Many things are said about judging, and confusion persists about whether Christians are to judge or not to judge. I wrestled through the seeming conundrum – to judge or not to judge – a number of years ago and came up with 8 Important Points About Judging and Judgment. I didn’t realize, then, how these principles tie into the way we should look at immigration.
In very brief summary, Jesus said, “Judge not, that you be not judged” (Matt. 7:1), and followed immediately with the statement, “For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you.” (Mt. 7:2) He was not telling us not to judge; he was telling us to be careful how we judge. This is critical.
The statements in Matthew 7 cited above are the set up for the short parable of the person with a log in his eye trying to take the speck of his brother’s eye. The parable ends with Jesus telling us first to take the log out of our own eye; then we can see accurately to take the speck out of our brother’s eye.
Paul riffs on this theme Jesus preached when he said, “If we would judge ourselves, we would not be judged.” (1 Cor. 11:31 NKJV) Paul also picks up on something I missed for years in the log and speck parable. In that parable, Jesus is talking about “judging” our brother. Who we judge is just as critical as how we judge.
When I first discovered this, I realized that I and most Christians I know had it all wrong. That lightbulb went on when I read these words by the Apostle, Paul:
“What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside?”
1 corinthians 5:12
Jesus only talked about judging our brothers, and Paul makes it clear this means people in the church. We have no business judging people outside the church. “God will judge those outside.” (1 Cor. 5:13) (This is why we need to preach the gospel to them!)
Of course, when we feel compelled to judge someone else, we should always examine ourselves first. We should always be careful how we judge, because we how we judge others is how we will each be judged. We should never judge people outside the church – because Jesus came not to condemn – and neither should we; he came to save.
Notice these themes that Jesus preached:
We will be shown mercy as we show mercy to others (Matt. 5:7)
We will be forgiven as we forgive others (Matt. 6:15); and
We will be judged as we judge others (Matt. 7:2);
Consistent with what Jesus preached, the themes of judgment and mercy are tied together by James:
“[J]udgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment.”
JAMES 2:13
When James adds that “mercy triumphs over judgment,” he is highlighting a standard that is based on God’s character. God desires mercy and not sacrifice (Hosea 6:6); God desires mercy, which is why Jesus came to call sinners to himself (Matt. 9:13); and God desires us to be merciful as He is merciful. (Luke 6:36)
So many people view God as an angry God who is full of wrath and judgment. Nothing could be further from the truth. “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” (Psalm 103:8) “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end.” (Lamentations 3:22)
God is just because he is merciful! Biblical justice is characterized by mercy. Thus, justice without mercy is not biblical justice:
“Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you; therefore he will rise up to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him.”
Isaiah 30:18
But what does this have to do with judging neighbors? Why did James ask the rhetorical question: “Who are you to judge your neighbors?” This question ripples back to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” The context in which God told us to love our neighbors is a good place to start with answers to these questions.
I went to bed last night concerned I was getting things wrong. Specifically, I have been critical of Donald Trump and what he has done since he took office again, and I have been getting push back from many people. It isn’t the many people that concerns me, but my brothers and sisters in Christ who are calling me out on this.
It seems so obvious to me that the things being done are wrong, and the way they are being done is wrong, but other Christians are not seeing it. I prayed to God last night, “If I am wrong, please correct me.”
This morning my daily reading included this verse:
“I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.” Matthew 10:16
I was doubting myself last night, so my first thought was to check the context, even though I know it. Sure enough, it was what I remembered:
“These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: ‘Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. ‘” Matthew 10:5-6
I have read this passage dozens of times, probably, since I became a Christian over 40 years, but I didn’t realize the context of the sheep among wolves statement made by Jesus until the last year. When I read that passage recently, I said to myself, “Wait a minute! Jesus said that to his disciples when he sent them out to his own people – the Jews.” What!?
He said, don’t go to the Gentiles, and don’t even go to the Samaritans; go “the lost sheep of Israel.” He would later send them to the Samaritans; and he ultimately sent his followers to Judea, to Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
Of course, he sent them to the lost of sheep of Israel. Maybe not all the people of Israel were lost sheep. Maybe the wolves were only among the lost sheep of Israel.
Surely, the people in the church today are not the lost sheep. The church is filled with the elect. The church is filled with sheep who hear the shepherd’s voice. I believe that is true!
At the same time, I think it is safe to say that not everyone who goes to church is a child of God. The old adage that parking yourself in a garage does make you an automobile is true. Jesus said it this way: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat….” (Matthew 13:24-25)
I am sobered by this. I don’t think that Jesus was saying that all God’s people at that time were wolves. Maybe the wolves weren’t even people. Sometimes, we can take a metaphor too far. He was telling them to be careful, to be circumspect, to remember what he taught them, and not to be lead astray – even among God’s people. We may be sometimes fooled into listening to the voices of wolves, rather than the voice of the Good Shepherd.
This is the story of God and His people. God sent His prophets to His people again and again, and they did not listen. (Jeremiah 26:5) When God commissioned Isaiah, He told Isaiah that the people would hear, but not understand, and they would see, but they would not perceive, and this would continue until the land was in ruins and only a remnant remained. (Isaiah 6:1-13)
Of course, I am not the Prophet, Isaiah. I am a sinful man saved by the grace of a loving God. I have my own faults and biases and sinful tendencies, and I could be wrong. I am acutely aware of this.
Jesus was entered Jerusalem on the colt of a donkey around the time Pontius Pilate entered Jerusalem from the opposite direction, from Caesarea. Picture the incongruity of a full grown man sitting on a colt of a donkey with his legs dragging the ground under the poor little beast. Then picture the Roman ruler of the land came from the opposite direction in a mighty procession with banners and fanfare and a show of force with all the military show of Communist China.
Jesus was coming to die on a cross, but the people greeted him like he was a king who would ascend the throne of David and overthrow the Roman government. They shouted, “Hosanna!” (Save us!) They waived palm branches to herald the Messiah they believed would save them from the Romans like a hammer, and they laid their garments down in submission.
The people didn’t understand that Jesus came to die on a cross. The poignancy of this incongruence is understood best by how the story in Luke ends:
“As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, ‘If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side.They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.'”
Luke 19:41-44
Those people would have said they did recognize the time of God’s coming, right?! They got it right: he was the Messiah! They recognized that Jesus was God’s Messiah promised of old.
In that general sense, they did get it right. Jesus was/is the Messiah, but their expectations of what that meant and what he would do was wrong. They thought he came to conquer, but he came to die.
By the end of that week, the people who waived palm branches and laid their garments down had changed their tune. They wanted Barabbas released, not Jesus.
As discussed in the conversation linked below in the video, they wanted the way of Barabbas – the sword – not the way of Jesus, the cross. They didn’t want a suffering Messiah; they wanted a conquering Messiah. They didn’t want the Lamb of God; they wanted the Lion of Judah.
We aren’t much different than they. For all of our Bibles and bible apps, we don’t even know Scripture as well as they did! Lifeway Research reports that only 36% of Evangelicals read the Bible every day, and only 32% of Protestant, read the Bible every day.
We have our own expectations of the way God should do things, and we tend to lean back into what someone recently called the default stance of the flesh – the appeal of power and influence. But, that isn’t God’s way. Jesus showed us God’s way, and he invites us to follow his way as he followed the Father’s way in this present world.
Paul reminds us,
“But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are….”
1 Corinthians 1:27-28
We need to be careful not to be hearers who don’t understand and seers who don’t perceive. We need to be careful to choose God’s way, which is not our way. We need to carry our crosses and not swords.
Does any of this make me “right”? No. But, I am seeking God. I am trying to be true, to know Him, and to be like Him. That is my heart’s desire. I am trying to recognize and honor God in these times and to reflect His heart and character as best as I can understand it.
The lesson of the words of Jesus to be careful of the wolves among the sheep, the lesson of the prophets, and Paul’s reminder that God shames the wise and the strong by choosing what seems to be foolishness and weakness means that I need to resist the default position of the flesh (to rely on power and influence). I need to be grounded in God’s Word and not everything that anyone who is a Christian says. I need to be aware that weeds grow among the wheat and wolfish things appear among the sheep.
Though every man be a liar, yet God is true! (Romans 3:4) The heart of a man is deceitful above all things. (Jeremiah 17:9) This is true of me and my heart if I am not careful and do no guard it. We need each other, and we need to hold each other accountable, not to political ideologies and cultural ways, but to the Word of God and the way of Jesus.
I became a follower of Jesus in 1979, though I was a wild, untamed stallion when I was first confronted with the Lordship of Christ and verbally submitted to him. I wandered down my own paths in the year that followed, leading me to a breaking point and more complete surrender. (A cycle I have unfortunately repeated more than once.)
Over the following two years, I was about as surrendered to God as I have been my whole life. I was all in – or as all in as I was capable of being at that time, perhaps. During that time, I became a big fan of Keith Green. I even saw him in concert in Des Moines Iowa in 1981 or 1982. He died in a place crash within a year or two after that, and his impact and memory has faded.
When I saw him in concert, though, his radical Christian commitment had been a huge impact on me, and that impact carried with me beyond his death. Thus, my daily reading today recalls to my mind these lyrics by Keith Green:
To obey is better than sacrifice I want more than Sundays and Wednesday nights If you can't come to me every day Then don't bother coming at all
Keith Green was a musical child prodigy who was radically saved by Jesus. He used his great musical talent and platform to become a prophet of sorts to young Christians at the time who wanted an authentic faith.
I was very drawn to a monastic, cloistered life at that age that Keith Green represented, like a modern Essene. The truth is that I had long been drawn to that kind of thing going back to the book, My Side of the Mountain, that I read in grade school (about a boy who leaves his parents to hollow out a summer home in the trunk of dead tree in the Catskills).
That book seeded in me a longing for something authentic and pure. The idea took root in me that I could not find “it” in the bustle of the world. I needed to escape to solitude, self-reflection, and devotion to a simple life.
In a poignant moment in my senior year in college, I faced up to that longing and desire that ran deep in me, and I made a conscious decision to follow Jesus into the messy clamor of human society. Jesus often escaped to the mountains and the wilderness to be alone with God, but he always returned to the highways, and byways, and the public squares where people live.
Still, the Keith Green spirit of uncompromised obedience to Christ and Christ alone left an imprint on me. His prophetic insistence on radical commitment carried me forward in those early years of my journey with Christ.
Now, I find myself some 40+ years down a road that has taken many twists and turns. That road has taken me through long and winding wilderness areas that were darker than I care to dwell on. It has taken me to the other side of those dark times into the light of a new day, more weary and (hopefully) wiser for the experience. I am still following Jesus as best as I can, but I have a slightly different view of Keith Green’s words today. I hope I can give this the nuance it deserves.
I keep coming back to the theme of unity that Paul addressed in most of his letters. Christ tore down the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles (Ephesians 2:14), and there is no longer any divisions in Christ: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28 (Emphasis added) Elsewhere Paul says,
“[T]here is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.”
Colossians 3:11
We might add the major divisions we have today, like black or white, Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, capitalist or socialist, Palestinian or Israeli, American or Russian….
Did I lose anyone there?
Do you have a hard job believing that certain types of people can be considered Christians?
Are we not “all one in Christ”?
Of course, we need to define what is meant by “in Christ.”
“In Christ” means that we have a saving relationship with Christ in union with him:
Being one with Christ, means that those in Christ should be one with each other also. The one thing that binds us together is Christ Jesus. We may be very different from each other in many ways, but we are one if we are, indeed, in Christ.
It doesn’t matter how many differences we have with each other. If we are (indeed) in Christ, we are unified in Christ. Thus, it should not be surprising that Paul urged the Corinthians to be unified:
“I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.”
1 Corinthians 1:10
No divisions among you! Be united in mind and thought.
How do we do that? What keeps us from being united?
The following words were Paul’s assessment of the Corinthians when he wrote to them in the letter we call 1st Corinthians:
“[Y]ou are still influenced by the flesh. For since there is still jealousy and dissension among you, are you not influenced by the flesh and behaving like unregenerate people?” 1 Corinthians 3:3 NET
Paul admonished the Corinthians for having jealousy and dissension among them. What Paul meant in that phrase (jealousy and dissension) may not be exactly as you imagine, however. Of course, I will explain.
First of all, though, we need to understand that Paul wrote this letter to the Christians at Corinth. He was writing to people who were born again who were “still influenced by the flesh” , causing those Christians to behave “like unregenerate people”.
Christians today are also still influenced by the flesh, and we sometimes act like unregenerate people. And, that’s not okay!
God’s plan for you is to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ (Romans 8:29) who is the “the exact representation of [God’s] being”. (Hebrews 1:3) God had same plan for the Corinthian Christians, and He has the same plan for all Christ followers today.
If I have time and focus enough, I will make this a series. Today, though, I want to focus on the influence Paul specifically identified the Corinthians – jealousy. (If you read the whole letter, you find that jealousy wasn’t the only issue, but it’s the one Paul leads with.)
The word translated as jealousy in this verse is ζῆλος, ου, ὁ (zelos), meaning eagerness, zeal, rivalry. (Biblehub) It is an onomatopoeic term that mimics the sound of water bubbling over from heat. It may even derive from the Greek world, zéō (“to boil”).
Zeal comes from the same root word (zē), which means “hot enough to boil”. This word can be used in the positive or the negative. It can be used metaphorically with many emotions such as boiling anger, burning love, burning zeal, etc.
A person who burns with zeal for God is exhibits a positive form of zelos, but a person who burns with zeal for idols exhibits a negative form of zelos. Burning passion for one’s spouse can be good (unless it gets possessive), but burning passion for someone else’s spouse is not good.
Paul pairs zelos with ἔρις, ιδος, ἡ (eris) in the verse quoted above, which means strife and is often translated as contention, strife, wrangling, or quarreling. It means to have a contentious spirit. Thus, zeal (zelos) with a contentious spirit (eris) is how Paul assesses some people in the church in Corinth.
That kind of zeal is caused by the influence of the flesh. That kind of zeal, Paul says, is unregenerate behavior, and needs to stop. So, what is Paul specifically talking about?
Paul is talking about the quarreling among them over who they follow: “One of you says, ‘I follow Paul’; another, ‘I follow Apollos’; another, ‘I follow Cephas’; still another, ‘I follow Christ.'” (1 Cor. 1:12) He comes to the point again in Chapter 3 when he says, “Are you not acting like mere humans? For when one says, ‘I follow Paul,’ and another, ‘I follow Apollos,’” are you not mere human beings?”
Stop and think about that for a moment…. Don’t we still do that in the 21st Century, too? Paul says that this kind of attitude is worldliness; it is acting like “mere infants in Christ” (1 Cor. 3:1); it is acting as of we are unregenerate.
If we are going to take Paul (and God) seriously, we should not allow ourselves to burn with a contentious spirit that leads to dissension with fellow Christians. With that in mind, let’s take a deeper dive into what I believe Paul is saying.
Navigating by Faith 