Is God a Hypocrite?

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Is God a Hypocrite?

November 17, 2022

Questions about whether God is being a hypocrite when he commands us not to murder and then executes people himself and how a politically conservative Christian should respond to a medical school admission form that asks questions about political opinions.

* Why is God a hypocrite, commanding us not to murder in Exodus 20:13 and then executing people in Isaiah 66:16? What kind of good leader says, “Do as I say, not as I do”?

* What should someone who’s a Christian and a conservative do when filling out a form for medical school admission that asks questions about political opinions?

Transcript

I'm Amy Hall. I'm here with Greg Cokel and you're listening to #STRSK. And this is the podcast where we take your questions from Twitter with the #STRSK or you can email us through our website.

Just go to the podcast page and you'll see #STRSK and you'll find the link there. You can come straight to the little form and send us your question. Just keep it short.

It has to be the size of a tweet which is about two maybe three sentences. All right. You ready, Greg? Yes, ma'am.

This one comes from Sean. Why is God a hypocrite? Isaiah 6616, Exodus 2013, Deuteronomy 517. What kind of good leader says, "Do as I say, as I do?" Why don't you start by reading those first? All right.

Well, the Exodus Deuteronomy passages say the same thing. You shall not murder. Exodus 20 is the Ten Commandments.

Deuteronomy 517. 5 is the Ten Commandments. It's just a repetition of it.

Okay. And then the verse in Isaiah 66. Is that right? Isaiah 6616.

"For the Lord will execute judgment by fire and by his sword on all flesh and those slain by the Lord will be many." All right. So why is God a hypocrite? Okay. And then the second part of that or what I think he thought was the kind of extension of it was God has one standard for himself and we have another.

He has another standard for us. What kind of good leader says, "Do as I say, not as I do?" Okay. So first of all, the hypocrite is a faker just to clear up the word.

Okay. The hypocrite is a faker. He is somebody who makes pretenses to be one kind of person, especially something that looks good to people on the outside, but on the inside he's not that way.

He's devious and evil. Okay. Seven abominations on his lip kind of thing.

And so Proverbs has a number of warnings about this kind of person. The word hypocrite comes from the theater way back when when people play different parts and the parts would be manifest by a mask that they would put on or hold up in front of their face. So the hypocrite is the person who wears a mask.

The mask looks like one thing, but the person on the inside is something else. Okay. So the hypocrite is different from somebody who's inconsistent with his views.

Again, a hypocrite is a faker. Okay. So just clarification on that point.

The way the question was asked and the verses that were offered have nothing to do with God being a hypocrite. They have to do with God having a different standard for himself than he has for humans. All right.

So just a clarification. This is not hypocrisy. But it is a fair question.

Why does God have a different standard? I don't what's the this is Sean? Yeah, Sean. Yeah. Okay.

I don't know if Sean has kids. Does he have bedtimes for his kids? Most people do. 8.30, 9 o'clock, 9.30, 10 o'clock, depending on the age.

Does Sean go to bed at those same times? I suspect not. I suspect Sean, if he's a father, puts his kids down at times appropriate for them and then stays up with his wife, not until his bedtime because adults don't have bedtimes. Adults go to bed when they want to.

Now, sometimes they'll go to bed at certain times because that works for them in terms of their schedule the next day. But adults, parents have different standards that apply to them than to children because adults are adults and children are children. Okay.

We don't let children drive our cars. That doesn't mean we're hypocrites. That means that adults are adults and children are children.

And I could think of if we have the time, 100 examples of such a thing that wouldn't cause Sean to raise an eyebrow. My suspicion is this is a little bit of a hostile question because of the way it was asked. And so this is why I'm counting it in this way.

God's not a hypocrite. God is doing things that are appropriate for him and making restraints on humans that are appropriate for them. By the way, 10 commandments say thou shalt not murder.

It doesn't say thou shalt not kill. In Hebrew, there are two different words for murder and kill just like there is in English because though some killing is appropriate, other killing is unjustified. And so unjustifiable killing is called murder and it's actionable.

All right. So even for human beings, there is justifiable killing. And I'll just say, I'm just going to read a little bit more from Isaiah 66 verse 14.

Then you will see this in your heart will be glad and your bones will be flourished like the new grass and the hand of the Lord will be made known to his servants. Oh, that's all nice. But he will be indignant toward his enemies.

Okay, now you have two groups of people. You have servants of the Lord and you have enemies of the Lord. Okay.

Now remember by this, by the way, this is the Lord God. Okay. Whether Sean believes in God or not, if the complaint is against the text and what appears to be an inappropriate standard, then we have to take the text at face value and see if it's internally inconsistent.

The Lord here is the Lord God who made everything. So it's not just the government who gives one set of laws for people and maybe there's another set of laws for the so human beings can't execute bad guys. The government can execute bad guys.

All right. That's not hypocrisy. That's different roles for different groups.

So this is the Lord God and God says to my servants this and to my enemies, I will come in like a fire, like a whirlwind, when do I anger? Render anger with fury and rebuke with flames of fire and the sword. Use the sword or no flush. Okay.

So so their God is doing the kind of thing that if God is God, which would be the regent over the universe is appropriate, just like it's appropriate when there are evil doers in the state for the regent of the state to execute a kind of judgment that is not available to exercise to the standard citizen. There's no mystery about this at all. There's nothing odd or unusual.

And if you know, to Sean, I would say Sean, you've not thought about this for a single second. If this is your complaint. Sean, you misused the word hypocrite.

Okay. Understand. There are a lot of people do.

But you've also do not acknowledge that even even if this is a complete work of fiction, kings have authorities, authority and latitude and liberties, and appropriately so, then subjects do. Why is that confusing? Why is that a problem? So it seems to me that this is just a vacuous kind of complaint that has no real foundation, at least the way it's leveled. Now there might be other particulars that he might bring up that troublesome to him, but what he's mentioned, this is a non-issue.

To sum up when he says, what kind of good leader says do as I say, not as I do? The answer is every government ever, everyone. I'm not allowed to put to lock people in a room for years and years and years, but the government puts people in jail. So the same is true here.

The people in authority have the authority to judge and it's right for them to do that in ways that it's not right for me. And this is something we all understand. And this is about judgment.

And this is about judgment. Yeah. Now it also, the other thing here though, is that he does put human beings, certain human beings in authority to judge even to the point of death.

So there are punishments in the Old Testament where they would put people to death for a certain serious sin. So even in that case, human beings were given the authority to judge just as God had the authority. They just were right.

Yeah, it's to execute. So even in that case, the lesser authorities had the same power to judge as God as the greater authority. The only thing we don't have a right to do is to murder, which means to take human life without proper justification.

Incidentally, who do you work for? Stand a reason. On a personal basis. What do you mean? What are you asking? Who's your boss? You are.

Right. Do I have latitude to do things that you do not have latitude to do? Of course. So it's not just every government.

It's every single person in leadership. You know, and it wasn't meant to embarrass you because I don't learn it over my team. You know, sometimes we count the votes, sometimes we weigh them, right? No, I was just reacting because you don't have the right to judge people to death.

No, but the question, the question had to do with what kind of leader has one standard for himself and a different standard for those he leads. And I'm saying, yeah. So there is a sense, obviously you mentioned all governments have that latitude over others and that includes the latitude to execute justice.

And but every leader has a different role and a different sense of latitude than those who he leads. This is standard for leadership or just take the word. A leader of some enterprise can compel following, but nobody else in that group can compel following.

That's the difference between a leader in an official sense and a follower in an official sense. So again, this is noise. I don't mean to be inappropriately disparaging because I'm not trying to put Drew down, but I would say Drew.

No, it's Sean. I mean, Sean rather, Drew is the other show. Sean, this is a vacuous complaint.

Clearly, you have not thought about it. That doesn't mean that theism is true and atheism is false. It means that this is not a sound complaint against the God of the Bible.

In the past, when I've used that example of governments, what they've said back to me is that's a different thing. How? Yeah, you have to ask how and you have to say, look, this is a principle that you understand that you recognize and it's the same principle here. It's not different.

So I beyond that, I don't know what else you could do. Well, if they think it's different because governments are legitimate and we know governments exist, we don't know God exists. Well, that's part of this worldview.

The challenge here, and this important point to make, Amy, and I've already made it, but I want to underscore it, the challenge is a challenge based on the internal legitimacy or coherence of our account of reality. It does not matter whether for this issue, if our account is true, this is a challenge against the truthfulness of it, but it has to do with an appeal to an outside moral standard where Sean gets that I'm not sure, but the moral standard is that one should be a hypocrite in the sense that he described it. Okay, so that also is a little bit of a difficulty, but when the look at I'm reading the hobbit or not the hobbit, but the Lord of the Rings, I just started again.

Okay, and you could find things inside that fictitious story. You say, wait a minute, this doesn't work. This is a contradiction inside the story.

And I can say, wait, if you understood this, this, and this, or it doesn't, it fits right in. Oh, I missed that. Okay, that's the kind of question this is.

This isn't principally a question about whether Christianity is true. It's a question about the internal consistency of the story. Okay, now we show that now if he could say there's not this is not appropriate, then that casts question, a question on the legitimacy of the story as an account of reality, but it turns out this is absolutely normal in all aspects of reality.

And so therefore, it's not a substantive challenge to the legitimacy of the God of the Bible. Let's take a question from Trey. A friend of mine was filling out a form for medical school admission, and they were asking questions political in nature, like his opinion on the Affordable Care Act.

He being a conservative and Christian believes he will be discriminated against for answering truthfully. What should a Christian do, refuse to answer, lower your up? Thanks for taking my question. Well, I'll tell you my instinct and but I'll proceed it by seeing advice as cheap, because it doesn't cost me to follow this advice, it costs them to follow the advice.

If they asked you, who did you vote for in the last election? Would it be fair to say, that's none of your business? It's a private ballot. I think that would be totally appropriate, but doesn't mean they would ask that question. How is this question any different? The Affordable Care Act is a policy issue that relates to partisan politics.

Why can't a someone say, that's none of your business? Tell me how my view of the Affordable Care Act relates to my ability to fulfill the medical obligations that are in question here. I think it was a medical circumstance. The difficulty here is you are not entitled to your private opinions anymore in the United States of America, period.

By the way, you know, who just said that? Bill Maher, I watched it last night in one of his 10-minute screeds and he's been great lately going after the lunacy that we see on the left. You are not entitled anymore and this is the situation we're facing. I'm sorry, that's not any of your business, what my political views are.

Why is that question even on here? Why is that question on here? That's a fair question. You don't even have to be not... I would say none of your business, I mean, that would be kind of a harsh way of putting what you could say, this is a personal matter for me and I don't see how it relates to anything pertaining to this job application. Why are my politics important to this application or whatever it is they're filling out? This happens all the time though, more and more and more.

Remember what? Eight, ten years ago, we got a letter from a father whose daughter was going to be in a state beauty pageant and he wanted to know how she would respond to the question, what do you think of same-sex marriage? That's a political view. It has nothing to do with virtue and, you know, anything related to being... It's politics and if she gave the conservative answer, she would be canceled. That was what, twelve years ago.

So this is happening everywhere and it's time we said, I'm not going to answer that, that's private. I mean, it's like I'm trying to think of a way I could offer a question about his private-sex life with his wife that doesn't sound crude on the air. It's the same kind of thing.

It's none of your business. Why does anybody who employs us have the right to do that? But they think they do because they're looking to hire only the people with the right political view and this has happened lots of times before. Soviet Union, Third Reich, Soviet Black countries, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Red China.

This isn't even for a job. This is for medical school admission. So this is a school.

This isn't even because I could see if there's maybe a hospital that wants to promote certain things and they want people to agree, that at least has a reason. But I can't even imagine a reason for a medical school asking these questions. And it's unclear to me what form it is.

Is it just filling out a bubble? I agree. I disagree. Is it an essay question? I don't even know how these questions are being asked.

My suspicion is they're not even going to give you the chance to say undecided or I refuse to whatever. Like they do sometimes they ask your race and they say, don't want to answer. It's not going to happen here.

This is the trend with woke corporations and schools. If you do not buy into their politics, you cannot go to their school. Now this is happening more and more just mark my words.

I watched Rod Drier did a Prager U on totalitarianism last night. You go to Prager U, look up the more recent one totalitarianism. Rod Drier who wrote "Live not by lies." And he said, this is what's happening.

It's soft totalitarianism, not hard. It's not coming directly from the government. It's when the cultural agencies say, we're not going to let you participate unless you have the right political view.

So you can't go to school, you can't bank with us. It's already happening. People are not being, banking accounts are being canceled.

So you take them anywhere else where you can't bank with us because we don't like your views. And no fly list is something that he mentioned. I don't know how much that's happening, but they're going to just isolate all the people who are politically incorrect.

And so they have no impact and everything's going to be run by the right political view. Okay, that's totalitarianism. Now what he said is, in following Sultan Yitzun, "Live not by lies." You cannot force people to believe your way.

What you can do is keep other people from forcing you to affirm something that is not true and that is a lie. And that's the only hope for this at all. Unless people say no and then pay the price they have to pay for saying no, then this will not change.

It will get worse. And it is rolling over us like I keep using tidal wave as an illustration, but it's like tidal wave is like as bad as it gets. But then last year's tidal wave looks like this year's short break because it's gotten so much worse.

This is not an appropriate question to ask. No, it's not an, I mean, I'm trying to decide if I would rather leave the question blank or answer it truthfully. I would certainly not answer untruthfully.

So I think those are the two options here on the table. If you don't answer, they're going to know what your answer is. They're going to know that you didn't want to.

So it could be an extra statement of not answering that would be worth your time. Yeah, well, what non-answering does is it says you have no right to pry into my personal life like this. You don't have to presume what you can presume whatever you want.

I don't know somebody who supported the personal, the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, also known as Obamacare, might be just as offended that they're being asked this question. I don't know what their agenda is. Maybe their agenda is that anybody who's in support of it is not going to work for us.

Maybe that's their agenda. Who knows? It's the it's not an appropriate question because it's a means of either way, one way or another, sifting out from an educational opportunity, people that don't have the right politics. They're using an irrelevant category to choose who's going to their school.

I mean, that's the same as not choosing someone because of their race or some other their sex or whatever it is, something that's not related to being a doctor. It's not your political views are not related to doing your job as a doctor. So they're using an irrelevant category.

I don't think it would hurt to contact someone like Lions defending freedom or somebody like that. After the fact to let them know what's going on, maybe they would have some ideas too if you don't know what you should do. But the other thing is I think it's helpful to you if you're applying to this school to know what this school cares about.

If this school's doing that, maybe you don't want to go regardless. Right. That's right.

This won't be the first time you run into this. The UC schools, for example, I know this for a fact, the UC schools had an occasion in the med school, University of California med school. This isn't Cal State.

That's kind of the blue color version. This is the University of California system, medical schools, and one doctor who is an instructor made a reference to a pregnant woman and then immediately backed off and apologized to everybody in writing that he didn't mean to imply that only women could be pregnant. Okay.

And one of the reasons that he backed off so quickly is because everybody's watching him, all the students to make sure he doesn't slip up and say something politically incorrect. And this is where we have to say no, and we've got to push back. And I think there are plenty of medical schools out there who aren't going to ask these.

I hope there are medical schools out there who aren't going to ask these questions. So maybe that will help you narrow down your wokeness is covering the planet right now. And this is, I heard an attorney last week, who runs an enterprise, a First Amendment protection enterprise, he founded it.

They're doing great work. They just won two Supreme Court decisions recently, and they were huge. They were huge.

He said, it's hard to find a fortune 500 company that is not given in to all this wokeness. Well, that's pretty big. They're going to be a lot of difficult decisions, I think, for a lot of us in the future.

So thank you, Sean, and Trey. Fortunately, I mean, you don't work for a woke employer, at least for now. I know, and I appreciate you saying at the beginning of the episode that, or beginning of this question, that it's easy for us to say.

And so I appreciate those of you who are dealing with this out there and having to make these decisions. And I will say also that there is grace, because you won't always know exactly what you want to do or what you should do. We do our best.

We pick our battles, and then we trust that in God's grace. And that's all we can do right now, I think. You know, Martin Eamoller is the author of this famous statement that came for the Jews, and I wasn't a Jew.

So I didn't do anything about it. They came for the gypsies. I wasn't a gypsy, and then finally came, they came for me, and no one was left.

Martin Eamoller spent five years in Dachau. He survived. But the point is really clear, unless we say no to these totalitarian, even I just out of complete self interest, then there's nobody they can't come for.

We're not at that stage yet. But the people who lived in Soviet block countries and emigrated to the United States are terrified because of what they see happening. Well, on that happy note.

Have a nice day. Thank you, Sean and Trey. We appreciate hearing from you.

This is Amy Hall and Greg Hochl for Stand to Reason.