Sermon: Do Not Judge
Moral Condemnation in Hypocrisy
#1719
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 22-Jul-23; 81 minutes
description: Judging is hardwired into the human nervous system; if we stop judging or evaluating, we will die. The thousands of decisions we make every day give us discernment enabling us to act. Judgment may encompass legal or judicial decisions, natural or innate judgment such as matters of safety, learned opinions or biases, and moral standards based upon God's moral law, a fixed, unchanging standard. Sadly, people replace this fixed standard with human traditions and pagan myths, substituting corruptible human standards for God's permanent standards, making them emotionally biased rather than based on godly truth. Matthew 7:1-5 is often used against God's chosen as a "gotcha" statement, charging them with hypocrisy, not having the spiritual capacity to understand the nature of godly judging. While we do not have the prerogative of condemning and passing judgment, we do have the responsibility of observing behaviors or inspecting spiritual fruit, beginning with self, using righteous judgment (John 7:24) rather than going by surface appearances. The speck and beam analogy referred to the blatant hypocrisy of a so-called brother-in-Christ attempting to 'helpfully' correct a spiritual sibling of a tiny flaw while secretly harboring a truly dangerous sin worthy of condemnation-such as the Pharisees condemning Jesus for healing a man on the Sabbath, breaking their manmade traditions. We are admonished to judge ourselves rigorously, clearing ourselves of the deadly planks of hidden sin threatening to scuttle our salvation. If we could successfully accomplish that task, we would be equipped to lovingly help our spiritual siblings in their struggles.
transcript:
Judging is hardwired into the human mind. It is a necessary part of life, and in fact, if we stopped making judgments, if that were somehow possible, we would soon die. That is how important making judgments is to life, because God made us through the spirit in man that He put in us to be thinking beings like He is. And that requires us not to act on instinctive desires like an animal, but to take in information and process it, make judgments and decisions so that we can remain alive or do what whatever it is that we are wanting to do.
So we, let us say, there is something that comes up, we perceive a problem, and using our rational process of thought and judgment, we work through to a solution and then we decide whether to actually follow that solution or not. Such a process must include making judgments, even multiple judgments, about the various pieces of information we collect and then sort out and decide upon. So judgment is a key part of the decision process and every decision that we make has to have an element of judgment in it.
And we must make hundreds or thousands of decisions, whether they are conscious decisions or unconscious decisions, every day. Whether it is deciding to get out of bed after a very long night, to getting back in it at the end of the day. We must decide what to eat, what to drink, what to wear, as Jesus covered at the end of Matthew 6. He tells us not to worry about those sorts of things.
But we also have to make decisions about things like where to go, what to do, whom to speak to and how to speak to them, what to buy, what route to take to the office, whether to get an oil change, or what have you. We have to make all these kinds of decisions either every day or from time to time. They are all judgments that we make.
With every decision we have to make at least one judgment and oftentimes many judgments. Or maybe we do not call them judgments. Maybe we call them assessments or evaluations or discriminations. We discriminate between one thing versus another. Or a discernment. Discernments are just different kind of judgments, a little bit different nuance. But making these, whether we call them judgments, assessments, evaluations, discernments, or discriminations, they help us make up our minds so that we can act.
Now because not all judgments are the same, we categorize them in different ways. We can make categories of judgments. I have got four here to try to keep it simple. There are probably many more, but I am just going to kind of compact them all down into these four.
We probably first think of what we might call legal or judicial judgments. Those are the kind government officials in black robes do. Like the Supreme Court and all the other courts below them. They judge legal matters and sentence or fine guilty parties for breaking the law. We can call this formal judgment or legal judgment, the term I used before. That kind of judgment is not necessarily on our radar today.
Another kind of judgment I will call natural judgment or innate judgment. We do this kind of evaluating naturally as part of human existence, as part of survival, of how we get through life. We innately evaluate what we eat and drink. We usually do not have to think very hard about what we eat or drink. We either have a routine, a habit, or we have preferences. And so, you know, somebody says, do you want eggs or do you want shrimp? It is very quick and innate in us to say eggs (unless you are my wife and she does not like eggs, and she would say, "No, I'll just have an apple.")
We gauge situations in terms of safety. We know innately when we go into a dark alley that we need to be more cautious and we decide, "No, I'm not going to go into that dark alley. I'm going to stay in the light on the street." We assess possible courses of action for feasibility. Is it feasible to do this sort of thing if we do X, Y and Z first? So we make various decisions about should we first get something to eat and then do this activity and that activity, and we can get home at a reasonable hour.
But these kind of decisions, these kind of judgments, these innate judgments are judgments that keep us alive a lot of times. If a baseball player stands in a batter's box and he is looking out at the pitcher, and he starts his wind up, he has to evaluate the pitcher's motion, and the ball spin, and speed. And so he has to make a split second decision about whether he is going to either swing at the ball coming at him at 90, 95 miles an hour or whether he is going to hit the deck and get out of the way of a high, hard fastball. But he does that, he has an innate ability to see where that ball is going to go. It may be a quarter of a second. He can judge, that ball is coming up and in and he better get it out of the way or it is going to come over the plate and he can lay his bat on it. But it is a natural thing. And if you understand what I mean, that situation is a fight-or-flight situation. And the fight-or-flight, we call it a drive or an instinct, but there is a measure of judgment there, if we are in our right mind, if we are not too terrified to be able to think, that we could actually make a split second judgment and act upon it.
The third one that I have listed here is an interesting one. It is the one we most think of, I think, in terms of judgment, after the judicial or formal judgment. But this one is based on learned likes and dislikes, which I will label subjective judgment or maybe even the best word for it is simply, opinion. Our opinions are based on our education and our experience, and they are influenced by our accumulated biases. We often act as if they are based in fact because we value our own thinking so highly. But in the end, they are just individual preferences. These opinions we may have added a few facts to the process of our judgment and they form the basis for our conclusions. But our opinion is still not an established fact. It is still our opinion. It is subjective.
Now, if I wanted to (and I do not want to), but if I wanted to, I could go on all day about how the Pittsburgh Steelers are the best NFL franchise in history. And none of my hot air that I would spew over that hour or two or six, or however long it took, would be necessarily factual. In the end, it would just be my personal opinion. Now, it is my personal opinion, but I am not going to try to convince you of it. (Your blood is not the right color.) But generally much of what we claim to know is more subjective than we will admit.
As a matter of fact, just about everything that we express as this is what is right and true in terms of our dialogue with one another, tends to be very heavily subjective rather than objective. What we found out over the past couple of years since the COVID outbreak and Senor Fauci and all the rest, is that even science is mere opinion. I mean, there might be science there in the background that they could say well, this and this.
But we found out that there is a mountain of other factual science that combats those opinions that the government put out on COVID and the like. And we were forced to choose which opinion we were going to follow. Because we found out in the meantime that the things that they were spouting as science either were not true or based on faulty experiments and such, rushed through by Pfizer and other, I will call them non-governmental agencies (they were certainly working with the government quite a bit). But what do you believe? I mean, they say "follow the science" because supposedly it is true and factual. But I saw the other day that really you should follow the money and there you find the so-called science that has been highly influenced by the money.
And so what do you believe? You have to come up with some sound basis for why you are going to do what you are going to do and then make your decision. It is all part of judgment and a lot of it is based on opinion.
Now, the last category of judgment that I want to talk about right now is moral judgment. You probably figured I would end with moral judgment. That is making distinctions or evaluations or judgments about what is right and wrong. That is moral judgment. It is a close cousin to legal judgment because it operates on or by a fixed standard. Legal judgment uses the standard of human governmental law while moral judgment is based on its moral equivalent. Now, the moral equivalent that we use as a basis for judgment in our case is God, in what He has written in His Word.
But it is not always the God of the Bible that is the God that people follow. People have been following false Jesuses, you know, false gods. They have also believed in Zeus and Jupiter (which we saw a lot of yesterday at the Getty Villa. J Paul Getty was an oil man. That is where he made his money. But his love was classical sculpture and art and that sort of thing. And there were a lot of deities portrayed there in the stuff that we saw yesterday.)
But a lot of people used the gods of Mount Olympus as their standard. That was not very good. Sometimes, like the Jews, they do claim to follow God. But when you look behind the curtain, what they follow mostly is tradition. Or it could be the standard that people judge by as a certain philosophy. Some person that they greatly admire has come up with a system for living life, whether it is Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, or whether it is some of the German philosophers of the last couple of centuries, and they follow them. Some people follow a guru on the top of the mountain or some yogi in India. And, every time, they are following a man and his thoughts and his judgments.
So those who judge morally, then, using this standard, pointing to this standard, will say that they are following "the truth." It is really, though, their truth because they decided that that is what they want to follow. But it is still a set of moral tenets that they treat as absolute truth or absolute verity.
These days, society has regressed to where for many people, maybe most people in our culture, the truth is what each individual believes. Such people declare that absolute truth does not exist. So they all live according to their own conscience. And we know that their own conscience is not very clean. I mean, their morality, if you even want to call it that, could be all over the place and be immorality. And in many cases, it is. Their moral decision have devolved into opinions based on nothing more substantial, I should say, than their feelings. This is what I feel is right. How many times do you hear that on the news and interviews with starlets and baseball players and whatever? They feel that this is the way to go. I believe this is the way it should be so I am going to live that way.
And then these days they criticize or cancel people because they do not believe what they believe. So when they do this, when they criticize or cancel someone, their judgment of that person is hypocritical, it is flawed, it is unfair, because they are using a standard of judgment that nobody else has. There is no way that that other person could live up to another individual's standard, whatever it happens to be. It is not based on a common, higher standard like we try to do by living according to the Word of God.
So, in essence, the moral judgment of this age is personal and emotional. It is not rational. They may think it is rational but it is based on nothing, nothing but their own feelings or their own biases.
Matthew 7:1 is how far we have gotten through the Sermon on the Mount in this very long series that I have done. Our Savior commands us, "Judge not, that you be not judged." Now, we are going to look into this passage of His Sermon on the Mount, verses 1 through 5, to determine what kind of judgment He is talking about and why He condemns it for His disciples.
He does not say what kind of judgment in terms of the categories that I have given you here—the four—but it is actually one of them. And so we will see that He forbids this kind of judgment because it opposes what He and His Father are doing in the church. If we would refrain from doing this kind of judgment, we would be a lot better off. And ultimately, He is going to do the same thing with all humanity, but He has to start with us first. We have to be the forerunners in terms of not judging so that we will not be judged.
One of the key things that I am not going to get into in this sermon (I have talked about it in other sermons), but when we judge, we are taking a prerogative of God to ourselves. And it is a very bad form of self-worship when we put ourselves above God in terms of judgment. That is not necessarily what He is getting at here, but it can be a part of it. But He actually focuses on something else here. Let us go read those first five verses of Matthew 7 so we are a little bit immersed in what He says here.
Matthew 7:1-5 "Judge not, that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the same measure you use, it will be measured back to you. And why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me remove the speck out of your eye'; and look, a plank is in your own eye? Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother's eye."
Remove the speck out of your brother's eye after you have worked on yourself.
This passage, particularly the first verse, is well known in the world and it is often used against Christians when they point out a person's or the culture's sins. They are saying, "Well, you're judging me." Opponents use it as a kind of "gotcha" statement. "Didn't Jesus say you're not supposed to judge?" And when they say that they think they won the argument and you just need to sit down and shut up. Because they think that it proves that Christians are hypocrites because we make judgments.
All it actually shows is that they have no idea what Jesus was talking about. And I seriously doubt that they have the spiritual capacity to understand what He meant in this passage. It is simple. It is one of those fascinating things that Jesus was able to do. It is very simple on the outside. And once you start digging into what He was actually saying, and you get a little of the background and you figure out what He is talking about in context, it gets really interesting and it just goes way beyond what is there on the surface.
But I want to get something out of the way immediately and that is this word judge. I will just read a commentator on this. This is Leon Morris. He is very well known in theological circles. He wrote the Pillar New Testament Commentary on the book of Matthew and he explains this very succinctly. So I am going to do a longish quote here.
Do not judge refers to the passing of harsh adverse verdicts on the conduct of our fellows. It does not forbid the use of our best critical thinking, which may be done in a spirit of tolerance and helpfulness and which Jesus elsewhere commands as a help to others. Don't judge does not mean, don't think. The verb is used not only generally of passing a verdict, but specifically of passing an adverse verdict, condemning, and it is this that Jesus is forbidding. The present imperative gives the sense, "Don't make a practice of judging."
That is the general meaning that we are trying to understand here. It does not refer to making judgments. Generally, it refers to passing harsh adverse verdicts on others, especially on our brothers, our brethren, the people who are our fellow disciples. So on the surface, it is very simple. We can use the word condemn here. "Condemn not, that you be not condemned." And that is very simple. That is a good rule of thumb way of thinking of this. That we are condemning them for their sins.
The Greek word for judge here is krino, which means to judge, to pass judgment on. It had an interesting evolution. Its base meeting, krino's base meaning is "to separate and select." So if you had a bunch of marbles in a pail or something, and you are looking at them and you separate them into green marbles, and blue marbles, and red marbles, and orange marbles, and yellow marbles, and black marbles, and white marbles, and all the rest of the marbles that are in there, and you select the prettiest ones. So you have discriminated, right, among the colors of the marbles. And then you have selected, you have made a decision about which marbles you like the best.
So originally, it meant to separate into categories and then select. And that led to the definition, the meaning "to determine." You determined that this person was guilty. You determined that this person was at the scene of a crime. You determined that he used this particular weapon. You determined this, that, and the other thing. And of course, once you determine those things, you make a judgment.
And then finally, it meant "to judge" or "to pronounce judgment." This is where it got to finally and also why it has so many different definitions, different nuances of what judgment is because it went through all of them: from just selecting your favorite among random things all the way to a legal type of judgment. And then of course, it can be used as a moral judgment as well.
So like our concept of judgment, the Greek term can suggest a wide range of judgments from official legal judgments and sentencing, to forming opinions, to estimating and choosing, or resolving to do something. It goes the whole gamut here. It is like our word judgment or to judge.
In the Bible, when krino is used, you have to look at the context very carefully to figure out the specific meaning in that particular passage. And Jesus does this for us in verses 2 through 5. We do not have to guess at His meaning. He is talking about moral fitness here, moral judgment, figuring out or trying to determine another person's level of guilt or of determining the person's standing before God and then condemning him for it.
That is what He is talking about here. Looking at a brother or sister in Christ, seeing a fault, definite fault; Jesus here does not say in any way that the fault is not real. He is saying that the person has a fault. Look to the person next to you, you know that that person has faults. No one is perfect yet. So it is looking at a another person, another person's faults, and saying, "Well, you're going in the Lake of Fire," or "You're a bad person, you're evil." That is not a good thing to do. Jesus condemns our condemning of other people.
Let us look in John 7:24. We are still talking a little bit about the word krino here. This was when He was at the Feast there in Jerusalem where He was not going to go but He decided to go, and then He ran into the people there at the Temple and they were trying to figure out, "Who is this Jesus? Could this be the Christ?"
John 7:24 [He says] "Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment."
Immediately, if you just had in your Bibles Matthew 7:1 and John 7:24, you could very well think that Jesus was contradicting Himself in these two scriptures because one says, "Do not judge." And the other one says, "Judge with righteous judgment." One says, Do not judge. The other one says, Do judge, just do it right.
Obviously, Jesus is not contradicting Himself. That is what we take on faith and we understand to be true. Obviously, He is speaking of two different kinds of judgments or He would not have said it like this. One kind, He forbids as unrighteous and the other, He urges us to do righteously. So we can see right here that He does not condemn all judgment. He understands very well, better than we do, that we need to make judgments. It is a part of how we live. It is a part of how we actually better ourselves because if we are going to be moving toward the Kingdom of God, we have to be judging ourselves and situations and behaviors and all these kind of things so that we can make progress, choose the right.
Remember I said, krino needs the context so we can understand what kind of judgment He is talking about. So in context, He advises righteous judgment, or discernment, we could say, regarding what happened, which was actually in John 5. We will not go back there. But on the Sabbath day, He told a man to go and wash himself in the pool of Bethesda, and he had to pick up his mat and go into the pool and he was completely healed. And this is what the Jews were referring to when they were saying that they did not know what to make of Him because, Yeah, He did all kinds of righteous deeds and miracles and it was wonderful, but He made somebody work on the Sabbath and He Himself healed on the Sabbath.
That was the big thing. They were not necessarily worried about the guy carrying his little palate on the Sabbath, his mat. They were more interested in criticizing Jesus. And so it was His healing on the Sabbath that really got their goat. So they were condemning Him for that.
Well, if we would go back and read the scriptures right before verse 24, we would find that He says, He makes His argument using circumcision and He says, "You know, you Jews allow circumcision on the Sabbath. Why can't I heal a man completely on the Sabbath?"
Now think of this. What do we have in circumcision? It is a minor surgery in which a part of the body, part of the flesh of a little boy, is cut. There is blood, there is screaming, there is terror, this little baby. And then, it is left to heal, essentially, and the little kid has to suffer for however many days until his flesh knits. It is a destructive act. Jesus is saying:
"OK, you Jews. If a boy is born and the day of circumcision, the eighth day, lands on a Sabbath, you allow your mohel to circumcise the boy. If you allow this on the Sabbath, why is it so bad that I made a man well on the Sabbath? Why is your destructive act, in order to conform to the covenant right, but My act of grace and construction, health, vigor, bringing a man from begging on the side of the pool there into a man who could once again work and do all these good things, why is that wrong? Is there not a problem in our judgment here that we are so interested in conforming to the law that we allow ourselves to mutilate a little boy? Not that that is wrong because God commanded it in the covenant. But here I am doing something loving, kind, gracious to a person and you condemn Me for it."
That was His argument. And so we get to verse 24, He tells the crowd there, "Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment." So stripping away all the folderol around this, what Jesus is talking about is evaluating proper Sabbath behavior. Because they were judging Him versus their ideas about the law and what was allowable on the Sabbath. And the Jews were really sticklers about the Sabbath. I have told you this before. You could carry up to three barley grains or whatever. Any more than that you were working. You can carry a little thread but do you not dare carry a needle because if you carry a needle, you could do work, so you are sinning if you carry a needle. You can go 5/8 of a mile, no more. One step after that, you have sinned, you have gone longer than a Sabbath day's journey.
There were lots of things like that. They were very particular. They had taken a great deal of time. All the sages sat around, doing the Pooh thing, tapping his temple and saying "think, think, think, think, think" and they decided that this was how it was going to be. That they needed to make these very picayune laws to keep people from breaking the Sabbath.
Jesus is saying that all that work that those sages did was nonsense because it was not made using righteous judgment. They had made great mistakes in their judgment, in their evaluation of what was proper Sabbath behavior. So obviously, what meant the most to them was what was written in the law and that is what they defined all of it on. They took no thought, it appears, for what was kind, what was good, what was merciful, what pertained to life rather than what pertained to death.
And that is kind of what we are talking about here in terms of a constructive thing like Jesus did out of mercy, and a destructive thing that they would allow because the law said it should be done on the eighth day. So they did not think at all of what we would call spiritual attributes, spiritual traits, spiritual goodness, only what was written. And Jesus said this reasoning is flawed. So He says, "Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment."
What He is talking about here is determining what God allows using the whole broad spectrum of God's Word and things like the fruit of the Spirit and the idea of life and goodness. Paul called it "rightly dividing the word of truth," rightly splitting it down, chopping it up fine, thinking it through. That is II Timothy 2:15, if you do not know the scripture.
What He is talking about here is distinguishing between right and wrong behaviors. He is not talking about condemning other people or judging other people. He is talking about you have a dilemma. You do not know what is right. You could do this or you could do that. You need to judge with righteous judgment.
Now, in terms of the word appearance here, "according to appearance," everything on the outside, as far as the Jews were concerned, was that Jesus had a man break the Sabbath and then he went in the water and he came out well. To them, he was "appearing" to sin on the Sabbath. He was "appearing" to make a man sin on the Sabbath. And so to them, He was ripe for condemnation. But He said, that was just what you saw on the outside. That is what you saw happening physically. You did not see the change on the inside.
They did not see Jesus' own reasons for doing that. He was God. He was making one of His creatures well, a man. He was doing it totally out of the goodness of His heart, as we say. They did not see His motives, they did not see His intentions, they did not see what it was that that made Him do this. They did not see how it was part of His work. None of that is visible, none of that is necessarily apparent using our five senses. So this is a warning here that we have to be careful about what we see, what we think we see, what we imagine is happening when something like this is occurring, a spiritual thing, because spiritual things are usually not discernible by the five senses.
This was part of the work of God that Jesus was doing that the Jews were not equipped to seek, to understand. They did not see the long term effects. We do not know if this man who was healed in the pool eventually was converted and came into the church. But it is these long term consequences that we cannot see with our eyes, they have yet to occur. We do not have the ability to see these things.
And so He is saying here, "Ok, you see something happening and you think there is sin involved. Be careful what conclusions you come up with based on those things that your five senses took in. There might be a lot more going on that you can't see." A lot more spiritual things that are going on under the surface and we will not maybe be clued into what they are for many years. Maybe not until the Kingdom when we figure out that that person who we thought was doing something so terrible was actually maybe in the first stages of their conversion and still making mistakes, but improving. We do not know. So judge with righteous judgment, withhold your judgment until you see more. So He is talking about something other than what He is talking about necessarily in Matthew 7:1.
However, their condemnation of Jesus for doing these things was exactly what He is talking about in Matthew 7:1. The main thing in John 7:24 is evaluating a situation, evaluating behavior in terms of right and wrong. What we are getting in Matthew 7:1 has to do with judging people and condemning people.
Let us go back there to Matthew 7. We will read verses 1 and 2 again.
Matthew 7:1-2 "Judge not, that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the same measure you use, it will be measured back to you."
The reason that He gives for withholding judgment is that we are not judged, "that you be not judged." He has already covered the principle of reciprocity several times in the Sermon on the Mount. Back in chapter 5, verse 7, He says, "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." That is reciprocity. If you are merciful to somebody, God is going to have mercy on you. You will have mercy in return.
Chapter 6, verse 12, another example where this is mentioned. "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." So we find out in the Model Prayer that if we forgive those who owe us something, God will forgive us because we owe Him everything. Also, verse 14, "For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." Jesus explained it a lot better than I did. I should have just let Him do that.
What He is getting at here at the end of chapter 7, verse 1, He is saying this is going to come back to you if you make wrong judgments on people. But if you make good judgments, it will come back to you as good judgment. We need to be a little bit worried about that because we tend to be harsh judges. And so if we are harsh judges and we keep up the practice of judging harshly, well, we can expect harsh judgment ourselves. That is just how it works. Whatever you sow, you are going to reap. Kind of an associated form of the principle of reciprocity.
Commentators are near unanimous in saying that Jesus here refers to facing divine judgment. It is not just that you will get good judgment in this world. He is talking about that Jesus knows what kind of judgment you make on other people, and so He is not going to be easy on you if you have not been easy on others. And there is a reason for that.
We will all be brought before the judgment seat of Christ, as it says in II Corinthians 5:10, so we better be careful about what kind of judgment we use. We should be loathe to condemn others, not wanting that condemnation to turn back on us, It is like a boomerang. You judge somebody harshly, it is going to come back to bite you in the end.
Let us see what I Corinthians 4 says. Paul writes,
I Corinthians 4:1-5 Let a man so consider us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover it is required in stewards that one be found faithful. But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by a human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself. For I know nothing against myself, yet I am not justified by this; but He who judges me is the Lord. Therefore [this is his conclusion because the Corinthians were very, very judgmental about Paul so he is trying to defend himself here and give them a principle that they can hang their hat on] judge nothing before the time, until the Lord comes, who will bring to light the hidden things of darkness and reveal the counsels of the hearts. Then each one's praise will come from God.
So this is the overall principle that he wants us to take on these matters. Do not judge each other for things you cannot determine fully. And that is about all the time because God is the One that is in charge of judgment. Judgment has been given to Jesus Christ, not us. It is not our job. And so we have to be very careful about judging other Christians because, like in John 7:24, we do not know a whole lot. We do not have that perfect perspective that Jesus has. We do not know a lot that is going on under our ability to perceive. We do not know what is in another's heart, what another's motive is, what his intentions were. Some things we can see are definitely sins. But even in knowing that that person sinned, we are not to judge them. It is not our job. Leave that to the experts, and that is certainly not us.
Let us go back to Matthew 7, verse 2 because verse 2 is a Hebraism. It is a set of parallel aphorisms that mean essentially the same thing.
Matthew 7:2 "With what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the same measure you use, it will be measured back to you."
Measure for measure, a common phrase, is a widespread ancient tradition in business and law and many other areas of life. The second phrase there about with the same measure you use, it will be measured back to you, comes from the marketplace where goods like grain had to be measured accurately to determine a price. I do not know if you are aware of this, but it was a common standard way back when that the purchaser's measure or his scoop, if you will, would be used at the time of purchase in the marketplace. And if it had to be transported to him, to his house or a place of business, they would use the same measure, the same scoop to determine that the amount that was agreed upon in the marketplace was the same amount that was delivered to his home or to his business.
So the same measure was measured back. This was a way to make sure that the purchaser was not cheated. So there was a double measuring that was done at the time of purchase and the time of delivery. And if those two did not match, then the purchaser had means to be reimbursed or given the amount of grain that was actually supposed to come to him. So this is what Jesus used, this idea was what Jesus used to help them in that day to understand that the judgment that is used at first when we judge is going to be the same that will be used against us when He judges. So we need to be very careful.
Jesus here implies that 1) the standard is the standard. That is a Mike Tomlin-ism if you are a Pittsburgh Steelers fan. It applies to all equally and it does not change at all. And 2) our application of the standard will be applied to us upon delivery. So we need to be careful what standard we use.
Let us go to James, the second chapter. I could read the whole of chapter 2 up to this point, but I think I will not. I will just try to fill in as we go, but let us just read verses 12 and 13.
James 2:12-13 So speak and so do as those who will be judged by the law of liberty [the standard]. For judgment is without mercy to the one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.
This is a restating of what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount. James is want to do that. He does a lot of commentary on the Sermon on the Mount in his epistle. It was his brother, you know. Might as well.
But James' overall subject here is partiality. Now, partiality has two sides to it, as was shown here. If you remember the situation, a person who is not very well off comes in and there is also a rich man who comes in and the person who was partial seated and gave all kinds of attention to the rich man rather than the poor man. But there are the two sides. You have the rich man and you have the poor man.
So on the one hand, partiality is despising and mistreating those you consider lesser while favoring others because they are rich or prestigious or the element there, the reason for favoring somebody is because they can somehow benefit us either now or in the future. So there are two sides of it. There is the despising part on the one hand and the favor given to the other.
And you know what? On both sides of this we show actually no love at all toward either one. There is no loving of the neighbor in this. We are really not loving the person we favor because it is all about us. It is all about what we want. And we are certainly not loving the one we despise because we are giving him nothing, no attention, no help, no kindness. The ones we supposedly love by our favor are those whom we wish to use for ourselves, for our own selfish reasons. So there is no mercy in any of it.
That is why he gets down to verses 12 and 13 and starts talking about mercy. There is no mercy in our judgment in the way that we approach these two individuals. It is all selfish ambition; push down the guy who we want to be under us and favor the guy who is over us to the point where we are brought up to his level. It is all about us. He is saying there is no mercy there all through it. I mean, partiality is a sin. It is not doing any good for anybody else but ourselves. It is all selfishness.
And so when we show partiality, we are putting ourselves under judgment. And so Jesus says, in talking about the principle of reciprocity, "Well, I'm going to treat you the same way," because He can see right through all of our motives and see that it was all about us. So He is not going to have mercy on us for being so callous and so self-centered.
Now, he does mention here the law of liberty. That is the accepted standard, that is God's law, that is the way of life God lives. And we are all judged according to the same law before the same Judge. So that is something that we can count on.
The apostle, in commenting on this, advises us to live so that we do not cross the line that the law sets. Or put another way, we do not cross the line that the Judge has set because the Judge is the One who made and gave the law. They are all one. He knows it perfectly. He is a perfect Judge. And since we have not shown mercy to those we shunned, we can expect no mercy from the Judge who is also the Advocate for the downtrodden. See how, by being partial, we are stacking things against ourselves with the Judge against the law. But if we learn and practice mercy, if we learn to be merciful to both the poor man in his bad clothes and the rich man in his fine clothes, we need to have no fear of judgment.
Why? Because we have shown mercy, we will be shown mercy. There will be nothing against us. There will actually be a lot of plaudits. Hey, this guy helped the poor man. He also helped the rich man. He did not show any partiality. So there is nothing in the indictment to judge, because you showed mercy.
And "mercy triumphs over justice" here, which he ends with, means that God would rather extend mercy to us rather than wrathful judgment. But if we show no mercy, we will receive none from Him. We want the mercy to triumph. My dad liked to say, "God is the God of justice. He is also the God of mercy, but He leans toward mercy. He'd rather give us mercy than judgment."
Back to Matthew 7.
Matthew 7:3-5 "Why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me remove the speck out of your eye'; and look, a plank is in your own eye. Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother's eye."
This may be one of Jesus' most famous illustrations: the speck and the plank in the eye. It is clearly hyperbolic and ridiculous, and it is meant to be. It is meant to be kind of comic. Jesus is using hyper-exaggeration to make His point that critics and condemners are hypocrites. That is the main point that He is trying to get out here, the hypocrisy of it all. They point out, that is, critics and condemners, point out and condemn minor faults in others while either blind to or ignoring or tolerating or justifying their own much more serious sins.
It is like condemning a brother for taking a pen from the office storeroom for personal use, when you have just defrauded the government for thousands of dollars in taxes. Or here is another example: it is like condemning a sister in the church for showing too much skin while you have had multiple affairs. Both are sins, but one is far more severe than the other. In this case, the you or the me, we have the greater sins, and so we are being hypocrites for condemning somebody for a sin that is so small that it is not quite inconsequential, but it is teetering on inconsequential, whereas your sin is monumental and is keeping you from the Kingdom of God.
Now, the speck and the plank in the eye, we can call little guilt and big guilt. Speck obviously is little guilt. Speck is the Greek word karphos. It is any small dry thing. A piece chaff, a stubble, a splinter, or as here in the New King James, a speck, a speck of something, a dust moat, who knows, something very, very tiny and something that irritates the eye.
Beam, as it is in the King James is dokos, a beam or spar of timber. It is a whole branch. It is a plank, it is a log or a bar, a huge bar.
Now, the real distinction here is that the fault in the brother's eye is tiny. Whereas our problem, the plank, is huge! It is like a little speck of sand versus the Rock of Gibraltar. That is kind of the hyper-exaggeration that we are talking about here. That it is something incomparably small or tiny versus huge.
If you will, let us go to I John 5. Now remember these are sins. Remember it was little guilt and big guilt. So we are talking about differences among sins. And John talks about that:
I John 5:16-17 If anyone sees his brother sinning a sin which does not lead to death, he will ask, and He [God] will give him life for those who commit sin not leading to death. There is sin leading to death. I do not say that he should pray about that. All unrighteousness is sin, and there is sin not leading to death.
What is he talking about here? He is obviously making a distinction between sins. Not all sins are equal. He is likely distinguishing here between so-called normal sins, everyday sins which God will forgive upon repentance. And on the other side, he is talking about the unpardonable sin, a sin so heinous and anti-God that God will not forgive it. These are sins that a person refuses to repent of or willful sins that, as Paul says (or whoever the writer of Hebrews is), says in Hebrews 10, willful sins that insult the Spirit of grace. If you want to look at what Paul (or whoever the author is) says in Hebrews, that is Hebrews 6:4-8 and Hebrews 10:26-31.
That is probably what John is talking about. He is talking about the normal sins that we repent of and the other sins that we hide within ourselves and refuse to repent of, or sin against the Spirit of grace, as he says. John may also mean here sins that, while harmful, are not fatal, and then on the other side, sins that lead to fatal consequences.
Now, we know that by principle, all sins lead to death. But in the real world, if you will, some sins cause death immediately or obviously are a very clear cause of sin, and there are other sins that may not have quite that big a consequence. In the context here in I John 5, this is less likely, but we know that some sins actually do have worse results than others upon us physically. This seems to be what Jesus means in Matthew 7:3-5 (which we will go back to).
So John was talking about something that was of far more serious consequence perhaps than what Jesus was talking about here because He is talking about sins among the disciples that they can repent of. One is just has a huge sin and the other one has a very minor sin in the grand scheme of things.
Matthew 7:5 "Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother's eye."
I do not know if you have noticed in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus really pounds hypocrisy. He mentions it four times across the three chapters, mostly in chapters 6 and 7. And the word appears more than anywhere else in the gospel except for Matthew 23, where he really pounds on the Pharisees for hypocrisy.
Now, what is the hypocrisy here that He shows in verses 3 through 5? If I can put it succinctly, the condemning person, the one who says, "let me take the speck out of your eye," appears to be performing a kindly act to help his brother out while he is blind to, or overlooking, or justifying his own much worse sin. Now, the label of hypocrite; we know that hypocrite comes from the stage. The word hypocrite comes from the stage, and it means a play actor, somebody who is not actually being real, if you will, and somebody who is not doing something for the right reasons. He is play acting at something.
So the label of hypocrite suggests that Jesus means that the "helpful" critic knows about his sin but is ignoring it or tolerating it or it is just become so much a part of him that he justifies it to himself as being good or okay, or God will overlook this. That sort of thing. He is acting as if the sin is not there within him. And so he is putting on all of these "kindnesses" toward other people with their small sins, but ignoring it within himself. He arrogantly presumes he is qualified to help the other person. He is pretending to be the more spiritual of the two here. "I've had years in the church. Let me help you with this problem."
The fact is though, the reality is he is the more guilty and stands condemned under the law. While this other person with a very small sin apparently is under God's grace. He will be condemned if he fails to repent of his sin. But it is going to be much easier for the person with the speck to repent of his minor sin than it is for the very "kind" critic to repent of his monumental sin. So who is actually the more spiritual?
Now, I want to say, just to make sure we understand this, Jesus does not give the brother who has the speck a pass. He still expects the person with the speck to repent. So just because it is relatively minor by comparison, does not mean it is not a disqualifying sin. If it sticks around and becomes more embedded in his character, then it is going to become like the critic's monumental sin over time. The time to catch the sin is when it is small like a speck and it can be overcome easily. But he still needs to repent of it.
All sin needs to be removed, major and minor. And so this is a caution to us if we feel we have specks, that we should not let a little sin get away with the spiritual damage it can cause over time. Because even a speck has the potential of keeping us out of the Kingdom of God.
Notice here in verse 5, He says, remove the plank—that monumental sin—then help the brother without condemnation, without hypocrisy, with his less grievous sin. This is a principle that if we can do this, if we can really face up to our sins and overcome something that is huge in our lives that we have been protecting for a long time as part of our character—our human character, our bad character—and actually overcome it, get rid of it, then we experience such clearing of ourselves. You remember Paul talks in II Corinthians 7 about repentance and all those things that once we repent, we feel and we engage in all of these good things, good thoughts, good emotions about having overcome this, and it becomes an experience then that we can use to help others in the church unhypocritically. We can say, "Look, I had this Rock of Gibraltar in my eye and I got over it and I know that you with your little grain of sand can get over what you're going through, and I can help by giving you a few pointers," or "read this passage." or whatever it happens to be that we use to help, even holding their hand and saying, "I know it's tough but you can do it. If I did it, you know, weak as I am, you can do it because I know you're stronger than me." And so you can help these people who have specks.
But the problem is when we are a hypocrite and we have got these huge sins, we should not be helping anybody. We need to be helping ourselves, if you will. So if we do get rid of the plank in our own eye, then we can become of great service to the church. We can help build up the church by helping those who need help taking out specks. We can use the wisdom that we have built because of the process and give them proper understanding and encouragement to edify them.
On the other hand, what Jesus condemns here, the process of condemning a person, that just produces failure and conflict and disunity in the church. Whereas proper self-examination, which we are supposed to be doing at least once a year and probably better if you do it more often (all the time), but proper self-examination and loving forbearance for other people's struggles and the support that we can give to them while they are repenting, that builds the church, that increases unity. It edifies everyone and causes growth and closeness and unity in the church. Paul writes,
Romans 14:19 Therefore let us pursue the things which make for peace and the things by which one may edify another.
That is our goal here; not to condemn because they may have a sin, but to build up and support so that we can all come into unity with one another as we are coming into unity with Christ and the Father.
So the lesson here in Matthew 7:1-5 is that we need to prioritize our criticism, that is, turn the searchlight full blast on ourselves first. Take care of our own character before trying to help others. Paul says in Philippians 2:3 we need to be humble and consider everyone better than ourselves. Then once we have that humble attitude and take care of the flaws in our nature, we will have what it takes to look out for others interests, which he then goes on to say in the next verse.
Let us go to John 8. I know I am running out of time here. I will not read this whole bit from verse 1. But this is where they caught the woman in the act of adultery and brought her before Jesus and Jesus showed that they, the crowd who brought her in, were sinners. They did not have the standing to judge her.
John 8:10-12 When Jesus has raised Himself up and saw no one but the woman, He said to her woman, "Where are those accusers of yours? [your condemners] Has no one condemned you?" She said, "No one, Lord." And Jesus said to her, "Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more." Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, "I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life."
Here, Jesus models what He means in Matthew 7:1-5. But notice, He did not have a plank, He did not even have a speck! He was morally perfect. If you go and read what He says, He says the Father has given Me judgment over all things. He was already designated to be the Judge, the One who sat on the judgment seat. So He had the prerogative to judge or to condemn her. But Jesus modeled for us what we humans must do. He says, "Don't condemn. I'm not even going to condemn you, even though you were caught in the act, even though you may have been doing this as a living, and this is not nearly the first time that this has happened."
Jesus did not pass judgment. He did not condemn this woman because He was giving us a very high standard to reach toward. This lady was not even part of the church, as it were. And that is what Matthew 7:1-5 is about: disciples judging one another. And He would not do it. As a human being, He would not take that authority to Himself.
So let us be more like Jesus, in all things of course, but specifically today in this matter of condemning one another. Never hypocritically presume to condemn another person, and in that way we will help each other along the way to the Kingdom of God.
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