Face Painting - Others Witness and Conclusion

Face Painting

Others Witness

Next in this section, let us take a brief inventory of how believers have always looked at this sin, so as to cure that modern delusion of self-important thinking that we are the only age that has had the truth, or that matters, simply out of a blank ignorance of what any other age was or believed. This being the design, comment will be confined to a minimum.

William Cowper was a famous poet and hymn writer of the 1700's. Among the many poems which he himself wrote, he also translated many poems into English that were in French and Greek originally. Among the Greek verses he translated we find the following:

You give your cheeks a rosy stain
With washes dye your hair,
But paint and washes both are vain
To give a youthful air.

Those wrinkles mock your daily toil
No labor will efface 'em,
You wear a mask of smoothest oil
Yet still with ease we trace 'em.

An art so fruitless then forsake,
Which though you much excel in,
You never can contrive to make
Old Hecuba young Helen.

On a Battered Beauty

Hair, wax, rouge, honey, teeth, you buy,
A multifarious store!
A mask at once would all supply,
Nor would it cost you more.

Cowper's translations underlines the futility of face painting in the first, and the shame of face painting in the second.

After displaying the wicked career, and sudden ruin of Jezebel, Matthew Henry exhorts, "Let painted faces look in Jezebel's glass, and see how they like themselves." Henry's comment presses the sudden judgment like to come upon those who will follow a Jezebel.

Conclusion

We have seen that face painting is condemned in the scriptures. And yet we are all aware that the modern church has utterly repudiated, indeed mocked, this witness. Face painting may seem like a small practice. But departure from plain biblical teaching, and as well from the example of all the godly who have gone before cannot be judged a small matter to any real Christian, no matter how small it may seem to others. A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump. A little sin left to reign soon spreads it's evil into every artery of the church.

There are many sins of this nature reigning in our day. Face painting is only one. I challenge anyone to fairly demonstrate from reliable historical record that any civilized nation has, from creation till the present, ever digressed in such matters so far as to leave their women publicly exposed to the degree of our modern "sun bathers". Look from creation to the present day, and you will utterly fail. True, cannibals and other spectacles of human degradation and barbarism may be appealed to as espousing our modern principles, but no civilized nation. Honestly admit, then, what you have truly become. The response of your average religious worldling to a modestly adorned woman is likely parallel to what cannibals and other barbarians thought when they first saw clothed white people come to them with the good news of Jesus Christ. Ah, we have been evangelized by the heathen! Thus our testimony to the world of the ascendancy, power. and sanctity of the Christian faith. Like as in Aaron's time, the people have "made themselves naked unto their shame among their enemies" (Ex. 32:25). When the women of the church appear before the world with painted faces, britches, "shorts", swim-wear, etc. they have done no less. We thus confess to them their own creed. We will never succeed in calling the world to repentance and to the virtues of the Christian revelation while we despise that repentance as feverishly as themselves, and make a great and malignant mocking at any who seek it at our hand. To the degree that this is the spirit that reigns in the church, we only attempt to demonstrate that the church of Christ is not a divine, but merely a human, institution. While this is our witness, we are "good for nothing but to be cast out and trodden under foot of men".

Author: Charles L. Church