Matthew 6:1–4 — “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”¹
Jesus is not introducing a new command here. Moses had already told Israel in Deuteronomy 15 to open their hands wide to the brother standing in front of them with nothing, to give freely without a grudging thought, because God promised to bless the open hand with His own provision.² The law on generosity was never the problem. What the religious leaders had done with it was the problem; taking a command meant to flow from a grateful heart toward God and turning it into a theatrical production performed entirely for the crowd.
History tells us there were thirteen trumpet-shaped receptacles in the temple courts where worshipers dropped their offerings, and the coins rang and clattered as they fell, with a large gift making considerably more noise than a small one. The Pharisees had figured that out. When Jesus said “sound no trumpet,” He was exposing men who had mastered the art of making their generosity as loud and visible as possible. That word “to be seen,” the Greek theathēnai, is exactly where we get the English word theater. Men on a stage, wearing masks, working a crowd, asking people to supply the approval that God alone was meant to give them.
A.W. Tozer drew the same diagnosis in The Root of the Righteous, distinguishing between the man who does things genuinely for God and the man who does things to be seen while telling himself the whole time that he is doing them for God, because the distance between those two men on the outside can appear to be almost nothing while on the inside it is everything.
Proverbs 19:17 says, “Whoever gives to the poor is lending directly to the Lord, and the Lord will repay what He owes.2” That is the economy Jesus is pointing you toward, where God watches what no one else in the room can see and settles accounts in His own time and His own way. Proverbs 21:2 says, “Every man thinks his own way is right, but it is the Lord who weighs the heart.2”
He is not watching the gift. He is watching what is underneath it.
Who are you giving for?
Where are you seeking applause?
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