The Ministry of Judgment Without Mercy
How and why brow-beating others with Holy Scripture as a response to their pain and suffering... is just unbecoming of believers in the God who is love.
“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.” 1 Corinthians 13:1-3
This righteous rant is brought to you by a recent opportunity I was granted to watch as a person in desperation and at their wits’ end, who’d just lost everything they had in the world—including every visible means of sustenance and support—was ‘ministered’ to by a professing believer with an ill-timed exhortation to just suck it up because God’s only teaching them how to be content with nothing.
Callously, coldly and heartlessly ignoring the fact the person was hurting, in pain and suffering, at the end of their emotional rope, and in the immediate moment requiring compassionate, sympathetic and gentle relief from their anguish much more urgently than they needed to be coldly and clinically reminded of the scriptural explanation for their predicament; of which, as a faithful and obedient believer themselves, they were already very painfully aware.
And right away that reminded me of C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, in which a fictional senior demon, Screwtape, is advising one of his underling demons, Wormwood, in the art of manipulating people into the temptations of sin to keep them in the throes of pain and suffering while marching them straight into the gaping wide maw of the gates of hell.
At one point, Screwtape counsels his underling to drive the people he targets for temptation towards a sense and practice of false spirituality devoid of any truly spiritual meaning or effect.
In which, for example, when faced with a person in distress, the tempted person is conditioned by their demon to respond to the person’s anguish with scriptural platitudes that do nothing to relieve the pain and suffering of the person in question, but actually make them feel worse…
By reinforcing their pain and suffering with the harshness of coldly delivered scripture that only has the effect of amplifying their feelings of weakness, guilt and inadequacy…
While making the deliverer of such absurd ‘ministry’ feel big about themselves for rendering what they’ve been deluded into thinking is ‘selfless ministry’…
When in actuality it’s nothing more than pride in one’s own scriptural knowledge callously presented in arrogant delusion as ‘spiritual compassion.’
To better explain what this looks like in action and what it all means, let’s borrow a page from the Lord Jesus, Yeshua the Messiah’s Institute of Explanation by Parable.
The Parable of the Good Samaritan v. 2025
A homeless man whose wife died from Covid vaccine injury; whose children were taken from him by the government because he refused to let them choose their pronouns in school; who lost his lifelong job when his employer decided to fire and replace him with an illegal alien willing to work for half the pay; and then who, as a result, finally got the cherry on the sundae as he lost his home when he couldn’t pay his mortgage...
Was sitting on the sidewalk in a filthy t-shirt, torn pants and no shoes, lips chapped and cracked by wind and sun burn, between a Chick-Fil-A and a Starbucks, sparing for change.
A neat, tidy young couple in their Sunday best, both wearing shiny, gold crosses around their necks, comes out of the Chick-Fil-A, each with two fists full of heavily loaded take-out bags.
“The Lord bless you if you could please spare some change,” the homeless man asks them.
The young man with the bags of take-out stops, smiles down at the homeless man pleasantly, and declaims haughtily: “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
His wife leans in and adds: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”
The homeless man, his hand still shakily extended up to them, looks at them with a painfully evident mix of despair and confusion.
The couple give each other satisfied smiles and walk away.
A few minutes later, a middle-aged woman covered in tattoos and piercings, with long, black hair, black, shiny, skin-tight leggings and barely wearing a purple “Coexist” t-shirt, approaches and is about to enter the Starbucks, when the homeless man extends his shaky hand up to her.
“The Lord bless you if you could please spare some change,” he asks the woman.
“Sorry, hon, I only have my debit card,” she says, blows past him and disappears into the Starbucks.
Deflated and discouraged, the man drops his hand into his lap and stares ahead blankly, breathing deeply to prevent a sob from escaping his trembling lips.
After a short while, the same woman comes back out of the Starbucks.
She stops in front of the homeless man, stoops down, and lays a tray at his feet: large coffee, bottled water, a bacon-gouda-egg sandwich, a turkey-provolone-pesto ciabatta, and cinnamon coffee cake.
She smiles at the astonished man.
“The Lord bless you,” the man says, in a shaky voice, with tears in his eyes.
The woman smiles back, wishes him well and walks off down the sidewalk.
Of the Sunday-best couple and the “Coexist” woman, who was the more righteous?
“The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them... Everything they do is done for people to see... Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.” Matthew 23:2-5, 27-28
Now It’s an Art Class and We’re Drawing Conclusions
If we consider ourselves children of God and followers of the Lord Jesus, Yeshua the Messiah...
And when we come up against a situation that demands our compassionate action...
But all we can manage in our faith (of which we’re so proud) to come up with, is to callously mouth empty scriptural platitudes that make us sound and feel spiritually enlightened and virtuous...
While saying and/or doing absolutely nothing to effectively minister to a fellow human being in obvious and urgent distress...
And actually—in our callous disregard for their pain because of our more urgently selfish regard for our own image—amplify their suffering by reminding them of their weakness, failure and inadequacy...
Then, “Houston, we have a problem.”
A really big problem.
(Photo Credits: istockPhoto; InspiredPencil.com.)
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