Too many of you are using that as a cover for selfishness and whim, pretending to be righteous just because you are ‘legal.’ Please, no more pretending. If you divorce your wife, you’re responsible for making her an adulteress (unless she has already made herself that by sexual promiscuity). And if you marry such a divorced adulteress, you’re automatically an adulterer yourself. You can’t use legal cover to mask a moral failure. (Matthew 5:32 MSG)
What’s wrong with spiritual pretension? Pretending to be spiritual is worse than just flat-out doing wrong. In addition to acting out of selfishness, I compound the sin by feigning righteousness. So not only do I commit sin by following self instead of Christ, I deny the truth in covering it up.
Jesus addresses an issue as important today as in his time. Sure, it’s legal to divorce your spouse, but is it just a legal maneuver to mask moral failure?
Aside from clinically-defined abusive relationships, how many marriages would be saved if we didn’t look to cover up our own selfishness? Irreconcilable differences is just another way of saying neither party is willing to deny self long enough to work things out. Jesus says just because it’s legal doesn’t make it right. Making decisions based on legal limits and legal advice means we’ve long ago departed from focusing on the spiritual issues of the matter.
As soon as I start thinking what can I get away with, I’ve started down the path of covering up and faking it. Jesus points out that the consequences of covering up my selfishness go beyond myself. Whenever I act selfishly I’ve deprived someone else of the benefit of my acting unselfishly. What if instead I decided to act on the behalf of others, in their best interests? Then we all benefit and I save the trouble of concocting a cover-up. If I put as much real effort into seeking the welfare of others as I do faking it, we’d all be much better off.
The solution is to catch myself on the way to spiritual pretension. If the next steps in my action plan include devising a way of covering up my selfish intentions, then I’m fixing to fake who I am. Instead, my goal is to make who I am and who I appear to be the same thing.
Deep Questions 