What Only God Knows

Mat 6:3 When you give charity, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing:
Mat 6:4 Your charity should be in secret: and your Father who see in secret himself shall reward you openly.

In part, this statement continues Christ's logic separating social justice from divine justice. The key difference is that God knows what every person thinks or does in secret. Human society is based on imperfect public information. Imperfect knowledge results in imperfect decisions and imperfect justice. God's judgment is based on perfect knowledge and therefore is always going to be different from society's judgments. Working to gain social prestige is flawed because that judgment is based upon flawed knowledge.

For the term "reward," a different term is used here that earlier in the Gospel. Instead of misthos, the word used in apodidomi. Misthos means simply payment for work. Apodidomi means selling something you own, repaying a debt, discharging a duty, or restoring something taken. The idea is restoring a balance. So the reward we get for doing good works is not just payment for the work. It is a balancing of accounts between ourselves and God.

Most religions, including Christianity, recognize that we humans cannot control God. God does as God desires based on knowledge we can never have. However, Christ consistently uses terms regarding God's reward that infers that God owes us something for our right behavior. However, this idea of "balancing the book" may come even closer to what Christ was talking about.

Christ saw the natural operation of the world as the result of God's will. When he talks about God rewarding us for our behavior, he is talking about something that happens naturally given the way that God constructed the universe. It isn't a special action any more than the conservation of energy is a special action. This balancing is simply a matter of how the universe works the operation of God's natural law.

When we perform a good act and do not seek social compensation, the result is that we grow. Christ said that we are rewarded by this growth, but this reward isn't a special act of God's grace. It is the order of things. We cannot help be come closer to our own perfection when we do what is right for the right reasons. The right reasons are defined specifically as not doing it for social reward.