24 Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment.
There are segments of the Christian community who have taken up the notion that Christians ought not to judge each other - or anyone, for that matter. It's unloving, you see. Intolerant. Arrogant. Of course, when one Christian says to another, "Hey, you shouldn't be judging me!" that Christian is doing the very thing they are objecting to in the conduct of their fellow Christians. Funny how that works, eh? This is because one cannot be a thinking person, choosing between beliefs, forming preferences, and evaluating circumstances for danger, benefit, etc. without making judgements. When Bob decides he'd much prefer a chocolate sundae to a strawberry one, he has judged between the two options and come down on the side of chocolate; when Mary chooses to date Harold instead of Buck, finding Harold more to her liking, she has made a judgment between the two men; when Charles carries a sign at a Pro-Life rally rightly opposing baby murder, he has correctly judged such murder an evil and worth protesting. And so on. Judging between things is an essential to living, really, so to forbid it is just, well, silly - and lands you in the awkward position of being guilty of judging when you forbid it.
What Scripture actually prohibits in the matter of judging is doing so hypocritically. See Romans 2:1-3. Jesus expressly warned against this sort of thing:
Matthew 7:1-5 (NASB)
1 "Do not judge so that you will not be judged.
2 "For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you.
3 "Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?
4 "Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' and behold, the log is in your own eye?
5 "You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.
Did you notice in verse 5 that Jesus assumes that once one is not guilty of hypocritical judgment, one will then act to remove the speck from the eye of one's brother? So, don't be a liar, criticizing others for their lying; don't be an adulterer and deride another about their porn addiction; don't be running around telling others they ought not to be judging. Instead, when you've sorted out your own lying, repenting of it fully, you've will have important things to say to other liars about getting free of lying; when you've dealt with the sin of adultery in your own life before God, forsaking it totally, you'll have solid ground upon which to stand in calling it evil in the lives of others; when you realize that you have become a judge of those you criticize for judging and so leave off such criticism, you'll be able to help other don't-judge-me types to see their hypocrisy. And so on.
What most Christians resent about judging is condemnation. They dislike it when brothers and sisters in Christ point at each other and in their judgments of each other consign each other to irretrievable reprobation and to hell (the former naturally preceding the latter). Is it unavoidable, though, when saying to someone, "What you did was morally wrong. It was sin and you ought not to have done it," that you condemn them to a state of unalterable wickedness and deserving of permanent ostracization? No. It's entirely possible to condemn a person's behaviour while acknowledging that they can change, that they can do better in the future. This happens frequently in the various letters constituting the New Testament. Read Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. Yikes! He goes to town on them, judging their behaviour very severely! Chapter 5 is a real jaw-dropper for many modern, don't-judge-me "Christians." Peter, too, has some spicy things to say about false teachers. (See 2 Peter 2.) But both men are assuming that their readers will act better, righteously, and not continue in sin or fall prey to deceitful, carnal doctrines. Judgment, then, does not necessitate condemnation.
Some Christians (in the West, anyway), though, still want to prohibit all judgment, ostensibly to avoid unloving condemnation of others but, really, it often seems to me, simply because they live in a mind-your-own-business culture and live fairly morally and spiritually-compromised lives. Such compromise is increasingly common among modern, western Christians, affluence and ease helping along such compromise enormously. And so, the idea of any believer pointing at another and saying, "Hey, that's wrong!" or "That's sin, what you're doing," is rather horrifying. The assumption among the compromised being, of course, that everyone is likewise compromised, and so they are safe from criticism and judgment from their fellow Christians. Implicit in their condemnation of "judginess," is that no one really lives a holy, God-honoring life and so no one is ever in any position to make critical comments about the moral/spiritual choices of others.
Satan, of course, laughs at this state of affairs, knowing it effectively mutes the voice of the Church on moral issues. There's nothing more helpful to the devil than to have the Church afraid to say that anyone within its ranks is doing anything immoral, or teaching anything false, or has grown tepid in their love for the Lord.
So, go ahead, judge. Yourself first and most stringently and then, in love and truth, the Body of Believers, working to remove "the leaven that leavens the whole lump," confronting sin within the Bride of Christ, the Church, so that it might one day stand before God pure and lovely in His eyes, and serve as a powerful, holy force for Him in the world.
2 Timothy 4:1-2
1 I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom:
2 preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction.
1 Corinthians 5:9-13
9 I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people;
10 I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world, or with the covetous and swindlers, or with idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world.
11 But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler—not even to eat with such a one.
12 For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church?
13 But those who are outside, God judges. REMOVE THE WICKED MAN FROM AMONG YOURSELVES.
P.S.
Paul was in terrible error in his persecution of Christians, but he didn't let this stop him as an apostle of the Early Church from casting out from the Corinthian fellowship the man willfully sinning sexually with his step-mother. (1 Corinthians 5), or rebuking sharply those Roman believers who were guilty of hypocritically judging others (Romans 2), or challenging the drift of the Galatian Christians toward the false doctrine of the Judaizers (Galatians 3).
The big problem many modern Christians have, it seems to me, anyway, is with pointed, personal criticism. Take the pastor who condemns gluttony from the pulpit, for example, who teaches that loading layers of fat onto one's body dishonors God and brings the Christian faith into disrepute. Hoo-whee! The obese Christians who would cheer the pastor calling out adulterers, or gossips, or the hateful absolutely rage at any suggestion that their grossly-fat bodies are the result of living that ought to be condemned. The problem, I think, is that there is no way to hide this particular lack of Spirit-control. The enormously fat man with the nearly-bursting shirt and pants, waddling around, wheezing and sweating, has no way to pretend his eating habits are under God's control. But woe betide anyone who suggests that this is so!
The Church has come to accept certain kinds of sin, to ignore them, at least, lest anyone feel ashamed. For some reason (I think it's the by-product of relativism/moral subjectivism infecting the Church), the comfort of the person has become the highest good in the Christian community. And few things make a person more uncomfortable than being told they are guilty of sin. So, talk of sin, judging this or that behavior as morally-wrong, has to go. And this cessation of moral evaluations is fortified by accusations of legalism leveled against those who make such evaluations. Love is the thing; not heartless criticism. None of us is perfect, so we should all just shut-up about the sin in the life of the next person. That person with the food addiction, made grotesque in their physical form by their lack of Spirit-control, their arteries inflamed by sugar and clogged by cholesterol, afflicted by diabetes, kidneys failing, feet gangrenous, is shown love best by the rest of us pretending his addiction isn't destroying him. In fact, Christians will commiserate with such a man over his failing health, encouraging the idea that he is a victim of his circumstance rather than reaping the corruption of his willful choice to sin. (Galatians 6:7)
Anyway, we make decisions all the time and pretty reflexively, too. If those decisions lead us into sin, however, they ought to fall under the condemnation of fellow believers. That's condemnation of the choice to sin, not of the sinner. This criticism of sinful choices is always appropriate, when offered in a spirit of love, free from hypocrisy and in defense of the Body that is so susceptible to the "leavening" of sin. Such criticism requires that believers constantly judge the moral rightness of their own living (and that of fellow believers). So, decision-making, criticism and judging are all entangled with each other, over-lapping and entwining very naturally, it seems to me.
P.P.S.
I preached on Sunday about living in submission to God. When I was finished, a man with his lower, right leg in a cast hobbled up to me, his rheumy eyes peering at me, and said, "My wife didn't like all your talk about submission. By the end of your sermon, she said to me, 'He's said 'submission' fifty-eight times now.' She's not too big on submitting to anybody." He grinned at me, leaning heavily on his crutches, waiting for my reply. I ignored his remark about his wife and asked what he'd done to his leg.
"It's not just the one leg. I'll probably have the other one casted up when this one comes off. They're both in a bad way."
I asked him why that was.
"Diabetes. I lost a kidney already, y'know."
I offered a sympathetic reply and then the crippled fellow declared, "I like my ice cream. I just won't give it up. It just tastes too good!" Our conversation ended soon after and the fellow hobbled away.
Off and on, I've been thinking on this short exchange with this guy, stunned at the blindness he showed to his own open rebellion toward God in his eating habits. (And how quick he was to throw his wife under the bus! Yikes!) Anyway, he was typical of many other Christians I know who have a very soft attitude toward food addiction and obesity. This man, crippled by his lack of Spirit-control over his eating, was a slowly-collapsing illustration of the destructiveness of living apart from God's control. But as he talked with me, it was clear he expected only commiseration with his circumstance, not criticism. It was clearly criticism he needed, though (and maybe another couple of sermons on submitting to God!)
I've heard so many times from believers caught in various addictions that their addiction is "very complicated," the implication being that God's remedy for all sin is just not effective against their particular "complicated" sinful addiction. I get that some sins develop a biochemical component, making it much more difficult to win free of them. I get, too, that it takes time for the effects of sinful choices to be mitigated by living constantly under the Spirit's control. The obese person won't slim down overnight; the porn addict won't be free of the twisting effects of porn in an instant; the practiced liar will have to wrestle with the habit of exaggeration and deceit he's formed as God brings him free of his lying, and so on. But there is no sin so "complicated" that it exceeds the power of the Holy Spirit to dissolve, there is no sinful bondage beyond the liberating power of God. We imperil ourselves and the entire Body of Believers when we think otherwise.
