When wickedness comes, contempt comes also, and with dishonor comes disgrace.
Contempt is wickedness’s natural companion, going and coming. A wicked man will be despised, sooner or later, because all men know what wickedness is contemptible. A wicked man will also despise himself. More, he will learn to despise everybody else, for he knows the disgrace of his wrongdoing and can only evade it by degrading others down past his level. Humility is the sole remedy for contempt, and the wicked man has rejected humility.
Men despise the wicked. We know that sin reduces a person and makes him vile. Do not mistake this for a virtue in man. While we ought to despise sin, we ought not to be contemptuous towards the sinner, as he is still made in God’s image (Gen. 1:26). A part of the impulse to be so contemptuous towards the sinner is pride, in fact. We say, ‘Look, am I not better than he? Therefore, I may despise him, and in despising him, make myself great in my own eyes.’ Yet Scripture has no love for those who are great in their own eyes (Is. 5:21).
Contempt is in fact closely allied with pride in mankind. We like to lift ourselves up, and putting others down is a convenient way of doing so, in the short term. Contempt is to say that I am greater than you, and that because I am greater than you, I need not care for you, may abuse you as I like. Contempt thus becomes an excuse for further sin.
Contempt is also party to a foolishness of self-deception. We are called to despise sin, I said, but we must be careful here. To despise sin is right and proper; sin is a vile evil. To hold contempt towards sin, well, that idea requires caution. We are right to consider sin as nothing before God. He has won the victory (1 Cor. 15:57), and we may rightly hold sin in contempt before Him. Yet we are all too prone to mix this sort of justified contempt with an alloy.
The danger is that we hold sin in contempt in comparison to ourselves and our righteousness. If I say of sin, “I hold you in contempt,” and I mean by that statement, “I hold myself beyond sin’s temptation,” I’m engaging in dangerous folly. In my experience, the surest way to fall back into an old sin is to trust in my own ability to fend it off. We on earth do not have the luxury of contempt for the sin which still besets us; we may not regard it as a weak foe (1 John 1:10; 1 Pet. 5:8). We must wrestle with sin in God’s strength, not in a phantom assurance of self-righteousness. Such armor is the treachery of the flesh.
The Christian, thankfully, has a remedy to contempt. The pagan can see only the two sides of the problem. He can despise himself for his sin, or he can elevate himself to escape it. In matter of fact, the man who does not know God tends to do both, mixing and matching, at once knowing himself a viper of the pit and making himself the king of the world. In the process, he can only be above everybody else by condemning them to the merest scum. The Christian can take another path.
The Christian can take the path of humility. He can say at once, “I am born a sinner, poor and wretched, rotten to my bones with wickedness,” and, “I am born a child of God, saved and reconciled to him, made pure in His sight and learning true righteousness.” The first is the beginning of repentance; the second is the end of faith. Together they are the humility of the gospel (Mark 1:14-15).
Because the child of God is God’s child, he can go forth to the world without fear of its contempt and without contempt for its good, however polluted that good may be. He can rise without pride to conquer the whole earth, for the flag he bears is not his own but Christ’s. He can walk into the valley of the shadow of death without fear, for he does not need to put himself above with contempt. He can enter there and know his own sin and say despite it all, “It is well with my soul.”1 He can so live because he lives in Christ.
God bless
Written by Colson Potter
1 – Spafford, Horatio G. It is Well With My Soul. <LINK>
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
