“Judge not, lest ye be judged” (Matthew 7:1) is surely the most popular Bible verse among all unbelievers. Such ought not to mean, however, that believers don’t much care for it. That it is wildly misused by the unbelieving Pharisees in our day doesn’t mean it has no use. Jesus is not, of course, condemning all judgments. Indeed He couldn’t coherently do so for such is itself a judgment. Which is precisely where the unbelievers get all tangled up. If you say, “People ought not to kill their unborn children” within earshot of an unbelieving Pharisee, with all the speed of Superman in a phone booth said Pharisee will don a black robe and a white wig, grab a gavel and thunder down on you with all the grace of a Puritan preacher on an all persimmon diet, “THOU SHALT NOT JUDGE!”
We all have to make judgments. The trouble is, as I constantly seek to remind my ethics students, that we are prone to judge by different standards. We judge our enemies and their friends with the strictest standards, ourselves and our friends by the loosest standards. Which is precisely how we can all end up looking down our noses at those horrible, awful, world-would-be-better-off-without-them judgmental people without a clue that we are able to look down because we’ve been hoisted on our own petard. Heck, we didn’t even know we had a petard.
Here are some suggestions on how we might learn to judge rightly. First, the standard is the law of God. Not our preferences. Not the culture’s current preferences. Not the culture of fifty years ago’s preferences. To judge rightly we have to judge by the standard of the only being who has only ever judged rightly, the Judge of all the Earth. We don’t whittle it down to make room for us and our friends to wiggle under it. We don’t add to it to make room for us and our friends to batter our enemies with it. Just God’s law.
Second, we keep ever before us our own failure to keep the law. The law by which we judge others isn’t the standard we keep. It’s the standard we break. All the time. Often while being oblivious to it. God has the right to have sheer disgust at our neighbor’s sins. We have the right to acknowledge that He also has the right to have sheer disgust over our own. It is true enough to might be holier than your neighbor. It’s also true Hitler might have been holier than Stalin.
Third, we have to keep before us that the only difference between us and any other sinner, whether Hitler, Stalin, Ted Bundy, Sister Boom Boom, Al Capone or Fred Phelps, is the grace of God at work in us. We have nothing to boast of. In the race toward righteousness, for which we all still have light years to go, we may have a ten yard lead over the rogue’s gallery above, but we have been blessed with shoes we didn’t earn, lungs we didn’t create and we’re being carried by the omnipotent Holy Spirit. So yeah, looking down our noses is a failure to judge rightly.
Humility, in acknowledging it is God’s law alone that is the standard. Humility, in acknowledging that we fall immeasurably short of that standard. Humility, in acknowledging every inch of progress has been powered by the grace of God. That’s how we aspire to judge rightly, just before we repent for how wrongly we judge.