Matthew 7:1-6 –“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others,
you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in
your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your
eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you
will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
As Jesus looked at the
religious situation of his day, he saw that judging others had become a great
religious problem. The Pharisees and scribes sat in the place of the critic.
They were quick to pass judgment on those who didn’t live up to their
expectations. When Jesus was in the house of Simon the Pharisee and the sinful
woman anointed his feet, Simon said, "This man, if he were a prophet,
would know who and what manner of woman this is who is touching him, for she is
a sinner." (Luke 7:39). The Pharisees, in their self-righteous arrogance, had created a special class of people called "sinners" as if they themselves were not such. Do you think we sometimes do the same? It’s a self-righteous judgment; so Jesus says that we are not to judge. Now he’s not talking about the judgment in a courtroom. He’s not talking about judging open and obvious sin (we’ll get to that later). He’s not talking about judging false teachers. What he is talking about is a hasty, unloving, "holier than thou" type of attitude. It’s that "jumping to conclusions" about what we see, attitude. The Native Americans had their way of saying this: "Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his moccasins." And there’s something to that.
No comments:
Post a Comment