Only God Can Judge Me

Preached by Ben Bechtel

February 19, 2017

As I start my sermon this morning, I’m going to do something that has never been done before in the history of this church. This morning I am going to reference west coast rapper Tupac Shakur. Even though I have only been here for about a year and a half I can guarantee you that this is the first time in the near 20 year history of this church that Tupac has ever been used for a sermon illustration. If you are here and saying to yourself right now, “who is Tupac?” you prove my point. One of his most famous songs is entitled “Only God Can Judge Me.” The first lines of this song are, “only God can judge me, that right? Only God baby, nobody else . . . get out of my business.”This is somewhat of a rallying cry of our day, isn’t it? In fact, these verses we will be studying together today in Luke 6 are probably the most widely invoked verses from the Bible by our society today. As we come to this place in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (or the plain as Luke refers to it) we are going to be confronted with yet another radical way that members of his kingdom are to treat others. We will discover in this text that only as we correctly see ourselves and God can we properly discern good from evil in this world. Read Luke 6:37-42:

Scripture Reading

37 “Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; 38 give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you.”39 He also told them a parable: “Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit? 40 A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher. 41 Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 42 How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother's eye.

As we open these words of Jesus together this morning we are first going to look at how 1.) seeing blindly will lead us to judge poorly and then turn to how 2.) seeing clearly will lead us to judge rightly. Seeing blindly and judging poorly; seeing clearly and judging rightly.

1. Seeing Blindly and Judging Poorly

Being the youth director here at Community, I often am thinking about fun, goofy games we can play as a youth group. I’m not sure if we have ever played this particular game I am about to mention in our youth group before but it is the type of game we would play. I’m sure many of you are familiar with it. To start the game, you pair up with another person and one of the people in the pair has to put a blindfold on. Then a series of obstacles are set up and the person without the blindfold has to lead the blind person through the maze of obstacles to safety on the other side. What makes this particular game work is that while one of the members of the pair is completely unable to see, the other one is able to see. Now imagine playing that same game but both members of the pair are blindfolded instead of just the one receiving the directions. It would be nearly impossible. People would be tripping over each other and the obstacles in their way, all the while being given directions from a blind guide.This is the picture Jesus is painting here. In verse 39 of Luke chapter 6 this is precisely how Jesus describes the human condition. Look with me at this verse again:

39 He also told them a parable: “Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit?

In this text Jesus is diagnosing the problem of the entire human race. Our problem according to Jesus here is blindness. We cannot see. We are blind by our very nature. We are both blind people following other blind people into the pit and blind guides leading other blind men into the pit. What he means by this metaphor of sight is that we are all blinded by the sin of pride. Ever since our first parents Adam and Eve decided to place themselves above God and disobey his command to them in the Garden, all men and women have been plagued with this same problem.Ever since birth I have been legally blind in my right eye. It doesn’t affect anything substantial in my life although I do notice very small effects here and there. One of those effects that I do notice regularly is my tendency to swerve while I’m walking. I’ll start out walking straight but after walking a hundred feet or so I’ll be bumping into my wife Whitley. Then after 500 hundred feet I’ll be pushing her off of the sidewalk.This is precisely what pride does to us. Pride skews our vision and gets us off track. It causes our view of ourselves to be contorted and blown up bigger than it should. Pride affects our vision much like those clown mirrors do at circuses and amusement parks. And ultimately it morphs our vision so as to make us think that we are somehow the ultimate deciders of right and wrong. Essentially, pride convinces us that we are god, that we have the ability to ultimately decide what is good and what is evil. When we see ourselves as gods, the way in which we treat others gets all out of whack, like me running my wife off of the sidewalk. There are two main ways in which pride affects our ability to judge and discern correctly:

a. Judge Too Harshly

This is perhaps the greater danger of judgment inside the church. Just like Benjamin mentioned a few weeks ago when he was preaching on the Beatitudes, the way in which we enter the kingdom is the way we live within the kingdom. However, many of us, though we began our Christian life by seeing ourselves as desperately in need of God now think we’re pretty alright on our own. In fact, we think we have been Christians long enough that we now have the ability to judge people’s hearts and motives. We set ourselves up as Judges (with a capital J). We set ourselves up as gods.Jesus speaks to us about this in verses 41-42:

41 Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 42 How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother's eye.

You are supposed to see the absurdity, irony, and comedy here in Jesus’ words. Let’s try to say it another way. Let’s say a couple is out on a date early in their relationship and they are eating at Chipotle (which is a great choice). Especially when you eat their burritos, Chipotle tends to be a pretty messy place to eat. So, they start eating and the guy sees a piece of rice on her face and he mentions it to her. Then two bites later he does it again. And again. And again. And eventually after the fifth or sixth time she is frustrated and blurts out, “you have about half of your burrito on your face! Take care of that before you tell me anymore!” This is the irony and comedy that Jesus is trying to bring out here.Friends, how ironic and comedic is it that we think we can point out our brother or sister’s sin but don’t have a clue about our own junk? Is that not the epitome of pride? We all do this! We all assume that we are fine, that our stuff is relatively put together, or that our stuff isn’t as bad as his or her stuff.It is here that we need to see ourselves rightly, as a sinner who has just as much junk as the next person. And it is here that we need to see God rightly, as the one who alone has the right to ultimately judge the hearts of men and women. And it is here where I think Tupac’s song gets it exactly right. God is the only one who can truly judge me and you. God is the only one who is able to correctly judge the hearts of all men, including our own. Instead of puffing us up, that should humble us before the throne of the King of the universe because he can see right through our fronts of piety and arrogance to the pride that is in all of our hearts.In the parallel passage to this one, in Matthew 7, Jesus adds a very interesting and scary comment to his teaching (v. 1-2a):

1Judge not, that you be not judged. 2 For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged,

Did you catch the force of what he is saying? Jesus says that if you think yourself wise enough, discerning enough, and good enough to take his place as judge he’ll grant you that. If we exalt ourselves in pride and judgment over others God will judge us by that same standard. I don’t know about you, but that’s a terrifying thought. How do we treat our unbelieving neighbor in our heart? Are we constantly judging him or her for their behavior, claiming that there is no way God could work in their life? What about our fellow Christians? Are we characterized by a judgmental, fault-finding spirit in the church? Are we constantly seeking to point out theological error or a character flaw? Or are we a people defined by the humble love of Jesus? Christians, don’t cling to your pride. Turn to God, be humbled, and then be gracious towards your fellow man, recognizing the mess of burrito that we all have smeared on our face.

b. Judge Too Loosely (Or Not At All)

This is what I hinted at in the introduction. There is a large section of our society today that would claim that it is not okay under any circumstances to make value judgments. Calling something right or wrong, true or false, or good or evil is the cardinal sin. They would look to Jesus’ words here for validation for this type of thinking. However, this understanding of this passage fails to take Jesus in his own context. If we read on to the end of verse 42, the very reason that you remove the log from your own eye is so that you can remove the speck from your brother’s. As well, it fails to hear the not-so-subtle critique of the Pharisees by Jesus here—he is calling them blind guides for the people of Israel! That is absolutely a judgment, and a judgment it seems he also wants his people to make.It is not all judgments that Jesus prohibits here, but those of an ultimate sense that come from a false view of who we are as we said above. This doesn’t mean though that in a sense of false humility we should claim to not be able to discern right from wrong or truth from error. The person who claims that we cannot discern right from wrong is also setting him or herself up as a god in pride by ignoring God’s standards of morality and truth. Not only is this person self-refuting by making a value judgment about value judgments but they also are ignoring the ability that we have as image bearers of God to decide good from evil. In the attitude of humility and love for enemy just taught by Jesus in the section before, we can discern truth from error and right from wrong while still acknowledging that God is judge of souls, not us.

2. Seeing Clearly and Judging Rightly

Now we naturally turn to the question, “how do we see clearly and judge rightly?” If God is the only one who can judge and we are all equally sinners, how is it that followers of Jesus can make any type of value judgments at all? I believe we receive an answer to this question in v. 40 of Luke 6:

40 A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.

How is it that we learn to do anything in life? How is it that we learned how to talk? How is it that we learned how to ride a bike? How is it that we learned how to add and subtract, to read and write, to play soccer, to learn economics, or medicine, or construction or geology? We followed a master. We watched someone who knew how to do each of these things do them. We sat under their teaching. We were disciples of them.As Christians, who is our teacher? Every Sunday school kid will get this one right. Jesus is our teacher! He is the greatest teacher that the world has ever known. When we begin to follow Jesus, when we become disciples of Jesus, we start to look more like him. As this verse says, when we are trained we begin to look more and more like our teacher! As we follow Jesus, who is the revelation of the God of light, he begins to show us how to truly view ourselves. When his light shines into our dark hearts, what is revealed is what we spoke of earlier—our own sin and pride. He begins to illuminate the dark places of our hearts and root out the sin that resides there.But, here’s the hang-up—if our own hearts are revealed to us to be blind, full of judgment and pride, and as we said earlier God is the only righteous judge, what hope do we have? Do you see what I’m asking? Once we see clearly that only God can judge us and that we are dreadfully lost and blind, does that only lead us to despair? Were it not for the cross of Christ it absolutely would. But at the cross of Christ we get the clearest picture of God’s justice against human sin because the judgment that was owed to each of us was placed upon Jesus Christ. On the cross of Christ God judged Jesus in the place of sinners who themselves were heaping their judgments on Jesus!Do you see the cutting irony here as well? As the Romans tortured him and as the Jews mocked him they were judging the very Judge of the world and their hearts. In their pride they were shaking their fists at God and saying that they wanted to determine right from wrong. They spat upon the face of humility. They drove the nails into his hands. And as they did this they felt they were doing what was right in order to preserve their empire or religion. They puffed themselves up in pride and rejected Jesus. Friends, that is a picture of you and me! Who can say that they have not done this to their creator and loving Lord? And yet in this very act of man’s false and sinful judgment, God was judging Jesus in love so that we could be accepted. God the righteous and perfect judge put forth his son as a sacrifice so that we could be loved as his children. We can have hope for the future judgment day because we know that our ultimate judgment day occurred when the Lord of glory was crucified and this verdict was proved by his resurrection from the grave. Because he was pronounced guilty we can be pronounced innocent. At the cross we see our sin and God’s judgment revealed in the person of Jesus himself.Only the work of Jesus at the cross can truly bring us to a clear view of who we are and who God is. At the cross we are humbled because we realize that, along with all men, we brought nothing but our own pride and antagonism toward God to the table and yet we are offered free grace and a seat at God’s table. The cross shows us the depths of our own depravity and the heights of God’s loving and just character. It calls us to repent of our sin and trust in Christ’s work accomplished on our behalf. And it also holds out a new way to live.Let’s look at what Paul says about the death of Jesus in Phil. 2:5-8:

5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

This is marvelous! The 2nd person of the trinity gives up all the riches and glories of heaven, and becomes a man, a servant. The God of the universe in the person of Jesus of Christ became obedient to death on a cross. And as Luke 6 tells us, we are not above our teacher! What a way that this reality calls us to live! We can no longer see ourselves as the center of the story. We cannot hold onto our sweeping judgments of entire people groups. We cannot neglect to deal with the sin that is in our own heart. The cross of Jesus shows us that we must live in a way that humbly acknowledges God as the only righteous Judge and clings to the cross of Christ for hope and forgiveness. When we repent and cling to Jesus in faith, the cross gives us the corrective lenses that we need in order to be able to see ourselves clearly and thus, judge rightly.So, to close I want us to turn to two specific examples of what it might look like to be discerning and judge rightly, in humility, as a follower of Jesus. First, let’s apply this to what it might look like in interpersonal conflict. Jesus brings up this scenario in the opening verses of our passage today (v. 37-38):

37 “Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; 38 give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you.”

So how might seeing ourselves and God clearly enable us to judge rightly in a situation of conflict with another person? Let’s take a look at the metaphor Jesus uses here. He is using an example from the marketplace of his day. When you went to get grain at the market in Jesus’ day they would take the vessel that you were getting filled and press it down and shake it to make sure you got a full cup of grain. I like to think of Starbucks when I hear this metaphor. I don’t know if this has ever happened to you but if you get a regular coffee and ask for no room for cream coffee will leak out of the cup. Except in Jesus’ metaphor the cup is overflowing with grain.1 Bags of grain are being dumped in your lap. This is how God graciously gives to those who forgive and this is how he has given graciously to you in the person of Jesus. We are people who have had bags full of forgiveness and love dumped in our lap by the Father.So, if we have been given so much, how can we be people who withhold a few kernels of grain from others? If we see God as the God who gives and gives and gives at great cost to himself and ourselves as the humble recipients of that gift it is 100% inconsistent to withhold forgiveness from others. Instead of making our default position to heap judgment on others when they wrong us or hurt us Christians are to be the kinds of people who shower others with forgiveness, forgiveness that people cannot explain when they see it. If you have a family member that you have not talked to in years and you have harbored judgment in your heart for years, or if you have a co-worker you are holding a grudge against and things have been weird and tense between you two for some time, repent to them and forgive them! Dump bags full of forgiveness into their lap because that is what you have received from God in Jesus. Our posture towards others should be one of forgiveness and generosity because that is God’s posture to us in Christ.Second, let’s see how seeing ourselves clearly and judging rightly applies to our relationships within the church. Let me read verse 42 again for us so it is fresh in our minds:

42 How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother's eye.

Notice something crucial about this text and I mentioned it earlier on in passing—this text does not prohibit us from taking the speck out of our brother’s eye. It says that we deal with our own log so that we can deal with our brother’s speck. We see and deal with our own sin in order to be able to correct our brother in love. That is the end goal in view here. Notice also, the context that Jesus is talking about is within the kingdom community, the church. That’s what his use of the word “brother” indicates all over this sermon. He’s talking about the church here. What this text doesn’t do is give you license to start calling out all your unbelieving friends on their sin. That’s not the point. That’s annoying not lovingly showing them the way of Jesus.So how do we apply this text to our relationships within the church? The church is a place where in the context of loving relationships we have people who can point out the speck in our eye and who need us to do the same for them. Christian accountability is one of the major functions of the local church! Jesus envisioned that his kingdom would be a community of messed up, humble disciples pushing one another toward our teacher.This leads us to ask ourselves some hard questions. Are we in those types of relationships now? Do we have people who are doing this for us and for whom we are doing this? Are we avoiding these types of relationships out of fear or pride? Are we avoiding being these types of people for others? I know that is probably the hardest question, at least for me. I would encourage you today to find those people. There are so many wonderful people in our church who are living in this type of loving community already. Ask someone in your small group or someone whom you trust and respect in the church to do this today. Or it could be as simple as starting to become more involved in the lives of people in this church family so that you can form these types of relationships with others. Let’s be this kind of community, who lovingly points one another to look to the cross and see ourselves clearly in its glorious light.

1 Darrell L. Bock, Luke 1:1-9:50, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994), 607-608.