Passive.....Aggressive
I was listening to the Fox TV show Outnumbered today and they handed off to the committee questioning our Attorney General and something caught my ears. One of the representatives asked a yes or no question and I thought the Attorney General was going to get a crick in his neck for avoiding eye contact, and of course, avoiding answering the question. Passive Aggressive (def) - characterized by or showing indirect resistance to the demands of others and avoidance of direct confrontation: In other words, hiding the truth, or what we call "blowing smoke." Christians have a version of this activity and that is to smile big to the person's face and then stab them in the back at their earliest convenience. NOT GOOD.
If a person wants to judge someone else and make it look all right they will use the passive-aggressive approach so it doesn't come back on them. BUT IT STILL DOES!! In Galatians 6 Paul writes Don’t be misled—you cannot mock the justice of God. You will always harvest what you plant. What does the justice of God say? James 4: Don’t speak evil against each other, dear brothers and sisters. If you criticize and judge each other, then you are criticizing and judging God’s law. But your job is to obey the law, not to judge whether it applies to you.
We too many times ignore this warning and then the judgment comes back on us, sometimes twice as bad! Jesus said it this way in Matthew 7: 1"Do not judge others, and you will not be judged. 2 For you will be treated as you treat others. The standard you use in judging is the standard by which you will be judged. 3 “And why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own? 4 How can you think of saying to your friend, ‘Let me help you get rid of that speck in your eye,’ when you can’t see past the log in your own eye? 5 Hypocrite! First, get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend’s eye.
If I am constantly judging others then I don't have to deal with the very thing I am wrong in!! * This is the aggressive part of passive-aggressive when we feel we have the "right" to begin critiquing others as though we were innocent of anything. This aggressive attitude comes from a prideful heart that has not been given to God, or we wouldn't do it. If we can we are going to make our sins not look so bad. So we might make a prayer request for someone we know has messed up, or we may even shun them or kick them to the curb. This is the passive side of passive-aggressive. When we are in this way of thinking we will not spare anything to try and make ourselves look "right" in a Christian way. Truth is, it is so far from Christian anyway, so don't even try. When we put the two together we might think we can have the best of both worlds, but it is the worst of both worlds. Fake Christianity paired with a Prideful heart always results in this person being a Class A hypocrite.
Jesus could have been the most passive-aggressive person on the planet, but of course, He chose to do the Godly thing called love. Jesus said things like love God, love your neighbor, just love and that is the way we should be also.
The Pilgrimage Continues
David Warren