“Now if you call yourself a Jew, and rely on the law, and boast in God, and know his will, and approve the things that are superior, being instructed from the law, and if you are convinced that you are a guide for the blind, a light to those in darkness, an instructor of the ignorant, a teacher of the immature, having the embodiment of knowledge and truth in the law —  you then, who teach another, don’t you teach yourself? You who preach, “You must not steal” — do you steal? You who say, “You must not commit adultery” — do you commit adultery? You who detest idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law? For, as it is written: The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

When I lived in Denver, there was a pastor of a large church in a nearby city who had to resign after a very public moral failing. He spent years calling his congregation to live with the righteousness of Christ, but then it was discovered that he had a quiet meth habit and had been hooking up with male prostitutes. The church recovered eventually, but it was a pretty tough season for them for a while. We live in a culture that hates religious hypocrisy, and loves to shine light on religious hypocrites. Paul is inclined to agree with this. Let’s take a look at what he says here in the next part of Romans.

Years ago, author Brendan Manning penned one of the most potent lines about the dangers and problems of hypocrisy perhaps ever written. The line is etched in my memory mostly thanks to its being featured on a D.C. Talk album from many moons ago. It goes like this: “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, walk out the door, and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”

It’s a rather searing indictment of the church, but it’s not one that falls very far off the mark. In fact, in far too many instances, it hits the mark pretty well right on the center. When people who claim to follow Jesus live toward those around them in ways that aren’t consistent with the teachings of Jesus, they are proclaiming one of two things as true. The first is that the presentation of Jesus we find in the Scriptures is nothing like what He actually said and did.

The problem with this is twofold. For starters, it severely undermines the authority and reliability of the Scriptures in ways that give skeptics rhetorical cover for rejecting them in favor of making up their own truth. The other problem is that it gives people leave to engage in rank speculation regarding the things Jesus actually said and did. The only historical evidence we have for what Jesus said and did is in the Gospels and a few other places in the New Testament. Outside of that, we’ve got next to nothing. Anyone who claims by word or deed that Jesus said or did or taught or believed something other than we find presented to us in the Gospels is just making it up as they go along. And if we can just make it up as we go along when it comes to Jesus, then anything goes, and the whole of the Christian faith is just a giant game of make believe. No one is saved by that.

The other thing these folks who profess to follow Jesus and then live toward those around them in ways that are inconsistent with His revealed teachings is that they don’t actually believe those things are true. Well, why would someone profess to believe in something they don’t actually think is true? Because of what they think they stand to gain by staking out such a position. This indicates that the whole thing is just a cynical ploy for prestige, power, and position. Proclaiming this is the whole substance of religion just creates cynics and skeptics.

Essentially, the person who proclaims faith in Jesus, but then lives toward the people around them – and especially the people closest to them – in ways that are inconsistent with His teachings steps into the role of a false prophet. Well, false prophets are something that gets addressed by the guys who contributed to the Scriptures more than once. God speaks rather thunderously regarding His opinion of false prophets and what should happen to them. Let’s just say it’s not terribly encouraging of the practice. Actually, let’s spell it out just a bit more. His opinion about what should happen to them ranges from death by stoning to seeing a heavy rock tied around their neck that is then dropped into the ocean. Like I said: He’s really not in favor of it.

As Paul continues to address the Jewish background folks in his audience who were perhaps feeling smugly satisfied with themselves after his opening condemnation of those who rejected the righteousness of God and were given over to their broken and evil desires as punishment, he hits them even harder here on the emptiness of their confidence.

“Now if you call yourself a Jew, and rely on the law, and boast in God, and know his will, and approve the things that are superior, being instructed from the law, and if you are convinced that you are a guide for the blind, a light to those in darkness, an instructor of the ignorant, a teacher of the immature, having the embodiment of knowledge and truth in the law…”

In other words, he’s addressing this to people who think they are so totally right with God and His ways that they are the ideal people to be teaching others about them. These folks had a rather decided superiority complex. They believed that because they were the possessors of the law of God through Moses that they were naturally on a better footing with Him than anyone else. This didn’t mean they didn’t still need Jesus, they just didn’t need Him as much as these other folks. They looked belittlingly on their Gentile background brothers and sisters, and on Gentiles more generally. If these poor people wanted to really learn how to be right with God, they needed to look no further than the righteous guides God had made available to them.

It is to these folks that Paul drops a challenge: have you ever lived in ways that were out of sync with your confession? Have you ever failed to keep the Law? Even once?

Now, Paul doesn’t flesh out the answer to that question here. He just lets it hang in the air before going on in the next section to explain why being a Jew wasn’t enough to save anybody. What Paul leaves quiet, let’s make a little bit louder. If you have violated the law even once, what does that make you? It makes you a lawbreaker. The argument of the Jews was that because they had the Law, they were better off than the Gentiles who didn’t. Paul says over and over throughout this section, though, that having the Law didn’t do anybody a bit of good if they didn’t keep it.

Well, Paul’s point with his rhetorical questions here is that everyone has broken the Law or the law at some point. No one has managed to keep it perfectly (with the exception of Jesus, but He hasn’t gotten to that part yet). This means that these Jewish background believers who thought themselves better than the Gentiles because they possessed the Law weren’t really different from them at all. Or rather, the difference was merely in degree not in kind. They were both lawbreakers. One of them simply hadn’t broken the Law as much as the other…or so they had convinced themselves.

This brings us to face an uncomfortable truth: does God concern Himself with degrees of lawbreaking in defining who is righteous and who isn’t, or is lawbreaking itself the deciding point between one and the other? If His standard is degrees of lawbreaking – that is, if you break His law only a little bit that’s okay, but a lot is not – what exactly is the degree? How do we know where the line is? Is the whole thing just capricious? Does God just pick and choose on a given day based on how He is feeling? Or is there some line we finally cross that officially casts us into the ranks of the unrighteous?

What’s more here, if the standard is one of degree, what does that mean for the laws that lie on the righteous side of the line? Did God really mean those, or were those just for practice? Do those commands we can violate with impunity really count? Why give those? Just for the sake of making us feel guilty? But if we can violate them without severing our relationship with God, then they wouldn’t seem to really bother Him all that much after all. Giving them is pointless, or mean-spirited, or both. Furthermore, to speak of degrees, but to still have a line somewhere means that all the talk of degrees is really just a canard. It’s really just a line. There’s just a shadow line before the real line.

You can perhaps see how quickly this whole line of thinking falls apart when pressed.

The hard truth was that for the Jewish background believers (and Jews more generally) to act like they were better off than the Gentile background believers (and Gentiles more generally) simply because they had the Law was a sham. It was an act. Perhaps they had bought into the act so much that they didn’t understand it was an act, but that’s why Paul was writing this. The people taking part in this act were proclaiming something about God that wasn’t true. They were blaspheming the name of God among those who didn’t profess to believe in Him. They were, to repeat the charge from before, false prophets.

God took this incredibly seriously. He still does. If you are going to profess to follow Jesus, then your behavior should be consistent with that profession. If you’re not willing to do that, don’t claim it. If you have places where you are dabbling in hypocrisy, stop that. Repent of it. Apologize to those you have been deceiving or to whom you have been lying about the nature and identity of Jesus. Throw yourself on the mercy of God in Christ, humbly submitting yourself to His authority and command. Then, make the changes you need to make to bring your lifestyle into sync with your confession. Anything less will leave you on ground that is not safe to inhabit for long.