We love to smooth the “rough edges” of biblical revelation. To take what is beautiful in its complexity and to mass produce reductionistic, monolithic, and bite-sized maxims and cliches. We like to avoid theological tension, by watering down the word to some lowest common denominator. We don’t want to wrestle with the complexity…whose got the time and energy for that level of clarity and precision?
Sometimes the work of softening and smoothing can be helpful. For example, when you sand a piece of wood and remove a few splinters, the result is positive. But what about when the same thing is done to the word of God? The word isn’t wood. Scripture has no splinters. It is all inherently and gloriously good, true, helpful, holy, and right. When we attempt to remove the rough edges, we diminish the glory and goodness of the word. We subtly imply that the word itself was imperfect and that we are in a position to make it better. We give in to the first temptation to “be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5).
As a result, we may indeed make it softer and smoother, but sometimes we need the rough edges to correct our own faults. The rough edges of our own lives need the hardness and coarseness of God’s word. Hard and rough hearts can’t always be corrected by soft and smooth words.
The ways that we soften and smooth the word are innumerable. We plaster formulaic phrases on bumper stickers and coffee mugs. We hide them in our hearts as if they themselves are inspired and inerrant. We live by them as though they are words to live by.
Hate the sin, love the sinner.
When God closes one door, He opens another.
Let go and let God.
God helps those who help themselves.
Are there hints of truth in these? Sure. But there is also a lot of room for misunderstanding and misapplication as well. And therein lies the danger. When we take what is sometimes true or has a nuance of truth and treat it as always and entirely reliable and infallible, we set ourselves up for failure.
I see this sort of danger in most modern Christian thinking on compassion. We think of compassion and pity as being virtues. And they are. But not always. And therein lies the danger.
Christian social media has erupted over the past few years with the idea that empathy is often sinful. I would highly encourage anyone who isn’t familiar with this to explore the various articles and interviews linked in the above resource. Part of the responsibility of the Church is to be aware of the particular dangers of the contemporary age and Joe Rigney and others wrestling with the sin of empathy are helpful guides in that discussion. [In fact, even secular sources are starting to see the perils of empathy as in psychologist Paul Bloom’s “Against Empathy” among others.]
But I want to go beyond that particular conversation on empathy to show how Scripture itself talks explicitly about the sin of pity.
My premise is this, while compassion and pity are often virtuous, they are sometimes unhelpful, unwise, and even sinful. That might be a shocking statement, but it holds up in light of God’s word. While compassion and pity are often good and right, there are contexts in which showing compassion is explicitly forbidden by the Lord.
Let’s look at some texts that demonstrate this:
If a malicious witness arises to accuse a person of wrongdoing, then both parties to the dispute shall appear before the Lord, before the priests and the judges who are in office in those days. The judges shall inquire diligently, and if the witness is a false witness and has accused his brother falsely, then you shall do to him as he had meant to do to his brother. So you shall purge the evil from your midst. And the rest shall hear and fear, and shall never again commit any such evil among you. Your eye shall not pity. It shall be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. (Deuteronomy 19:16–21)
Your eye shall not pity him, but you shall purge the guilt of innocent blood from Israel, so that it may be well with you. (Deuteronomy 19:13)
And you shall consume all the peoples that the Lord your God will give over to you. Your eye shall not pity them, neither shall you serve their gods, for that would be a snare to you. (Deuteronomy 7:16)
you shall not yield to him or listen to him, nor shall your eye pity him, nor shall you spare him, nor shall you conceal him. (Deuteronomy 13:8)
…Your eye shall have no pity. (Deuteronomy 25:12)
No offense to Mr. T, but sometimes you shouldn’t pity the fool.
Now, I know the temptation in this very moment. In fact, it is the exact same temptation that God is warning against. The temptation is to explain away such verses, to downplay them, to redefine them, to neuter them so they are impotent to affect change in our lives. The very temptation in the human heart that would cause God to include such warnings in Scripture is the same temptation that motivates us today to try to soften the blow.
He knows our weaknesses. He knows how tempted we are to show pity even when that would be unwise and wrong. He knows how tempted we are to be led by our hearts and feelings, to forsake what lasts for what is fleeting. He knows how often we choose what is easy and nice rather than what is hard and good. He knows the perils of pity, the hazard of compassion untethered from the word.
That’s why we need to sit here for a second. We need to feel the weight of these many passages. God, in His inspired, inerrant, authoritative, and sufficient word has commanded us to show no pity in some instances. At least in some contexts, compassion (another entirely faithful translation of the underlying Hebrew) is forbidden, prohibited, verboten, sinful. We may not like it, we may not understand it, but we cannot ignore or deny it.
In saying this, God is simply commanding us to imitate Himself as He often says that He will refuse to show compassion and pity.
And I will dash them one against another, fathers and sons together, declares the Lord. I will not pity or spare or have compassion, that I should not destroy them.’ ” (Jeremiah 13:14, see also Ezekiel 5:11, 7:4, 7:9; 8:18; 24:14)
In addition to this, we might also consider the fact that Aaron was prohibited from mourning the deaths of his sons (Leviticus 10:6-8) and Ezekiel was forbidden from mourning the death of his wife (Ezekiel 24:15-18) and John says that there are certain types of sins that we shouldn’t pray about (1 John 5:16).
Such passages strike us as strange. Rather than wrestle with the theological tension, we choose to release the pressure, but do so by means of simply subverting and ignoring such passages. These aspects of God’s word are uncomfortable and inconvenient so we simply choose to pass over them; as if out of sight, out of mind.
But no Scripture is superfluous. Nothing is gratuitous or dispensable. When we soften a rough edge, we deny ourselves of something that we ourselves need. We undermine the sufficiency and authority and inerrancy of the word when we choose to dismiss the parts that feel icky.
What parent hasn’t felt the twinge of pity for their child? What parent hasn’t felt the temptation to allow that empathy to cause them to neglect the exercise of discipline? Is that always wrong? Of course not. There are times when the fact that your child is sick should cause you to extend a bit more grace. There are certainly times when your feelings of compassion help you to be faithful. But there are also times when those feelings lead you astray.
What Christian hasn’t felt the pull of pity to tempt them to overlook sin in another believer rather than call it out and pursue the biblical process for correction? What believer hasn’t excused or justified or downplayed their own or a friend’s sin in the name of compassion or pity or sympathy or empathy? Again, when compassion helps us to submit to God’s word, that is good, but when pity overrules or subverts or ignores Scripture, it is evidence that the gauge of our feelings is broken. When so-called compassion suggests that we ignore Matthew 18 or 1 Corinthians 5 or leads us to think that discipline or consequences would be unloving or unkind, we show that our pity party has turned into a riot against wisdom.
Such commands against pity in Scripture thus help to recalibrate our feelings. Some of us are tempted to be overly harsh and demanding. In such cases, we need to be reminded of the virtues of compassion and sympathy. But others are tempted by the opposite sin, that of passivity and pietism. Some are driven by their feelings and err on the side of an irresponsible reductionistic caricature of grace. For them, it is good to be reminded that pity and compassion are not always virtues, in fact, sometimes they are sin.
The problem with this second group is that they tend to be blind to their own faults. This is always the case with pietism. The drunkard tends to know he has a problem with drinking, the legalistic teetotaler not only doesn’t recognize her sin, she tends to boast in her asceticism. The quarrelsome man is often rebuked for his hot-tempered nature, but few people correct the overly passive man who refuses to ever fight for what is right. Such is the nature of pietism, it seems holy and thus remains hidden. So, for the person who is ruled by pity, the danger is that they often don’t even recognize the potential peril.
Sometimes God commands correction. Sometimes God forbids pity. Sometimes God demands that His people face the consequences of their sin. In such times, grace hurts, as a surgeon’s knife cuts the patient or as a splinter is removed from the skin. This is no less gracious, no less compassionate, and yet it seems harsh and hard and unkind to those not trained in godliness, those acquainted only with the milk and not the meat of the word.
God commands parents to discipline their children. God commands churches to discipline their own. God commands believers to fight violently against their own sin. When we circumvent such commands, we aren’t actually being compassionate. We are like a doctor who refuses to do surgery to remove the cancer lest he cause some temporary discomfort to a patient. We are doing what sin always does, forsaking lasting joy for the sake of some temporal pleasure. We are using the good of compassion to mask the sin of pity, abusing and misusing the biblical virtue for the sake of worldly vice.
The Church needs to be reminded that we can’t simply say biblical words, we must invest biblical words with biblical meaning. As Joe Rigney writes, “the devil loves to hide real sins in innocent phrases, and especially inside of virtues.” We can’t love our brothers and sisters without first defining love by means of Scripture. We can’t show grace or compassion without first wrestling with the biblical definitions of those terms. When we do, we find that sometimes our compassion isn’t really compassionate, our pity is pitiful, our love is unloving. This is what happens when we define biblical words by worldly definition.
Sometimes compassion is commanded, but sometimes pity is prohibited. We need wisdom and knowledge of the word to assess what is appropriate in each situation. When our so-called compassion leads us to forsake faithfulness to the biblical text, we know that we aren’t actually being biblically compassionate in that moment. We are allowing the world rather than the word to define our responses and should therefore repent and walk in the light of Scriptural truth.
So let us commit ourselves to relish the rough edges of Scripture due to the roughness of our own lives and the deceitfulness and danger of sin. And let us be compassionate as God is compassionate, neither more nor less, knowing that He and He alone knows what is always right and good for His people; He alone defines what is and isn’t actually compassionate. Let us submit our feelings to the authority of the word and amend ourselves thereby.
Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. (Romans 12:9)