Don't point ...

My mom always told me I shouldn’t point at other people …

As I read through Joel 1 – 3, Psalm 150,  Jeremiah 51 – 52, Isaiah 1 – 6, Lamentations 1 – 5, and Amos 1 – 4, I was struck by the preponderance of dismay being communicated by so many.  The authors of the books, the prophets represented in the accounts, and even in some respects God as He outlined how His judgment and righteousness has to demand reprimand and repercussion upon the Israelites.  These implications came of course as a consequence of a long history of disobedience and idolatry by the Israelites and Judaites.

Where the reading got particularly potent for me was in Lamentations (generally attributed to Jeremiah), especially 3:17-23 …

Peace has been stripped away, and I have forgotten what prosperity is.  I cry out, “My splendor is gone!  Everything I had hoped for from the Lord is lost!”  The thought of my suffering and homelessness is bitter beyond words.  I will never forget this awful time, as I grieve over my loss.  Yet I still dare to hope when I remember this:  The faithful love of the Lord never ends!  His mercies never cease.  Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning.

As a prophet, Jeremiah was well aware of the abomination that was the society of his time.  He’d not only seen it firsthand, but he was charged with the responsibility (among others) to point out the disgrace of his people, and to highlight the coming judgment.  But … Jeremiah’s heart was wrenched at the failure of his people.  He speaks of “crying out” and feeling the bitter loss of the demise of his homeland.

The parallels between Jewish society in those days and our society in present days are striking.  However, Jeremiah’s response to the circumstances, I believe, are quite different than what is common today.  Jeremiah was sincerely heartbroken at the fate of his people, mostly about how they’d brought their circumstances upon themselves … his lament in fact is the very topic of the book.

Often today, we tend to point the finger at others to identify their shortcomings, disobedience, sin, etc.  We forget, as the adage goes, that “when we point the finger at someone else, there are three more that point back at us.”  That is, when we focus on the shortcomings of others, we inherently are disregarding our own shortcomings.

In Christian circles these days, we tend to not only identify the sins of others and forget our own, but we also categorize and rank the sins of others.  To our mind … I don’t believe to God’s … there are certain sins that are more sinful than others.  Most often, the sins we find most deplorable are those with which we don’t struggle, and / or that we find more disgusting.  Homosexuality, drug abuse, etc., tend to rank higher than other sins … in our minds.  But I don’t believe this is God’s heart … and while I recognize there are a number of passages in scripture that specifically identify certain sins, I think it’s a stretch to say that the Bible classifies them somehow as greater in offensiveness than other sins.  But that’s a debate for a different time.

Rather than to have a genuine heartbrokenness about the existence and proliferation of sin in our society, our lives, the lives of our friends and the lives of our families, we instead often point outward to highlight how bad certain people are.   We condemn others for their sins, knowing full well that through Jesus, God the Father doesn’t (so long as we accept Jesus’s free gift of eternal life through faith in Him), and that we should stand equally condemned if we apply the same standard to our shortcomings.  We forget that ALL sin is an offense to God, that He hates ALL sin, and that we’re supposed to hate ALL sin … including our own.  We also forget that Jesus died for ALL sins, including those that we find disgusting or offensive.  We tend to put boundaries on His free offer of salvation applied to all sin for those who choose to accept His gift in faith.  He doesn’t place such boundaries.

Jeremiah shows us that we should have a heart like God’s heart, which breaks at the existence of sin and the enactment of sinful behaviors.  Instead of accusatorily and condemningly pointing the fingers at others, we should take to heart our responsibility to pray for those who need to know our Lord, to act in similar ways to our Lord when He walked the earth, to love and serve those who struggle with sin.  We should also remember that while we’re forgiven and perhaps saved from the bondage of many sins we carried out before we knew Jesus, being human we have our own current areas of sin with which we struggle, no better or worse than anyone else’s sin.

Bottom line … let’s point no further than at ourselves and let the Lord work on our issues.  He’ll work on the sins of other people on his own.  Let’s ask the Lord prayerfully to change our hearts and our perspectives to align them to His … where our hatred for sin extends no further than ourselves, and where our heartbreak at the sinfulness of others is treated with the salve of compassion and love through prayer.  It doesn’t mean that we look the other way, or call sin something other than what it truly is (sin), but we should let our transformation with the Holy Spirit’s help be the source of motivation and transformation of others.  If we’re gonna point anywhere, let’s point (others) up toward God.

Pointing up,

MR