Two Kinds of Judgment Matthew 7:1-6 Introduction There are plenty of Bible verses that people find offensive: Take Eph 5:22: “Wives submit to your husbands,” which evokes images of “the little woman” doting on her husband as he comes home from work, at his beck and call. There’s John 14:6 in which Jesus has the arrogance and audacity to suggest that he is the only way to God: “I am the way and the truth and the life, no one comes to the father except through me.” Or 1 Cor 6:9: “Do you not know that those who practice homosexuality will not inherit the kingdom of God.” I mean, there are tons and tons and tons of passages of the Bible that are offensive to our contemporary sensibilities, but there’s at least one verse, certainly one verse that sounds like music to our modern ears – Matt 7:1: Jesus says, “Do not judge, lest you be judged.” Even if you’re unfamiliar with the contents of the Bible, this is one verse that sounds great to you. “Don’t judge people.” You hear this all the time, especially on daytime talk shows. “You can’t judge me! You don’t know me. You haven’t lived my life. You don’t have the right to tell me anything!” It seems to reflect the spirit of our age, where tolerance has been the clarion call of people for a generation. To hear Jesus echo the idea that no one has the right to judge other people helps to solidify in our minds the sheer arrogance of any claim that anything you are doing may be wrong. It probably makes you like Jesus a whole lot more than you did, and most of your Christian friends a whole lot less. To hear Jesus condemn judgmentalism is pretty comforting. And there is a sense in which it should be. Who likes a judgmental person? I know I don’t. Aren’t they the kind of people you avoid like the plague? On the other hand, I’m also convinced that to take Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 7 simply as the rubber stamp of the moral relativism of our postmodern society goes too far. Let’s look at what Jesus says in context. Turn with me in your Bibles to Matt 7:1-6 and read with me. <Read the text>  Now for our purposes this morning, we’re going to walk through this text under four headings: (1) Jesus judges our judgmentalism; (2) Jesus illustrates our judgmentalism; (3) Jesus offers the alternative to judgmentalism; and finally (4) Jesus advises caution in the process. Jesus Judges Our Judgmentalism The first point, that Jesus condemns our judgmentalism is very clear in our text. Nothing could be more straightforward at the onset than that Jesus condemns our judgmentalism, which is just another way of saying that he judges our judgmentalism. This should be our first clue that Jesus is not telling us to abandon every kind of judgment about people or behaviors or whatever. He’s not telling us to through good judgment or discernment to the wind in favor of an amorphous tolerance. He judges judgmentalism. The command itself would be inherently contradictory if Jesus meant to dispense with judging altogether. Another clue that Jesus is not telling us permanently to suspend all judgment is v 6. Read it again. <Read the text> Jesus calls people “dogs” and “swine,” and calls on us to use good judgment in casting our pearls and giving what is holy to them (more on that later). The point is that this verse is further evidence that Jesus can’t possibly be talking about moral relativism, the blanket acceptance of every attitude and behavior. He must be saying something more than that! “Do not judge…pigs.” Clearly, Jesus is after something more than our modern understanding of tolerance. And just in case you’re not persuaded, Matt 7:15-20 tells us to beware of false prophets who can be identified (and so judged to be false) by the fruit they produce – by what their lives look like. Again, Jesus calls on us to make a judgment, to be discriminating enough to be able to distinguish false teachers from legit ones. Check it out. <Read the text> So clearly, Jesus condemnation of judgmentalism is just that – a condemnation of judgmentalism, not a condemnation of good judgment. Matthew 7:1 is not a call to a kind of sanctified spinelessness; instead, the idea of judgment that Jesus blasts is of a certain kind, the self-righteous kind, standing in contempt of other people. In John 7:24, Jesus puts it like this: “Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.” John Stott does a great job explaining what Jesus is getting at:  It does not mean to assess people critically, but to judge them harshly. The censorious critic is a fault-finder who is negative and destructive toward other people and enjoys actively seeking out their failings. He puts the worst possible construction on their motives, pours cold water on their schemes and is ungenerous toward their mistakes. Now Jesus doesn’t simply judge our judgmentalism by censuring it in v 1; he judges it with the promise that people who judge others have reason to be concerned about the Day of Judgment at the end (and beginning) of the world – the end of this world as we’ve known it and the beginning of this world better than it was meant to be. The promise of future judgment is also found in v 1. Read it again with me. <Read the text> That phrase at the end of the verse – so that you will not be judged – contains something we’ve seen before in the Sermon on the Mount; namely, what’s called the divine passive – an implicit reference to God’s activity. As a way of mentioning God without mentioning him, Jewish writers (and speakers) would simply use the passive voice of the verb (“will not be judged”) in such a way that the audience would know that they meant that God would be the actor, the agent – in this case, the one doing the judging. So what Jesus is teaching is that if we judge others God will judge us at the judgment. This is not to say that if we don’t judge others we won’t face the judgment; only to say that if we don’t judge others we won’t be condemned for our judgmentalism on the Last Day. The Apostle Paul puts it like this in Rom 14:10-13: Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God; for it is written, “As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God.” So then each of us will give an account of himself to God. Therefore let us not pass judgment on one another any longer, but rather decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother.  Here in Matthew 7, Jesus is pointing out the seriousness of our judgmentalism. It lands us in hot water with God because it usurps his role as the sole lawgiver and judge. As soon as we step into that posture with other people, we have arrogated to ourselves power that belongs only to the Lord. As the Apostle James puts it, “There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?” Answer: not God! More than that, Jesus says that God’s judgment of us is not only certain; it will also be absolutely and utterly fair. Check out v 2. <Read the text> And the reason I say that it will be utterly fair is that God will judge us in the same way that we judge other people. God will measure us (the analogy is of the scales) by the way we measure other people. He will put us on the scales we have used in our lives. And what will happen is that even by our own “standard of measure” we will find ourselves to be abysmal failures. I don’t think we even have to be told this. It is so much a part of us – we judge in other people the very things we are guilty of ourselves. Paul puts it like this in Rom 2:1: “Therefore you have no excuse, everyone of you who passes judgment, for in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things.” John Stott is again on to something when he says that “what we are often doing is seeing our own faults in others and judging them vicariously. That way we experience the pleasure of self-righteousness without the pain of penitence.” In other words, we see our faults in others, but rather than taking responsibility for them and walking the pathway of repentance, we take the easy road of deflecting attention from ourselves onto others. The result is that we have a perverted sense that the sin has been taken care of (because we’ve judged another person in our place) and can have it with none of the guilt – like judging someone else is a fat-free cookie – all the pleasure; none of the guilt. But what Jesus is saying is that God is going to judge you for all our faults. He is going to judge you even by the standard you hold other people to. He’s going to pay you back with what you’ve been meting out to other people.  I should add that this is not an unusual thing for Jesus to say here in the Sermon on the Mount. If you’ve been unmerciful, God will be unmerciful to you – Matt 5:7: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” If you’ve been unforgiving, God will be unforgiving toward you – Matt 6:14-15: “For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.” It’s important at this point that you don’t get confused. Jesus is not preaching salvation by good behavior. Jesus never preaches salvation by good behavior. C S Lewis is right when he says that if you are contented with being nice, you are still a rebel to God. Instead, Jesus is saying that the judgmental person by not being forgiving and loving demonstrates his own refusal to repent – and it is this refusal to repent that shuts him out of the kingdom of God. And because he has refused to repent – God is going to judge him just like he’s judged others – and it will result in his eternal condemnation. So it seems clear that Jesus judges our judgmentalism. We need to take it seriously. If we persist in it, we have to question whether or not we’ve understood the gospel to begin with, whether or not we’ve really come to understand the gospel that teaches us that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Rom 8:1). This leads me to the next point in the text. Jesus illustrates what our judgmentalism is. And he uses an absurd and hilarious illustration to do it. Look down to vv 3-4. <Read the text> Jesus Illustrates Our Judgmentalism Jesus is funny in this passage, really funny. Just think of the absurdity of a person with a plank coming out of his face saying, “Hey, buddy, you’ve got something in your eye. Let me get that out for you.” It’s just hilarious. And Jesus uses this hilarious illustration to give clarity to the kind of judgment he condemns in vv 1-2. He’s talking about hypocritical judgment, self-righteous judgment. He comes right out and calls a spade a spade in v 5: “You hypocrite,” but even before he unmasks us for the hypocrites we are, he first points out two key components of self-righteous judgment: first, it is ignorant; and second, it is arrogant. Ignorance and arrogance are the marks of self-righteous judgment. First, notice the ignorance in v 3. <Read the text> The ignorance that Jesus is talking about is what I’ll call self-obliviousness. In the language of v 3, you do not notice the log (or plank) that is in your own eye. In other words, you don’t see yourself as you really are – as a deeply flawed, sinful, weak person. The lack of self-awareness of self-righteousness explains why Jesus calls self-righteousness spiritual blindness. Blindness doesn’t see darkness – it sees nothing. It is like trying to see out of the back of your head. What makes spiritual blindness worse than physical blindness is that it keeps you blind to your blindness. And it is this lack of awareness of the pervasiveness of my own weaknesses, flaws, and sins leads me to be harsh and condemnatory of other people. Let me elaborate a little bit with an illustration from the book of Hebrews. Turn to Heb 5:1-3. <Read the text> Now then, if the constant reminder of his own sins by the sacrifices he offers for himself as much as he does for the people – if the constant reminder of his own sins is what allows him to deal gently with the ignorant and misguided, then it follows that if he were to become oblivious of his own weaknesses he would no longer be able to deal gently with the ignorant and misguided. He’d become harsh and condemnatory. Turn back to Matthew 7. The point here is that self-righteousness is a kind of self-obliviousness. You do not notice the plank that is in your own eye; therefore, everyone else’s specks look pretty significant. Second, notice the arrogance in v 4. <Read the text> How can you say to your brother, “Let me take the speck out of your eye”? How arrogant do you have to be to behave like this? You really think that you’re better than your brother, that you have the vantage from which to see their flaws with accuracy even though you’ve got a plank in your face! Do you see the mixture of ignorance and arrogance that is the recipe for self-righteousness? In fact, I’d argue that the one necessarily leads to the other. Because we are so un-self-aware, we operate on the assumption that we’re in a better position than we actually are. And because of that, we can’t help but move into people’s lives from a position of power or superiority. Because we’re oblivious to our own weaknesses, everyone seems weaker than us. And that makes us arrogant. A great illustration of this kind of ignorant arrogance is found in the Old Testament book of 2 Samuel. Turn to Ch 12 with me. Now in order to understand this, I’ve got to set it up. <Review story of David and Bathsheba> Now with that in mind, let’s read vv 1-7a. <Read the text> What you see in David – can’t you see it in yourself in a thousand ways? In your relationship with your wife. In your relationship with your kids. How you treat your parents. How you act toward your brothers and sisters in the church family. People in the neighborhood. I mean, can’t you see it everywhere. We are so quick to condemn others. And the reason this is happening is that we’ve become dull to our own weaknesses and therefore proud about our so-called strengths. You can turn back to Matthew 7. So then, here’s what Jesus is condemning in our passage. He’s condemning that judgment of other people that flows from ignorance of the pervasiveness of our own sinfulness and the resultant arrogance that follows. We become absurdly insensitive to the fact that there is a plank protruding from our faces and go around pointing out the splinters in everyone else’s eyes. Jesus Offers the Christian Alternative to Judgmentalism But keep in mind what I pointed out earlier: Jesus is not condemning all judgment, all correction of our brothers and sisters in the church. He’s just condemning a certain kind of correction – the hypocritical kind – and as a result, he gives us an alternative – another way of genuinely helping the other members of the Christian community with issues in their lives that keep them from loving Jesus more fully and serving him more faithfully. He outlines that way in v 5…which is our third point. Read it with me. <Read the text> Notice that Jesus doesn’t say that we should never confront someone about their splinter, only that we shouldn’t address the splinter till we’ve addressed the plank sticking out of our face. He says, “First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.” Take the speck out – but only after you deal with the log. In fact, your hypocrisy (the log that’s in your eye) actually obscures your vision. It gets in the way of you being able to see with any clarity what is actually going on in the other person’s life. Once the log is removed, Jesus says, you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye. Can you imagine if your ophthalmologist stood over you with a scalpel with a 14-ft. two-by-four protruding (ever so slightly) from his left eye? Do you think he’d try to work around it? He’d have to! This is so helpful. It points us in the direction of what hypocrisy does to us – it obscures our vision. Therefore until you are aware of, convinced of, and beginning the process of repenting of your own “plankitude” (if I may), be very suspicious of your own ability to see others flaws. The beam in your own eye obscures your vision. Now, this doesn’t mean that we can’t move toward another person to address sin in their life, to tell them the truth about them (truth they may not have come to terms with themselves) – it doesn’t mean that we are forbidden from moving toward them till we’re sinless. Jesus’ teaching about this kind of loving, sincere confrontation in Matt 18:15-17 eliminates that entirely. The Lord expects us to love one another by speaking the truth to each other – even when that truth is hard – he expects us to point out errors and flaws and sins in each other so that we can grow in grace. Only he expects us (and this is the crucial point – he expects us to do it in such a way that doesn’t stand in contempt of the other person, but that sees yourself as an even greater sinner than the one you’re correcting. This, I’m suggesting, is in part what it means for us to first take the log out of our own eye. In other words, you need to examine your heart before you can properly confront someone who is sinning – who needs to be told a difficult truth. Think of it like this: we need to see if there are thoughts, motives, beliefs, and/or attitudes of heart that are essentially getting in the way of what God is truing to accomplish in another person’s life through us. If we don’t start with our own hearts, our confrontation will be everything that the word confrontation conjures up. Instead, of being a loving, sensitive, humble communication of a difficult truth, any number of things can happen. We can become… Impatient (“Why won’t you change already?”) Surprised (“I am shocked that you would do this.”) Incredulous (“I just don’t understand how you can do this. It doesn’t make sense to me!”) Angry (“I’m sick and tired of your…”) Defeatist (“You are never going to change”) Exasperated (“I’m so tired of dealing with…”) Until finally, we write them off (“I’m done with you”) And this is precisely where Jesus doesn’t want us to go. He doesn’t want us to write people off. He wants us to love people. He wants us (in the words of Paul) to speak the truth in love. To humbly and honestly tell the truth to others in such a way that they see their need for change in specific and concrete ways. “But,” you may be thinking, “what about v 6 – the verse we read when we started? Doesn’t that say that there are just some people who you shouldn’t bother with? People whose lives are so dirty, whose minds are so hostile, and whose hearts ar so hard that you shouldn’t even bother with them?” Check it out. <Read the text> Jesus Advises Caution in the Process Now at first glance, it might look like this is what Jesus is advising. If there are pigs and puppies in your life, don’t bother with them – they are too far gone. You’ll only end up hurt. Don’t waste your time with such people. If this is the case, then I agree with Dallas Willard who says that Jesus must be the biggest walking contradiction in the history of the universe…because he lived exactly the opposite of this. Think about it. According to Matthew 13, the pearl of great price is the gospel of the kingdom, which is all about Jesus – his person, his work, his ministry. All about what God has done for us (and is doing for us) in Jesus Christ. And what did our Father do with that pearl, with his most precious son? He cast that pearl before swine – before dogs like us – and we trampled it underfoot and tore him to pieces. And yet, Jesus did this for us willingly, to demonstrate his love for us, to show that even though we were dirty and hostile and hard-hearted, he wanted us for his own anyway. This is the gospel. Clearly, Jesus can’t be telling us not to waste our time telling the truth to certain vicious, ungodly, hostile, mean people. He’s not saying that at all. But he is telling us to exercise caution as we seek to speak the truth in love to people. Only it’s in a different way than you might think. Let’s take apart Jesus’ metaphor to see it more clearly. And let’s do it under three headings: People in general are pigs and dogs. In Palestine, while it is true that there were many wild dogs, dogs were also domesticated animals. In addition, pigs were only domesticated – that is, you’d never feed a wild pig, only domesticated pigs would be fed. So we’re not dealing here with wild or even unusually difficult animals. House-pets and dinner, that’s it!  The truths of the gospel are the pearls and the holy things. We have seen in v 5, that Jesus expects us to speak the truth in love to people with splinters. Now what’s important here is that the animals in Jesus’ illustration don’t choke on poison or rocks. In other words, they aren’t choking on something below them, but above them. They are expecting Alpo and corn husks, but their getting holy things and pearls. They aren’t in a position to receive them. The animals attack because they aren’t given something they can digest. They are being force-fed something that is beyond their capacity to receive. They expect food, you give them pearls, you’re more edible than pearls, so they eat you! So Jesus is saying that you have animals in your care. If you give them something valuable that they can’t digest, either they will choke on it or turn on you. So don’t be surprised if they do. In other words, Jesus is telling us that we may be the reason why people turn on us. We’re not being wise in how we communicate the truth to them. If you are not discerning in how you communicate the truth to people, as good and accurate as it may be, you will find yourself in big trouble. Your approach will provoke them to violence. Jesus is telling us that we need to do this work of correction carefully. We need to be discerning – not to be able to tell the difference between the swine and the good people, but to be able discern how we will give those pearls and holy things to pigs and dogs in such a way that they don’t turn and tear us to pieces. The Apostle Paul puts it this way in Eph 4:29: “Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear.” This implies that even though your words can be wholesome, you can give a wholesome word in such a way that it doesn’t give grace to the person you’re talking to; it can have the opposite effect. You need to give that wholesome word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment. Or as the Proverb goes: “Like apples of gold in settings of silver is a word aptly spoken.” So here’s what we have – four things: (1) the judgment of our judgmentalism; (2) the nature of our judgmentalism; (3) the alternative to our judgmentalism; and finally (4) caution in implementing the alternative.  How We Can Live Like This To me, this is a very serious and very high calling for Christians. To have this kind of humility on the one hand, and this kind of boldness on the other seems a near impossibility. In fact, the great preacher of the last century, Martyn Lloyd-Jones says that living this way “is one of the most difficult things in life, [and] it is one of the last things which we attain.” But even though this may be true, Jesus sees it as something that Christians can do; otherwise, he wouldn’t call us to do it. Jesus never makes demands of us that with his help we can’t achieve. But the question is how can we live like this? How can we get rid of the judgmentalism and yet speak the truth in love to people? Well, Lloyd-Jones also offers a suggestion. He says, There is only one way of getting rid of the spirit of censoriousness and hypercriticism, and that is to judge and condemn yourself. It humbles us to the dust, and then it follows of necessity that, having thus got rid of the beam out of our own eyes, we shall be in a fit condition to help the other person, and to get out the little mote that is in his eye. Judge yourself, he says, and you won’t judge other people. To which I suggest you could also say, “Judge yourself, and you not only won’t judge other people, you’ll be too defeated and destroyed even to help others remove their splinters.” Listen: the answer to our self-righteousness is not self-condemnation. It is self-awareness through the gospel! Self-condemnation can cripple us. It can throw us into despair such that we won’t even bother helping the other members of the Christian family address their failings: “What do I have to say to anyone…as sinful as I am?” That’s not where Jesus wants us to go. The answer is not self-condemnation. The answer is to remember what Jesus has done for us. It is to remember what he has done for us on the cross. How he, the precious pearl of the Father, was trampled under foot and torn to pieces so that we wouldn’t have to be. You see, the gospel opens your eyes essentially to two things: (1) how sinful and flawed you are on the one hand; and (2) how precious and loved you are on the other. You must be precious to God; otherwise, your heavenly father wouldn’t have paid such a steep price for you (the death of his son). You also must be a piece of work to God; otherwise, your heavenly father wouldn’t have had to pay that price for you. The gospel shows you that you’re precious and a piece of work all at the same time. And as you grow in understanding and believing this two things will happen – you’ll become increasingly humble and increasingly bold. Humility comes because you see the other person has a splinter while you are endowed with a plank. A person who’s growing in their understanding of the gospel doesn’t see themselves as less sinful than other people, but as more sinful. The gospel shows you that the most sinful person you know is…you. And it causes you to see it more clearly all the time. It’s what allowed the Apostle Paul late in his life to be able to say, “It is a trustworthy statement deserving full acceptance: that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am foremost of all.” He doesn’t say that he was foremost of all. But that he is foremost of all. To see Jesus having to die for him shows him how dreadful his sin must be. Who could be more of a sinner than me? I’m a big beam-face, a plank-head – everyone else has splinters. As the gospel grabs your heart you see yourself more and more as a plank perpetrator rather than a splinter sinner. And this humbles you to the dust. But the gospel doesn’t only engender humility, it engenders boldness. You don’t have to fear being torn to pieces by the splinter sinner because a beam-face like you has been accepted by the king of the universe. And if the king adores me, knowing how sinful and flawed I am, then it will matter less and less what the serfs think. The only solution to our self-righteousness and self-condemnation is a continual experience of the grace of God through the gospel. That’s where all of our self-righteousness comes from. The reason why we are “much more prone to judge another for something of far less consequence than [our] own faults” is that we are trying to deflect criticism from ourselves. And the reason we want to deflect criticism for ourselves is that deep down we know that someone is to blame, but in the absence of Jesus bearing our blame, the next best substitute is other people. More than that, by focusing on their shortcomings, flaws, weaknesses and sins, I avoid not simply focusing on my own (unpleasant as that is), but I allay my feelings of insecurity: “I’m not all that bad. Look at Mary.” The person who is growing in their understanding of the grace of God is not afraid to admit he’s got a beam coming out of his face because he knows that Jesus Christ not only loves him in spite of his unsightliness, but also because he knows that Jesus is patiently chipping away at that beam. Another thing we’re often doing in pointing out the splinter while the plank is still in our own eye is using it as a means to justify our continued sin in a particular area. “I’m not so bad (compared to that person), so I can keep doing what I’m doing.” Because I feel I’m not that bad. Therefore I don’t need repentance. It is a means by which we can deflect attention from ourselves and keep sinning AND a perch from which to feel superior to other people. It is a way we “defend and cherish our own sins.” Of course, if you want to see how badly you need repentance, look at Jesus dying on the cross for you. This will convince you every time! Self-righteousness always flows from insecurity about the gospel. If I know that Jesus loves me with the beam coming out of my face, I don’t have to try to feel better about myself by sinful comparisons with other people. The comparison game goes right out the window. To stand in judgment of another person means that we have not received or are not experiencing God’s mercy and grace in our own lives. Conclusion So remember the gospel this morning. Remember that when Jesus died on the cross he died for you – because he wanted to and because he had to, therefore you are a piece of work and precious all at the same time. This will blow away the chaff of self-righteousness, humble you to the dust, and empower you to love the other members of the church. On the one hand, you won’t be judgmental, and on the other, you’ll be discerning and helpful. May God give us the grace to live out of the freedom and joy of the gospel. Amen.