We live in a very judgmentally anti-judgment culture. The greatest sin one could commit in our post-modern culture is to judge something to be wrong. Tolerance, on the other hand, is considered to be the ultimate virtue. Ironically, the hypocrisy of our current culture is that it promotes tolerance as the first great commandment while also judging those who don’t adhere to its cultural orthodoxy. For example, if you do not believe that gender is fluid, then you are a Neanderthal. If you do not accept the cultural definition of love, then you are judged as hateful. If you do not adhere to secularism’s nearly religious conviction that truth is relative and all beliefs are valid, then you are a bigot. If your politics don’t match those of the cultural elite, then you could be defamed, doxed, or disowned. According to one author, our culture “redefines tolerance as agreement with or celebration of certain viewpoints. On this new definition, thinking someone else is wrong and saying so is intolerance.”[1] In other words, if you disagree with our current culture’s viewpoints on gender, love, religion, or political correctness, then you are labeled intolerant. The cultural elites are allowed to judge you, but you have no right to “judge” them.
The culture has redefined intolerance to mean making a judgment call on the culturally acceptable sins of our age. Some Christians have shied away from calling out the sins of our age, while at the same time judging other Christians who do. If some Christians condemn one of the culturally acceptable sins of our age, such as same-sex “marriage”, then other Christians may judge them to be . . . well, judgmental and hateful.
So, the question remains. As Christians, are we to judge or not to judge? Well, our example is always Jesus Christ—the author and finisher of our faith. In John 7, Jesus addressed the Pharisees’ outrage over His healing of the paralytic man in John 5 on the Sabbath. As religious zealots, the Pharisees judged Jesus for doing something that did not adhere to their rule book. Jesus responded by asking a question, “If a man on the sabbath day receive circumcision, that the law of Moses should not be broken; are ye angry at me, because I have made a man every whit whole on the sabbath day?” In other words, Jesus was saying that the Pharisees had taken an aspect of God’s law and extrapolated it to an extent that it violated the spirit of God’s law. They had created new laws—their own laws—based upon what they perceived as good. Jesus continued by saying, “Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgement.” To this, someone may say, “See! Jesus tells us to judge not. So, you do you, Christian.” Well, not exactly. Jesus said, “judge not . . . but judge.” The command is not about whether or not we are to judge but about how we are to judge.
Jesus reprimanded the Pharisees for judging His actions based on what they perceived according to their own senses and sensibilities. This is where both cultural cultists and Christians get into trouble. We too often judge others based on our own senses (how we feel about things) and our own sensibilities (what we think about things). This is a faulty and fluid metric. The culture changes, and so can our feelings and thoughts about any given topic. It’s easy to judge sins that our culture also recognizes as wrong. As Screwtape put it to his nephew, “The use of Fashion in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic.”[2] If the Devil wants to destroy our homes, what better way than to make pre-marital sex, marital infidelity, and gender confusion look like a fashionable sin and make “judging” those things to be wrong look like the unfashionable sin of “intolerance.” It takes much more courage to stand up to the fashionable sins of our day than it does to stand up to the ones that our culture also condemns. If we judge others based on what’s fashionable, in vogue, or what matches our own senses and sensibilities, then such judgement is intolerant, unkind, and wrong.
However, Jesus does call us to judge. By what standard? We are to judge righteous judgment. In other words, we are to make judgment calls based on what God says, not based on what we see or sense. We are to discern between what seems true and what is true, according to God’s Word. If the Pharisees had truly read Scripture seeking the heart of God, they would find that many of their rules violated the spirit of God’s law. What seemed right to them was actually oppressive and counterproductive. In contrast with the Pharisees, judging righteous judgment is not a “let down the hammer”, arrogant, or self-righteous judgement. The righteousness by which we are to judge is not our own; it’s God’s. The righteous judgment Jesus speaks of here is a humble, Bible-informed discernment that speaks the truth in love for God and to His image-bearers.
We can know what is right and wrong based on God’s Word. We can make a judgement about whether or not a Christian should live a homosexual lifestyle. We can make a judgment about whether or not a Christian should go certain places or participate in certain activities. But we are to make all of these judgements according to what God has already judged to be right and wrong in His word. Only when we judge according to God’s settled Word, not our senses and sensibilities, not our own sense of righteousness, will we judge truly righteous judgment.
The truth is that no one can go through life without making judgments. The most culturally tolerant people are often the most judgmental people because they make self-righteous judgments about others for discerning between right and wrong! It’s impossible to not judge. We discern, differentiate, and make decisions every day. What makes our judgment righteous or self-righteous depends on our metric. Is the metric my senses or sensibilities? If so, then I am no better than the intolerant cultural cultists or the oppressive Pharisees. Is the metric God’s Word? Then I am serving Christ and others when I stand up for the truth. May we be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.
[1] Thaddeus Williams. Confronting Injustice Without Compromising Truth, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2020), 178-179.
[2] C. S. Lewis. The Screwtape Letters, (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2001), 137-138.