In which our regular writers toss around subjects a
little more volatile than usual.
Immanuel Can: The only verse in the Bible that everyone today seems to know is “Judge not lest ye be judged.”
Tom: Sounds about right.
IC: Okay, so that verse seems to people to be conveying something important. Maybe it needs some
closer examination.
Tom: Fair enough. Well, it seems to me there’s an obvious incentive on the part of those who use
it to rebut any potential critique of their own behaviors — or the
behaviors of those for whom they choose to be advocates. I mean, quoting a verse to an unbeliever would
carry no weight at all, so it’s clearly a device to disqualify dissenting Christian
opinion and shut down any debate before it begins.
It’s saying to you and me, “Aha, see, you’re not allowed to
have a view on this.”
IC: More than that: it’s usually employed as a kind of threat that if you do, you are going
to get some terrible consequence yourself. People who use it are often trying
to turn defense into offense, effectively declare any possible accusers
hypocrites, and even to call for divine judgment upon all such.
The All-Encompassing Rule?
Tom: Indeed. When
you read the Lord’s statement in Matthew, do you take it to be an
all-encompassing rule? Do you understand it to mean that followers of
Christ are to pass no judgments at all?
IC: Well, it’s funny how unaware these same quoters of Matthew are of all the injunctions TO judge, such as
Christ’s command in John 7:24, “Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.” That would be a bit hard to obey if you couldn’t judge at all, wouldn’t it? Or
how about Luke 12:57, in which he asks, “And why
do you not even on your own initiative judge what is right?” It seems he finds some fault in the crowd’s
failure to judge — surely a strange indictment, if judging of all
kinds is just plain wrong. So something needs to be nuanced better here.
Looking for Examples
Tom: Well, yes. Whenever I come across a command of Christ (or the apostles
for that matter) whose meaning is disputed, I look to see
how the speaker modeled that command. What does not judging look like in
action? For the Lord, it looks like calling a brood of vipers a brood of vipers and warning them they were headed to hell. For
Jude it means calling
false teachers “shepherds feeding themselves; waterless
clouds, swept along by winds; fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead.”
For Paul and Peter, you pick the passage. There are tons. It is idle to say,
“Well, that was Christ.” How do you explain the apostolic examples? They were
men indwelt by Holy Spirit, as we are.
Clearly the injunction not to judge is limited in some way
that the casual reader is not equipped to discern.
Finding an Audience
IC: I should add
that my most recent exposure to this verse was when I was watching a philosophy
film in which a felon was shown raging in his cell about how he would have his
revenge on all of society. He was expatiating in minute detail on his plans for
torturing the general public whenever he might get the chance. In the middle of
all this, he threw in an off-the-cuff reference to this verse, before plowing
ahead with his various graphic imaginings. And that seemed to me a very poor
character reference for the sorts of people who have tended to limit their scriptural
repertoire to that particular verse.
Tom: Indeed. And
such people are not usually correctable. They’re not generally inclined to sit down and look at the
New Testament with us. My concern is more for the Christian masses who feel
muzzled by this sort of cynical retort; whose tender consciences are
incorrectly calibrated to believe that speaking the truth plainly about sin and
its consequences is going too far. If we’re going to go on the offensive from
time to time as the apostles did, we need to be able to do so in confidence
that we are acting according to the will of God.
IC: Yes, that’s the right focus
of concern, I think. Christians sometimes do feel shut down by that sort of
retort. Being aware of the importance of humility, and being also attuned to
their own need of forgiveness, this sort of carte blanche condemnation of judgment makes them
second-guess themselves, even on things they know to be evil. So they
hesitate to condemn things like abortion, homosexuality or premarital sex, on
the one hand, or “respectable” sins like gossip and greed on the other, not because
the Bible is unclear in what it says, but because they feel personally
vulnerable to judgment if they are too assertive. But if there is a clear
limitation to the application and scope of that verse, and a clear contrary
commandment to judge positively in other situations, that changes the whole
game, doesn’t it?
Motives and Actions
Tom: Unfortunately, yes. But that
requires discernment. I think we have to be careful about judging the motives
of men’s hearts. It’s clear from scripture that people don’t always know why they do what they do and that sometimes deceivers are deceived themselves. So I think it’s wise to be
careful about that. But when we judge actions by calling attention to what the
Bible says — always provided that we are condemning conduct that we do not engage in ourselves —
it seems to me that we are following a path well trodden by saints all
throughout history.
IC: Yes, I think that’s a good
distinction. We’re not called to judge other people’s worth, nor to judge their
motives. But, as Christ said, “By their fruits you will know them.” When we
look at actions, we not only can judge, we should. And if it turns out that
we’re not able to do so, it’s not a sign we’re generous of spirit; rather, it’s
a sign we’re deficient in discernment (if not disobedient in disposition).
How’s that for alliteration?
Tom: Should I capitalize the
‘D’s? I think our readers are shrewd enough to pick it up.
A World Without Judgment
Crazy thought here: What happens if we can’t be bothered to call out the wicked in
this world when they blatantly speak or act against God? Say we take the advice
of the felon in your philosophy film and zip it. What are the consequences?
IC: The obvious one is that evil
goes forward unquestioned. But there’s more. We also lose our own moral
bearings, fail in our own moral duties, and become useless to ourselves and to
the world in terms of our service as moral signposts to truth. In respect to
our service, testimony and obedience, we simply become confused and toxic. What
say you, Tom?
Tom: Very practically, there’s
also the judgment of God. That’s a serious concern. I’m thinking here of Eli.
His sons were said to be “blaspheming God” by the way they behaved as priests
of Israel, and God condemns not just the sons but Eli, because their father “did not restrain them”. Now this is an old man with adult sons, so physical restraint is probably not
an option. But it seems that while Eli asked his sons, “Why do you do such things?” and even warned them of the potential consequences of their actions, he did nothing effective to prevent them
from continuing. As a result, the whole household of Eli was judged by God and
replaced in the priesthood.
So we might ask the question “What COULD Eli have done?”
Where was he derelict in his duties?
Lack of Correction Is Lack of Love
IC: Certainly. His failure to
judge his sons’ actions and rein them in was no sign of open-mindedness, but
rather a failure of nurture. Ultimately, his tolerance led to their judgment by
God. It reminds me of something one of my students once said to me. She’d done
a series of some rather anti-social things, been caught and reprimanded by the
admin. When she came by to see me afterward, she suddenly said, “I don’t think
my mother loves me.”
I was stunned. Since I knew her mother (a kind-hearted but rather indecisive
sort), I defended her: “I think she does … why do you suppose that?”
She responded, “If she loved me, she’d stop me.”
See? She got it: lack of correction is a sign of lack of love. So then, what are we
saying to the world when we declare that we are content to let them pursue
their own self-destructive course to a lost eternity unimpeded by even a moral
objection from us? Is there even a smattering of real love in that?
Kind To Be Cruel
Tom: I think that’s a good point. And sometimes as parents, it’s that we don’t want the
fight, especially as we get older. Or it becomes more important to us to be
liked than to do and say the things we know are right but that may get a very
immediate and negative reaction. But I think we’re shortsighted in that: if I were to name the five people who have had the greatest impact on my Christian
life and whom I respect the most, every one of them has had reason to dress me
down or speak plainly to me at least once. It didn’t change my opinion of them,
except to the extent that it may actually have risen. I don’t have the
same respect for people who reinforced my delusions of adequacy.
IC: Right. Love
intervenes when danger approaches. And love takes no thought for whether or not it’s hard to intervene. It’s too absorbed with doing the right thing for a person to care what it
costs, or even whether or not that person is instantly understanding. It does
the right thing anyway.
We need to be reminded of that, especially in our era of
instant, easy ‘love’.
What Could Eli Have Done?
Tom: True. I’d
like to go back to my earlier question though, because we never really explored
it: What could Eli have done that he didn’t do?
I mean, as an older father with adult children he was
limited, and he did everything he could in that context. He said, “Why are you
doing this?” and warned them what would come of it and that God would be their
judge. And God still calls Eli out for failing to “restrain” his boys.
My thought is that he did what he could as a father. He did
NOT do all he could as a priest. As a senior priest, he could have called his
sons out publicly. He could have drawn attention to their thefts and their threats and the fact that they were a disgrace to the name of the Lord. If everyone in
Israel knew what they were up to, there would have been some public resistance
to their behavior and some peer pressure exerted on them to dial back the
predations a notch or two. They might have been restrained by that.
But he didn’t. Maybe he didn’t want to embarrass the family name.
IC: Maybe. Or
maybe a feeble protest is all he was willing to risk. His boys were hard types,
for sure; and if judged publicly, they might well have paid a very severe
penalty. There was something he surely can have done — and we cannot
speculate on precisely what that was, as scripture doesn’t say — but the
Lord’s judgment on Eli was that he still had cards to play, and didn’t
play them.
But if he had, and if he’d turned them, it’s possible his
sons souls might have been saved. As it is, it looks like Eli let them pay the
ultimate price. And that just cannot be
what love does.
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