Our preacher this past weekend talked about judging others. Here are some of my thoughts about it:
God judges us yet still loves us. Why? God is a God of Justice and He is the God of Grace and Mercy. God is going to challenge our sin (which deserves rejection and condemnation) because he doesn't want us to linger in sin. He handles judging with grace and mercy because He loves us. He wants us to repent because in doing so, we acknowledge our own responsibility in our sin. ...it's our only way out of it and back to Him. After judgement, He woos us back to Him because He loves us and constantly longs for fellowship with us. Do you see a pattern between judging and loving? Yeah, its there!
Judgement has a place when the aim is the preservation and restoration of others. There is a difference in judgement and condemnation. God uses judgement to bring us back to Him, to restore the severed relationship that sin causes. We can only judge others if we love them , otherwise we condemn them. So if we judge, we are not to condemn. We are to love people, first and foremost. We are not to judge (condemn) those we don't know or love.
Condemnation is judgement without love or relationship. Condemnation looks down on the other as bad, unforgivable and beyond help. Condemnation shuns others as "less than," creating a burden of shame.
What do you think about judging others? Comments?
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A core leftist argument is that objective truth does not exist, i.e. there is only opinion: only "your truth" and "my truth", and therefore we ought not judge. The PC left has raised not judging to an art form. Evan Sayet contends PCs believe the attempt to be right is at the root of all injustice in the world. To wit:
ReplyDeleteIf there is no objective truth, there is no reason to judge or to claim to be right.
If nobody ever thought to be right, what would we disagree about?
If we didn't disagree, surely we wouldn't fight.
Without fighting there would be no war.
Without war there would be no poverty.
Without poverty there would be no crime.
Without crime there would be no injustice.
Its a Utopian vision, and it all begins with rejection of objective truth, and consequent rejection of judgement.
Yet, as greater thinkers have pointed out: objective truth does exist. It often exists outside our ability to easily discern it, yet it exists. And thus we search for truth, and we make judgments about how our search is going: better? worse? closer to truth? further from truth?
Judgment has to exist. Intellectual discrimination is part of the essence of being human.
The problem - as you touched on, coming from a slightly different angle - is when we make judgments which are separated from truth; when we make judgments which are harsher than judgments God Himself would make; when we make judgments which are cut off from love and compassion and grace, and are instead harsh and condemnatory in a way which is unlike God and which is cut off from truth.
I am, in my Christianity, young and growing and learning. I am not even close to understanding Christianity, or to understanding lessons of the Bible - many of which I've yet to read. But I am trying to learn as I go, and these issues of judgment and of truth are issues I have been thinking about lately. Thanks for addressing them so thoughtfully.
Thanks for dropping by. WOW! I like the way you think and identify the roots of justice, truth and judgement. You have given my something to think about.
ReplyDeleteGood thoughts, Christ. As gcotharn pointed out, the secular world would love for us Christians to drop ALL judging (I prefer "discernment") altogether. However, the mere statement "there is no objective truth" is in itself an objective, judgmental statement; "self-defeating argument," as some would call it.
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