Romans 2:4 Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, forbearance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance?
One of the greatest insults you can suffer is being slapped in the face. There is something very personal about this. Just look at the movies portrayal of women being insulted by a man and their hand-impression-leaving response. I think this is so because, from the earliest age, we focus on people’s faces.
The face is the most important communication device. Not only does it have the mouth, but the eyes, eyebrows, eyelids, forehead, corners of the mouth and cheeks. Each has the ability to signal small details of communication that either reinforce the verbal message or signal a dissonance between them.
That is why we have the camera on the reporter’s face and not their shoes. So when we assault the very center of human communication, we are assaulting the person themselves. It is much more than a gut punch or a right cross. The open hand, which is meant for the most intimate of communications, is used to insult, defend, attack, and protect.
It think sometimes we slap the LORD in the face when we pass judgment on someone else while we are engaged in the same activities. We have seen this type of hypocrisy in our society during this past year. Leaders saying one thing and doing another. We took it as a slap in our face, when they were the ones needing the slap.
It is this kind of hypocrisy that Paul is pointing out here in this section of Romans. He is speaking to anyone who has a moral standard by which they claim to live, and yet they violate that standard in their personal life. And at the same time, they condemn that behavior in others.
We have a special breed of this currently circulating in our culture. We call it ‘virtue signaling’, and it stinks to high heaven. The multi-million dollar home purchased with money given to help poor black people. The TV preacher begging for money for another jet in order to facilitate the ministry. The politician who cries over the plight of her grandmother in Puerto Rico, but doesn’t actually pay for the repairs on her home, even though she has the means to do so.
But we don’t have to look that far away. Sometimes we need to just look in the mirror! We might have a streak of stubbornness and unrepentance in our hearts. These veins can run deep in us, weaving and winding into the deepest parts of who we are. We need the Holy Spirit to point out and weed out these areas.
We need to seek “glory, honor and immortality” will our whole being. This is a difficult pursuit. This is especially true when we don’t have persecution, pressure, or extreme difficulty forcing us to our knees. It can be hard to gather this much determination internally. We often need the outside pressures to motivate us to change.
That external pressure can come from our small group of close and accountable fellow Jesus-followers. That group is given permission to ask questions and mess with our comfortable life, probing deep when indications are there that something is amiss. And we all need this kind of accountability.
Paul wants us to see our need for a savior, One who can and will rescue us from ourselves and our tendency toward being a self-savior. We can’t save ourselves. Our actions fail us. Our attitudes betray us. Our outcomes fall short of the standard. We are a miserable bunch in desperate need of Jesus.
The Arnold Journey 