3 Types of Hypocrites

All of humanity, this side of full redemption, play the role of a hypocrite. We often hear the charge leveled against the church that we are filled with a bunch of hypocrites. This charge is true—at least in part. For the most part when someone says that to me I simply agree and tell such a person that we’ve always got room for one more.

While it is true that we are all hypocrites, there is another sense in which we are of a different stripe of hypocrisy. The Puritans saw three sorts of hypocrisy.

1. Natural. This hypocrisy has footing in every man. “Even the most upright heart has in it some hypocrisy, and he sometimes seems to be that which he is not; he may be sometimes more full in his profession than he is indeed in his actions”.
2. Foul and Gross. This is when a man’s heart is not at all what it seems to be to the world. These are as the Pharisees of old, of whom Christ compared to white-washed tombs. “This is when a man shall profess he loves God and Christ and His ways, and yet secretly condemns and hates holiness and resists the motions of God’s Spirit, and is at defiance with all the heavenly rules of life and powerful obedience.”
3. Formal. This hypocrisy is when a man not only deceives others but deceives his own heart as well. Such a pride may come in part from a man confusing grace in performance with grace in character. He is even afforded a bit of happiness but at the same time he holds “some sweet morsel under his tongue with which he will not part”.

Adapted from Obadiah Sedgwick, The Anatomy of Secret Sins, page 27. 

Regardless of the type of hypocrisy which resides in our heart the answer is found in the light. Christ, who is light, will eventually gut out every last vestige of hypocrisy in his children. Likewise, hypocrites apart from Christ will be exposed and consumed.

God alone has no shadow of turning. And it is this very God which overcomes our record of hypocrisy with his perfect record of righteousness. In Christ the vilest of hypocrites is made authentic and pure.