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The content of this blog was prompted by a Facebook post shown to me. To be honest, I haven’t been active on Facebook for a long time. So, the post was not something I would have otherwise seen. The reason for my departure from Facebook may stimulate a future blog but would be too much of a digression from the point of this one.  

In this Facebook post, scripture seemed to be intentionally manipulated to support the position that justice and mercy, if not adhered to, may turn into evil and destructive behavior. It is unquestionable that abusing justice and mercy results in egregious error and that those who do so must be called out. The focus of the post, however, was to promote a specific explanation of what constitutes justice and mercy. It had me both saddened and concerned and it reinforced what God has been dealing with me personally for quite some time.

I am consistently cautioned by mentors and my own experience to be careful not to manipulate scripture to support a personal interpretation of it. We have all done it to one extent or another. And we must understand that all of us, ministers especially, will be held accountable for that grave error. The Facebook post seemed to do just that. On the contrary, we are to fearfully ensure that to the best of our abilities we develop our interpretation of scripture based on the whole counsel of God, avoiding cherry picking scripture, and certainly not adding to or taking away from scripture to make a point – a point that is not actually addressed in the passage itself. God doesn’t need our help to interpret scripture. His Spirit motivated every word that was written. His Spirit is the only one Who can assist us to interpret it accurately.

And now to the point of the disheartening Facebook post and this blog…

As we study the whole of scripture, perhaps we begin to appreciate that true love – the kind that can only be defined by God, the God Who IS love – can never be understood, let alone acted upon, unless it is fundamentally founded upon truth. Love and truth are inextricably intertwined. Scripture declares that Godly love delights in truth; that is, it NEVER gives a pass to sin (1 Cor. 13:6). As believers, we are called to be empathetic to others’ plights. We are called to understand that pain and hurt are never to be ignored. They must motivate us to not only empathize but act to do all we can to facilitate God’s redemptive healing. I am one who has always been moved deeply, if not entirely by empathy. As a physician and a minister, it is the primary motivation for all I do. Fortunately, I have learned some difficult lessons in my 34 years as a physician, and more importantly as a minister over the last eight years. Those lessons have been an eye-opening evisceration of my previously naïve and incorrect understanding of God’s love.

Believers are called to love, period. That is non-negotiable. What I have come to realize, through much trepidation and experience, is that we cannot love because we feel empathy. Why? Love is not a feeling, nor is it founded on feelings. Believers love because Messiah first loved us, not because we feel any certain way towards someone, good or bad, or have had a particular experience with someone, good or bad. John describes God as love. Love is a person. How that love is expressed must be patterned after the Person of Love.

That’s why empathy is different from, and must be submissive to, love. Putting oneself in someone’s shoes may help one feel their pain, but their pain isn’t determinative of what’s true or false - and it certainly does not determine what is the right or wrong response to that pain. A person for whom you feel empathy may, in their pain, believe or demand things that are untrue, unhelpful, and even destructive. Their pain often produces words and actions that are untrue, unhelpful, and even destructive towards others. The question is: how would love respond? The answer, it seems to me, is a second question: how would God respond?

As a physician, I can empathize with the pain of withdrawal for a drug addict or an alcoholic. As a physician, as a human being, I have a choice in how I respond to that pain. It would be overt malpractice and indeed cruel (and certainly antithetical to God's love) for me to respond by giving them the heroin or the whiskey they crave. Consequently, how does love respond where those we “love” consistently abuse the help that empathy was meant to provide? What do we do when empathy fails to elicit change? Do we stop loving? Absolutely not! But how that same love is expressed must inevitably change. And, if love’s expression must change, the results could very well make all the difference in the world in many tangible and intangible ways.

Love is always dependent upon truth – the truth of the circumstances, the truth of God’s word, the truth of God’s examples, the truth of God’s leading. Love’s expression may change. Truth is absolute. If we allow our feelings to determine how we express love, we will fail to express God’s love - certainly in a way that is effective and eternal.

What do I mean? The expression of God's love in and through us must fully embrace both grace and truth – they are inseparable. And we must do so while we empathize deeply with what others are experiencing. Yeshua Himself was God’s word made flesh and the very embodiment of grace and truth. He not only was love, He expressed it perfectly in everything He said and did (John 1:14).

Yeshua often expressed Himself in ways that were not very "nice" by today's standard. He would have been heavily criticized for being unempathetic, callous, or just plain cruel based on much of today’s church culture. But He never stopped being full of grace and truth…HE NEVER STOPPED LOVING. Even in those moments, He exhibited true love - because, in those moments, He spoke truth. Feelings did not determine the role He had to play and the expression of love he manifested – neither His feelings nor the feelings of those that he encountered. It was not that He did not empathize. There were times that even Yeshua's emotions were overwhelming to Him on a human level (John 11:35, Luke 22:42-44). But those feelings were always subordinated to the truth. And His ultimate purpose, which is redemption based in true love, can never be accomplished without truth.

This tension between empathy and love is less relevant in most everyday interactions. It becomes more pronounced when it comes to the abusive and manipulative behavior of, for example, the individual prone to narcissism who sees little wrong with repeated behavior that causes harm to others. Many of the religious leaders who interacted with Yeshua were quite respected, dressed the part, even believed in God, and contemporaneously and repeatedly exhibited narcissistic behavior that promoted the exploitation of their positions by abusing those they were called to lead. Yeshua addressed it in no uncertain terms often, none more poignant than the seven woes of Matthew 23. Was He empathetic to the etiology of the religious leaders’ narcissism? Of course. Did He not love them too? He IS love. However, love requires truth – Yeshua not only identified their behaviors and the destructive consequences of those behaviors, but he clarified emphatically the corrective actions required, and the consequences of unrepentant and unaltered sinful behavior.

If we recognize the occasional toxic behavior in an individual, we empathize. After all, we are all guilty of that. We try to understand the underlying motivation, the hurt that may have prompted the unhealthy behavior. If it happens several times, we strongly encourage a desistance in the behavior and we do everything in our power to mitigate its effects on others. We provide opportunities for help and urge their use. We speak truth in love and set expectations that require accountability and have consequences. If we don’t, we fall into the category identified by psychologists as “enablers.” Yeshua never, EVER, acted as an enabler.

When toxic behavior manifests as a consistent pattern, when truth is not acknowledged by those exhibiting that behavior and when help is rejected, the only response that true love demands is to clearly and decisively act on a parallel truth. What truth? The truth of the actual behavior – those are facts that must be addressed. We must identify them, unequivocally set consequential boundaries that map directly to the behavior in order to minimize its impact on others…and we pray…diligently.

The Facebook post that prompted this blog attempted to guilt ministers to define justice and mercy through the lens of feelings. It suggested that if you don’t love through the lens of empathy, you are indeed oppressive, and you cannot be operating in God’s justice and mercy. Again, I am very familiar with that approach. IT WAS ME FOR A VERY LONG TIME.

I have come to find out through facing my own toxic behavior, by being held accountable and ultimately repenting and finding redemption and restoration, that I was wrong. I came to see that those who understand truth as the foundation to love are not guilty of being without feelings. And it is cynical and farcical to accuse them of being oppressive to others. The fact is, many of those who hold people accountable for their actions desperately feel empathy and must work frantically to subordinate that empathy so they can walk with integrity in both grace AND truth. Manipulating the concepts of justice and mercy and attempting to shame those who stand for truth is – purely and simply – sin.

God's justice and mercy demand truth. God's justice and mercy demand boundaries and accountability. And, attached to God's justice and mercy are consequences. His justice and mercy do not enable destructive behavior to continue unabated and potentially devastate others.

Witness the Israelites who were lavishly provided God's justice and mercy in the Exodus from Egypt, the parting of the Sea of Reeds, the perfect Manna supplied in the desert, and the giving of the Torah – all part of the transitional phase of the eternal covenant of redemption God made with Abraham. And through all of it, His justice and mercy poured grace out upon the apple of His eye, the children of Abraham. His justice and mercy also ultimately held them accountable and led to consequences – the results of the repeated patterns of unyielding toxic behavior that were exhibited by those that He desperately loved. God was not the cause of the consequences. The toxic behavior was. The results? 40 years and likely 1,000,000 or more deaths in the desert (603,548 men alone died), while God’s Promised Land that His people were called to enter was only an 11-day journey from Mount Sinai.

Perhaps those who wrote the original Facebook post, the minister who re-posted it, and those that venerated it through multiple positive responses, may have demanded that Moses have empathy for the people of Israel. They may have demanded that empathy motivate a very different form of justice and mercy than that which God applied. It seems to me that based on their understanding of justice and mercy, empathy would demand that Moses respond to the Israelite’s disobedience by mercifully leading them on that 11-day journey directly to the Promised Land anyway.

Of course, we know that God’s justice and mercy demanded a different expression of His love for the children of Israel. Moses was God’s friend. He knew God. He heard God. He walked with God. And God’s love, His justice and mercy, held Moses accountable to follow God’s presence through the desert for 40 years. In the process, the consequences of a generation’s sin would manifest. It was not God who ultimately did not allow them to enter the Promised Land. It was their behavior. If God would have responded to the Israelites' sin with that Facebook definition of justice and mercy, 1,000,000 Israelites steeped in disobedience would have populated His Promised Land. One cannot even imagine what consequences would have been felt throughout posterity if that took place. Of course, we know that future generations of the children of Israel, whom He loved and will love for eternity, fell into the same pattern of toxic behavior...and suffered sequentially greater and greater consequences upon themselves. Furthermore, Moses himself was held accountable for his own sin of striking the rock when he was told not to. The great Moses, the friend of God, was not allowed to enter the Promised Land.

We are all familiar with the encounter that Yeshua had with the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1-11). She was accused, albeit incorrectly based on the guidelines of the Torah – it was presented by heresay, without the proper 2-3 actual witnesses nor both parties involved in the sin present. Yeshua demanded of her accusers to answer the question as to whether they followed the same Torah that she broke. No one really knows what He wrote in the dirt, but my gut tells me he wrote out the laws of the Torah regarding adultery. The women's accusers walked away, one by one. Yeshua had empathy for her. He truly exhibited grace in the face of sin. He then said something profound to her: “Neither do I condemn you (GRACE). Now go, and sin no more (TRUTH).” He loved her, truly loved her. But I’m enamored by the statement, “go, and sin no more.” Was it a suggestion? Or was it a command? Was it spoken out of a hope that she would change from her prior behavior? Or was it an authoritative demand that held her accountable if she chose to sin again? And the rational next question in my mind is…what would be the consequence if she didn’t heed Yeshua’s command and committed adultery again?

In the body of Messiah, especially in our post-modern Western culture, several things have evolved over time. As one minister said, "Truth has been replaced by feelings. Faulty applications of compassion and empathy have replaced level-headed realism" when it comes to helping and caring for people. True love is abandoned, and unreliable emotions have taken its place.

The dictionary definition of toxic is that which "contains or is itself poisonous material, especially when capable of causing death or serious debilitation." An alternate definition found is "something that is considered an asset, which has lost so much value that it cannot be relied upon any longer." Toxic behavior is sin. If it is persistent and it is not addressed, regardless of how much empathy one has for the individual or group engaged in it, it becomes a cancer that metastasizes in perpetuity. At the same time, toxic empathy is also a cancer. It allows the toxic behavior to go unchecked. It compels ministers to allow congregants to continue in destructive behavior that always damages the entire flock and therefore it becomes complicit with the destructive outcome of the toxic behavior it allows.

It is true that empathy is desperately lacking in many portions of the body of Messiah. Do not interpret this discussion to mean in any way that unempathetic behavior should be tolerated. When empathy is lacking and toxic legalism sets in, it damages the body inexorably. Ministers who exhibit this type of behavior must be called out and treated the same way other toxic behaviors are treated. They need to be held accountable. That behavior has no place in the ministry.

Sadly, when the pendulum swings too far the other way in addressing sin in the body, it is no better. When men begin to ascribe their opinions to defining what only God can define, on either side of that swinging pendulum, man’s order attempts to usurp God’s clear guardrails – and that is very dangerous ground.

As mentioned, toxic empathy is also used to passively-aggressively shame ministers who desperately stand on truth in the face of sin. It doesn’t matter if they do it prayerfully and with great trepidation and fear – fear for the consequences that are reaped by those who do not repent, and fear for the consequences that are reaped if they themselves do not apply God’s justice and mercy the way He has required and exemplified. It is used against those who do all to stand in grace and truth, to set clear boundaries, and to disallow persistent toxic behavior to penetrate and permeate the body.

Toxic empathy is the fundamental sin of the postmodern "wokeness" that has become the societal norm in Western culture. Sadly, it has infiltrated the body of Messiah as well. It attempts to pull on our heartstrings through manipulation, half-baked stories and emotional talking points to persuade good people to allow bad behavior to continue. It demands that good people believe that the only way out of whatever predicament those individuals are in - those who are steeped in persistent toxic behavior - is to provide a grace that has no truth attached, that is itself a false form of love that God never endorsed. And it allows the wounds of those who exhibit toxic behavior and those who are impacted by it, to grow and fester unabated, with destructive consequences.

The body of Messiah needs to grow up. We ministers need to grow up. Those who live in pain, and who consistently inflict pain, indeed need to be loved. They need to be loved, not by being coddled, but with grace AND truth, by being called on to recognize, reassess, and repent of their toxic behavior. And, when repentance is not forthcoming, there are consequences that must be applied to prevent those behaviors from hurting others.

Accountability is not an option. It is time we ministers are held accountable, not only for our own behavior, but for holding others accountable for theirs. It is time that we ministers, those who operate in a false bravado and the misapplication of empathy, recognize it, reassess, and repent of our own toxic behavior.