Lux Lucet

“Judge not lest you be judged,” is a favorite quote of unbelievers. They delight in hurling them at Christians during an argument. And all too often, these words have exactly the effect intended, that is to reduce the Christian is reduced to silence. After all, are not these words not found in Scripture? Were they not spoken by Jesus himself? The answer to these questions is yes and yes. But do these words really mean, as the unbelievers seem to think they do, that Christians have not basis for making moral judgments? The short answer is no.

My Introduction to Irrationalism

As is the case with most who grow up in church, I was not taught to think rigorously. I recall many years ago asking someone at my church about a passage I did not understand. It seemed to me that there was a contradiction in Scripture, so I asked for an explanation and was given the standard quote from Isaiah 55, saying God’s thoughts and God’s ways are higher than ours. This was then interpreted to mean we just have to accept that some things in the Bible do not and cannot make sense to our finite minds. There are mysteries, tensions, and apparent contradictions in the Bible that finite man simply cannot understand with mere human logic.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this was my introduction to irrationalism. The person with whom I spoke provided me the best answer he knew. I have no reason to believe he had any intention of deliberately misleading me. And yet, mislead me he did. And it would be many years before, by the grace of God, I found my way out of that intellectual cul-de-sac.

My Introduction to Scripturalism

Fast forward about 20 years from the conversation above. I’m in my mid-30s and have just been introduced to the thought of Gordon H. Clark. I would describe the experience as going from stumbling about in a murky fog to walking with confidence in the bright noonday sun. Clark’s insistence on the logical coherence of Scripture not only brought me to the point where I could see that answers to tough theological questions were possible, it made me come to expect to find these answers in the Scriptures. This is as far removed from irrationalism as the east is from the west. The truth really did make me free.

Judge Not

“Judge not, that you be not judged,” are the words of Christ in Matthew 7:1. Many today, both within and without the church, seem to think that these words prove the critics of Christianity are right, that Jesus did, in fact, forbid Christians to make moral judgments, and that when Christians do condemn something as immoral, they are contradicting Christ himself. But if we approach Scripture as did Clark, with the understanding that Scripture is non-contradictory, that it is logically consistent, that it is understandable, this misinterpretation is easily dismissed.

Simply from a logical standpoint, any individual who criticizes Christians for making a moral judgments, saying it is wrong to judge another, is doing the very thing he claims should not be done: he is passing judgment on another. Imagine for a moment you are in a debate with an unbeliever over, say, the homosexual marriage. The unbeliever says he supports the idea. You oppose it on Scriptural grounds, saying that the Bible condemns homosexuality. The unbeliever then retorts, “It says in the Bible, Judge not, that you be not judged.” “You have no right to condemn the lifestyle choice of homosexuals.” The simple answer to this person would be to say, “You just did the very thing you said I shouldn’t do, you judged me.” “Based on your own premise, you have no right to criticize my opposition to homosexual marriage.”

In truth, it is impossible to escape rendering moral judgments. We all make judgments all the time, and must of necessity do so. If “Judge not, that you be not judged,” was meant by Jesus as an absolute prohibition on moral judgment, then Jesus would have been guilty asking what is impossible. But God does not talk nonsense. So when we find that an interpretation of a passage is logically absurd, this is not the time to throw up our hands, declare a mystery, and close our Bibles. This is when we have to pray that God would open our minds to the correct understanding of the passage in question, and then get to work.

Judge with Righteous Judgment

John 7:24 is an important passage for unlocking what Jesus meant by his statement in Matthew 7:1. When we use Scripture in this way, comparing one passage in the Bible to another, we are doing it based on a principle that is sometimes called the Analogy of Scripture. Perhaps a better name for it is Comparative Exegesis. Comparative Exegesis is valid, because the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God. And God cannot lie or make mistakes and contradict himself. When we approach the Bible with a proper respect for God’s Word, we are with confidence able to compare different passages that speak on the same subject and use the more clear passages to interpret the ones that are less clear to us.

John 7:24 quotes Jesus as saying, “Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.” In this passage, not only does Jesus approve of moral judgment, but he commands his disciples to engage in it. When we compare what Jesus says in John 7:24 to what he says in Matthew 7:1, we can conclude that Jesus’ warning to “Judge not” in Matthew was a prohibition against judgment by the wrong standard, not an absolute ban on it.

So we have established that God expects us to judge. The next question is this: What does it mean to judge with righteous judgment? The short answer to this question is that we are to pass judgment on the words and actions of men by the standard of God’s revealed Word. We are to judge right and wrong based on what is revealed in the Bible. In his essay The Church Irrational, John Robbins put it this way,

Now Christ not only expects Christians to make moral judgments; he tells us how to make them: “Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment” (John 7:24). The sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden was to judge according to appearance; their sin was not the fact that they judged; nor was it the fact that they used their own human faculty of judgment in deciding whether to obey or disobey God. As rational beings, we all must constantly use our own judgments; that is included in the idea of rationality.  The sin of Adam and Eve was not in judging, but in using the wrong standard to make their judgment. Rather than judging by the standard of God’s propositional revelation, they choose to judge by the evidence of their senses, “according to appearance”:

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. (Genesis 3:6)

The sin of Adam and Eve was not their use of private judgment, as some totalitarian theologians have suggested, but their abandonment of propositional revelation as the only standard by which to make all judgments. Adam and Eve did not believe the Word of God, and their unbelief separated them and all their children born by natural generation from God. Judging by appearance was also the sin of the Jews in John 7, when Christ commanded them to “judge righteous judgment,” not according to appearance. Making moral judgments is a serious affair. We must use the Word of God as our only standard in making such judgments, and we must labor to understand that Word, praying that God will give us wisdom in applying the principles of his Word to specific men, ideas, and events.

In Ephesians chapter 6, Paul famously enjoins his readers to put on the whole armor of God. In that passage, all the items mentioned but one are defensive in nature – the helmet of salvation, the breastplate of righteousness, etc. The one and only offensive weapon discussed in this passage is the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God. And it is this sword that the Christian is to use to defeat the “wisdom” of this world, to pull down it strongholds, and to cast down its arguments.

The enemies of Christ and of his Gospel seem to grow bolder by the day. If Christians are going to stand for the truth in these dark and confused times, they must learn to use the weapon God has given them skill and boldness. To do this requires understanding that Scriptures, far from being filled with apparent contradictions, are the inspired, logically coherent Word of God. When we come to a passage we do not understand, let us not throw up our hands and declare a mystery. Let us not allow the enemies of Christ to misuse his words to gain the victory. When we do not understand something, let us instead pray for understanding, and get to work on massaging out what Gordon Clark called “the Charlie Horse between our ears.”