Posted on by rschut1945

Judge Not Lest You Be Judged

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If you ever want to create a hostile environment in your Bible study class, just bring up this quote from Jesus and ask others for their opinion on what it means.  As a teacher I’ve had numerous people throw this scripture in my face, especially if I said something that they didn’t agree with. 

As a teacher I know that I’m fair game for such comments, but let’s take a look to see how the Christian is to behave when it comes to following this command from Jesus.

If we take Jesus literally, then what would happen to rapists, pedophiles, and murderers?  We’d have Jeffrey Dahrmer as our pastor and Charles Manson teaching Bible study.  But let’s overlook the extreme for a minute.

We have other seemingly contradictory statements made by both Jesus and Paul against taking it literally that we have to resolve first. 

In the same sermon where Jesus tells us not to judge, he says:

Matthew 7:6 (KJV)
6 Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.

I think that it requires a certain amount of judgement to consider which people are dogs and swine doesn’t it?

And in the opening sentences of his letter to the Galatians Paul says:

Galatians 1:6-9 (KJV)
6 I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel:
7 Which is not another; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ.
8 But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.
9 As we said before, so say I now again, If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed.

Notice that Paul even says this twice just to be sure that we get it.

But how does one decide if someone is accursed without judging them?

And once again we have Jesus himself commanding us:

Matthew 18:15-17 (NET1)
15 “If your brother sins, go and show him his fault when the two of you are alone.  If he listens to you, you have regained your brother.  
16 But if he does not listen, take one or two others with you, so that at the testimony of two or three witnesses every matter may be established.
17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church.  If he refuses to listen to the church, treat him like a Gentile or a tax collector.

Jesus isn’t suggesting here that we simply ignore a person’s sins and let them carry on without interference.  He’s telling us to take action against the individual that might even wind up in excommunication or shunning. 

But, on the other hand, doesn’t Jesus tell us to love our neighbor as well as our enemy?

And we have Paul also speaking about love:

1 Corinthians 13:7 (NET1)
7 It (meaning love) bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

So, if we love others then we must believe everything that they say and endure whatever they do.  Right?

How then do we put these verses together to resolve these seemingly contradictory scriptures?  Is Paul exaggerating simply for effect?

These are not easy to resolve if we look at them as individual statements without any context.  So, to summarize, we can’t judge, yet we must be able to determine who are like dogs and swine.  And we can’t judge yet we must be able to declare someone as accursed and remove them from the congregation, if necessary.  

Let’s begin by looking carefully at what Jesus taught in Matthew in the context of the rest of his sermon.  But let’s look carefully at some of these other verses:

 Matthew 7:1-6 (KJV)
1  Judge not, that ye be not judged.
2  For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
3  And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
4  Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
5  Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
6  Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.

Right after Jesus tells us not to judge he clarifies what he means by that.  Several points are clear.  Jesus had a different way of handling sin then the Pharisees and the lawyers.  Instead of focusing on looking for the sin in the other person, determining their guilt, and then administering punishment as prescribed by the law, Jesus taught that we must first look for sin in ourselves.  This is an application of what we learned in the previous video on The Search for Truth.  Truth begins by looking into ourselves to be sure that we are walking in truth before we try to help others; otherwise, we are the blind simply leading the blind. 

If we find ourselves without guilt, we must then approach the sinner with the intention of helping them rid themselves of the sin rather than in the spirit of judgment.  There is no condemnation and punishment in Jesus’ approach. 

In other verses Jesus tells us that if the person rejects our offer, we are to simply withdraw from that person and have nothing more to do with them.  But if they should repent, we must forgive them and welcome them back into the church.  There is no punishment for their sin that must first be administered such as a fine or public scourging prior to restitution.

So, Jesus is not telling us that we shouldn’t recognize sin when we see it and then do nothing about it.  He is saying that we should first be sure that we know what the sin is and not be hypocritical by committing a worse sin ourselves.  But if we love our brother, we should offer them help so that they might confess and overcome their sin and be restored in faith. 

In Galatians Paul is completely correct and in agreement with Jesus in how he advises us to handle sinners or those who pervert the gospel.  We should keep away from them and have nothing to do with them if they ignore our correction and help. 

And on the question of love believing all things and enduring all things, we cannot simply take this scripture alone in isolation of other scriptures or life would become total chaos.  We learned that truth must come first if we walk with God.  And the same thing is true here.  We certainly must be motivated by love in order to help others, but love must be filtered by truth.  Truth filters out lies and deception.  In this way, we are not asked to believe all things including lies, but we must listen carefully to find out if it is truth or error. 

Paul says this in the verse right before this one:

6 It (meaning love) is not glad about injustice, but rejoices in the truth.

So, when the JWs or Mormons come to the door, we are not commanded to believe everything that they tell us without question out of love.  We are commanded to determine if what they are telling us is true or false and only believe that which is true.    

So, Christian judgment comes from the spirit of truth, not from the spirit of judgment nor hypocrisy or even from revenge as it did with the Pharisees.  And our love for others is not blind love, but a love that sees things in the light, which is the light of truth. 

1 John 4:1 (KJV)
1 Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.

The Greek word try means to test its truthfulness and whether it comes from God.  Once again truth takes precedence over everything else.

1 John 4:6 (KJV)
6 We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us.  Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error.

Here John is dividing knowledge into that which is truth and that which is error.  Because we are walking in truth, we are familiar with truth and know what truth sounds like and looks like so that we can judge truth over error.  This is how we can also judge those who are walking in truth or error.  True divination of truth and error comes from knowing and walking with God.

So according to scripture, truth must always take precedence in our judgment—even in our love.  In a way we are not judging the person but judging the truth.  Are they walking in the truth as they claim?  Are they teaching the truth as they claim?  We can’t avoid some form of judgment if we are seeking to follow after the truth.

Posted on by rschut1945

Search for the Truth

The reason that I want to write about the topic of truth is that as a minister of Christ I want to explore how people think.  I think that it’s important that we all understand more about this subject.  I want to know what makes people do the things that they do, but most of all why they believe the things that they believe.  And this also includes myself.

I want to find out what is beneath all the ceremony and pretense that people show, especially when it comes to religious beliefs and forms of worship. 

Of course, I can’t include everything that I know about this subject in a short paper such as this, nor do I know all that there is to know about this subject.  But I am trying to make a beginning and hope that someone who reads this will continue from where I leave off.

I will begin by asking a simple question.

What does Paul mean in I Corinthians 8:1 when he says that knowledge puffs us up?

I think that we get caught up in acquiring knowledge which can give us a false sense of having something that others don’t have.  This gives us an inflated sense of what others think about us and even what we think about ourselves. 

Truth, on the other hand, is not acquired in the same manner as knowledge.  It is more of a surrendering rather than acquiring.

Truth deflates or empties us so that we appear as we really are to others as well as to ourselves.

This is why Jesus and many other NT writers told us to seek after truth rather than after knowledge. 

Of course, during the pursuit of truth we also acquire knowledge, but knowledge must be submissive to truth.  Our goal must be truth and not knowledge alone.

We should even search through the scriptures in this same manner looking for truth rather than knowledge.  This is perfectly consistent with what the scriptures themselves teach us.

In my dealing with cults as well as churches, I found that some have become obsessed with the idea of acquiring knowledge rather than truth.  One sign of being puffed up is shown in the way that they declare their knowledge as “right,” “correct,” or even “true,” especially when it comes to their doctrine and beliefs.

They do this in a variety of ways.  One way is by having representatives of their church vote on a doctrine and declare the results of the election as being authorized by God.  Another way is by having it declared true by a group of elders who have been appointed and given some supernatural power to ordain or proclaim a belief to be divinely inspired.  And there’s a third way where someone claims to be or has been selected as a divine representative of God such as a prophet or an elder.  He has the sole power to pronounce the validity of one doctrine right over another.  His voice is taken to be the voice of God.   

What this actually does is give its members a false sense of confidence and self-assurance as well as boost their individual egos as they congratulate themselves for being smart enough to know which church to belong to and follow.  But the question I have for them all is whether they really have the power to declare what is right or true?

In my experience on this subject many confuse truth with fact.  Facts can be acquired through knowledge, but facts are not the same thing as truth.  Facts are like pieces of a puzzle that need to be assembled together in order to form a complete picture.  It is the complete picture that I am referring to here as truth.  Of course, one can always force pieces to fit a puzzle and come up with a completely different picture—and they certainly do that.

Truth doesn’t inflate our egos but actually deflates it.  It makes us realize how dependent we are upon God since he is the author of truth as he is truth himself.  We might believe that we can declare our beliefs as fact, but we certainly cannot declare them as truth.  Only God can do that.

Truth reveals us as we actually are and not as what we want to appear to be.  It humbles us and brings us into submission.  Anyone who has ever felt the power of truth already knows all of this.  But those who declare themselves as right never allow themselves to discover truth because it would only destroy their self-image and the faith that they have in their own private, self-defined system of truth.  But it seems that people are very comfortable declaring their beliefs as being true. 

Now it stands to reason that to declare anything as true one must first know what truth really is.  And according to Scripture to know what truth is, one must walk in truth.  And this begins with knowing the truth about ourselves.  And that means that we have to see ourselves as we really are.  I think that this is the main reason that people fear the truth.  They are afraid that others will see who they really are beneath all their pretenses and disguises.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TRUTH

I think that it’s important for us to know how people think so that we can avoid not getting drawn into a false understanding of self in exchange for the promise of belonging and being accepted into a certain group.  This is very common because it appeals not only to our need for certainty and our need to validate our beliefs as true, but also to give us a sense of belonging and being accepted by others.   

I believe that it is more important for us to walk in the truth even if we have to walk in it alone.  Because we are truly never really alone.  God is always with us if we walk in truth because God is truth. 

In John 14:6 (KJV) Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.  Did Jesus mean that he lived the truth in purity?  Did he mean that he held nothing back or hid anything about himself?  Did he mean that he was completely transparent and did not put on a show or disguise of any kind for anyone?  And was he not telling us by his example that we ought to do the same thing if we wish to walk in truth?  In a sense, each of us should be able to say I am the truth.  We must allow ourselves to be transparent and open to everyone, especially to ourselves and most of all to God.  We should be able to say I am who I say I am—no more and no less.  What you see is exactly who I am.


It is the nature of God to be truthful.  In the letters of John he tells us that God is truth and there is no deception in him therefore there should be no deception in any of us if we say that we love God and have the nature of God in us.

1 John 1:5-7 (KJV)
5 This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.
6 If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth:
7 But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.

In these verses light is used as a reference to truth because truth illuminates what is there rather than hides it.

1 John 3:9-10 (KJV)
9 Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.  
10 In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil: whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother.

These verses refer to the nature of God that remains in us preventing us from sinning.

2 Peter 1:3-4 (KJV)
3 According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue:
4 Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.

Even Peter understood that we are partakers of the divine nature of God that keeps us from the corruption of the world.

So, in conclusion, I have observed that it is easy for people to declare themselves as having the true doctrine and belonging to the true church or cult.  All this is done simply by giving someone the authority to make this pronouncement, which makes it appear to be true. 

But the only way for a doctrine or a church to be true is if it leads us into a walk of truth with God as God sees it.  It is a walk of truth as we stand before such a divine being who is all powerful and holy and just.  This truth begins by seeing ourselves as he sees us.  And the only way to do this is to see ourselves as we stand before Christ.  For it is his holiness by which truth will be judged and not by any other human being.