I’m a big fan of Judging

Now that I have the click-bait title out of the way, let me explain what I mean by that.

I would wager that Matthew 7:1, “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” is one of the more popular scriptures to quote. Most Christians can quote that one verbatim, and many non-Christians can too. It’s an easy way to tell the religious people “back off and mind your own business.”

I very much prefer the text of the Joseph Smith Translation instead: “Judge not unrighteously, that ye be not judged; but judge righteous judgment.” For further context, let’s add Matthew 7:2 (going back to the King James Version): “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” I’ll also give honorable mention to the next verse, which I doubt very many of us could claim to know follows these judging verses: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

Of course the beam and mote scriptures continue for a bit (which I won’t quote here), but the point is that this is all one thought. That thought is: Whatever type of judgement is important to you, will be the type of judgement that condemns you on judgment day. That’s a pretty heavy statement, so it’s best that we understand what that means.

Let’s start by illustrating a few different types of judgment. I’ll pick on models that I’m calling Condemnation, Tolerance, and Permissive. Condemnation is probably the mode that most people think of from these verses, and the one most closely aligned to the beam and mote idea. Under the condemnation model, you look for the faults of others and condemn them when you find them. I might be driving down the street and find someone cutting me off, so I promptly give them a tongue lashing that they’ll never hear. But if they could actually hear what’s going on in my car, then ohhhhh, they would be so sorry for cutting me off. In the worst case (or maybe just the most immediate case), I use that opportunity to speed up and cut them off out of spite.

Very clearly we can see how damaging this attitude and behavior are. By letting my anger run wild, I’m allowing my anger to dictate my actions. I might be the direct cause of a car wreck instead of them. But if we look back to the text of the verses, we can see that that’s not what Jesus is teaching at all. Jesus is cautioning people not to Condemn others because at the final judgment then they themselves would be Condemned. No one wants to get to the final judgement and have Jesus say “your mode of judgment today is Condemnation. Now let’s list off all of the tiny errors you made throughout your life.”

The opposite of this mode of judgment is what I’m calling Tolerance, and unfortunately, I think many people default to this mode as a way to stay as far from Condemnation as they can. I don’t use the word tolerance in the sense it was used 100 years ago (or even 30 years ago). I’m using the modern definition here: “whatever you choose to do is right, as long as you’re following your truth.” I’m actually more scared of this mode of judgment than I am of Condemnation. In Tolerance, anything goes, as long as you think it’s right.

When you follow the Tolerance mode of judging, you’re essentially saying that there is no universal metric for good. There is only your own metric for whether or not it is good for you. We see this style of judging everywhere today. It is the attitude pushing forward the LGBTQIA+ movement. It is the attitude that says worshiping a Flying Spaghetti Monster is equal in value to worshiping the God of Abraham. It is the attitude that says I can consume pornography every day and it won’t ruin my relationships. Many, many people follow this path, but it runs into a brick wall when you start to talk about entry into Heaven.

3 Nephi 27:19 says it best: “And no unclean thing can enter into his kingdom.” 1 Corinthians 6:9 also says it well: “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God?” If we judge with Tolerance, saying “whatever you do is good, as long as it’s following your truth,” then when we get to Judgement Day, I believe that God will not turn that one around on us in the same way he turns around Condemnation. I believe that he will say “yes, whatever you do is good, as long as it’s following My Truth, and My Truth is everlasting. You cannot come here unless you follow My Truth.” The Tolerant won’t be able to abide that. They will see Heaven as a place of intolerance, because they won’t be able to follow their own truth.

Another way this might play out is by God saying that you have been so tolerant in life, that you must inherit a kingdom where everyone can continue to follow their own truth. Since no unclean thing can enter the presence of God, then that kingdom where we encourage people to follow their own truth is not God’s Kingdom.

And before we jump away from Tolerance, I want to point out what I consider to be a gateway drug to full Tolerance. As a precursor to full Tolerance, you might hear someone saying that you shouldn’t condemn someone because you don’t know their situation. That statement alone is very true, but at the same time it excuses the bad behavior. I have heard many people try to say that stealing is a natural byproduct of poverty, so a poor person stealing is not bad because they wouldn’t have to steal if it weren’t for the greedy capitalist. And yet this justification overlooks the simple fact that God told us not to steal. Don’t let your compassion blind you to the simple fact that we all sin. And especially don’t let your compassion lead you down a path to further and further blindness.

Let’s turn now to a model that I think is closer (but still not quite perfectly aligned) to what Christ intended to convey: Permissiveness. I’ll paint the Permissive as being halfway between Condemnation and Tolerance. In this, you do judge people all the time, but you also allow them to do their own thing. You might be 100% correct in your judgements, knowing perfectly well when someone else does good or evil. But you also recognize the danger of condemning. You won’t forbid someone else doing something bad because they have their own agency, and they can choose for themselves.

This attitude is seen in a lot of current US legislation (and I imagine in other countries, but I’m less aware of their politics). In most any large movement, there are people for, people against, and people who are indifferent. If we take the pro-abortion movement as an example, we see lots of arguments to justify the killing of unborn children (I’ll bet you can tell which side of the fence I’m on). But the argument which got the best results for abortion activists was not that killing babies is good. It’s the argument that restrictive laws are interfering with a woman’s right to choose. It’s the argument that we’re welcome to think that it’s wrong, and we’re welcome not to have abortions of our own, but that we’re wrong when we try to forbid the exercise of agency. They promote the attitude that we should all choose our own path and let others choose theirs. When all of the arguments have been made, we find that the only people who are in favor of very restrictive laws on abortion are those people who recognize abortion as murder. The clear majority of people say that there should be legal abortions for at least some elective cases. The vast majority of people say that regardless of the other restrictions, we should not restrict abortion when it comes to rape, incest, or life of the mother. The Permissive arguments have pushed most of the nation into a position of allowing evil so long as they don’t have to participate. We also see these arguments crop up in the legal marijuana debate, and the gay marriage debate, and any number of pushes for permissive behavior.

How is Permissive different from Tolerance? In both of them you allow other people to follow their own paths, but while Tolerance celebrates the different paths, Permissive shuns them. A Permissive man might know what’s right and what’s wrong, but only applies that judgement to himself.

So if we can’t condemn all evil, and we can’t allow all evil, then what is righteous judgment? Luckily for us, Jesus happens to be a great teacher, as long as we listen to everything he says. We stopped reading earlier after just a couple of verses so we could talk about them, but Jesus never intended for us to stop there. We need to add verse 5 here: “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.” Now we need to translate this into the same terminology that we’ve been using.

The standard teaching that we hear about the beam and mote story is that we shouldn’t judge other people, instead focusing on ourselves. I think that the standard teaching closely matches a Permissive attitude, but that ignores the second half of verse 5. Jesus said “and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” Again, Jesus didn’t intend for us to stop reading too early. We need to see that in verse 1 he is very clearly cautioning us to not judge unrighteously. We need to see that in verse 5 he is very clearly telling us to take care of ourselves first. But we also need to see that in verse 5 he is clearly telling us that it is our job to try to cast out the mote from our brother’s eye.

So we should not Condemn, telling people that they are wrong for every little thing. We should not Tolerate, pretending that anything and everything is good. We should not be Permissive, focusing just on ourselves and letting others do whatever they want. We should be Godly, fixing ourselves first, and then doing everything we can to help other people live righteously.

We absolutely should judge people, and situations, and ourselves. We just need to get that in the right order. We should judge ourselves, and situations, and then people. And we should fix ourselves, and situations, and then people. After all, that’s exactly the order in which God Himself did it.

To end this section, I’m going to awkwardly start a thing that will be much more useful later. I’m going to point you to new articles (which I haven’t written yet), that will be good threads to read down. So this paragraph is a placeholder, to be replaced at some point in the near future, when I have more things written, and can tell you what you might want to read next.