Stop Criticizing

Matthew 7:1-6

     This morning I want to encourage you if you will, with me, to turn in your Bible to Matthew, chapter 7.  Matthew 7, beginning at verse 1.  "Judge not, that ye be not judged.  For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye measure, it shall be measured to you again.  And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?  Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?  Thou hypocrite, first cast the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.  Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and lacerate you."

     Now, this is a fascinating portion of Scripture, a Scripture that is frequently referred to and oft quoted, and yet sometimes not really put together in a total package as the Lord, I believe, intended for it to be.  Let me give you a little background as we approach it.  In the Sermon on the Mount, our Lord has touched on all of the areas of a believer's life, in a wonderful and marvelous summation of all of the areas of truth related to living within the kingdom.  We have seen Christ meet us at every point.

     He began with our perspective on self in the Beatitudes, with our perspective on the world in the statements on salt and light, with our perspectives on the Word of God as He talked about the law and the fact that it was immutable and unchanging, our perspective on the moral law or holiness as He discussed the fact that we are to have an inward commitment as well as an external one.

     He discussed our religious activity -- giving, praying, fasting.  He discussed our perspective, as we have just recently seen, on money and possessions, material goods.  And now he comes to a text that deals with our relations with other people.  We've talked about our relations to ourselves, to God, to His Word, to the world, our relations to religious activity, our relations to the morality of the time and what God wants, and now to human relationships, right relationships.  And this is a tremendous passage that you'll be looking at. 

     Now, as in all the other elements of the Sermon on the Mount, the perspective here is given in contrast to the view of the scribes and the Pharisees.  They were the existing religious influence of the time, and, against the background of their perspective, the Lord presents the truth.  They came along, and their view of life was to be proud, and the Beatitudes were to be humble.  They were a part of the system.  Christ said that we are to be salt and light to the system. 

     They had denied the Word of God and established their own.  Christ reestablished the affirmation of His Word and His Word alone.  They believed only in an external morality.  Christ brought about an internal morality.  They acted out their religious activities of giving, praying and fasting in a hypocritical, superficial way, and the Lord said it has to be from the heart.  They were preoccupied with money and possessions, and the Lord says you are not so to be, but with the kingdom. 

     And they were very involved in wrongful human relationships, and the Lord sets it right here.  And in so contrasting Himself with them, He is unmasking the inadequacy of human religion, and reaffirming the fact that true religion comes only from God.  The last area, then, of His comparison, is this area, in chapter 7, of human relations.  And then from there He goes to sum up and finalize His message.

     Now, the area of human relations goes all the way through verse 12, but we're only going to be considering the first six this morning, and we'll get to the second section, the second six verses, next time.  But suffice it to say at this point that the Pharisees were so proud and so self-styled and so self-righteous and so smug and so convinced of their own superiority that one of the natural results of that was that they became totally condemning and judgmental of everybody else.

     I mean, any time a person, a man or a woman, invents a system of morality, they then become the judge that sits on the throne of that system and determines whether anybody else qualifies or not, and that's exactly what happened in the Pharisees' case.  And so they became oppressively judgmental of other people.  They condemned and criticized.  They were censorious.  They were unmerciful and forgiving, unkind, lacking grace, in their constant, carping criticism of everybody who didn't come up to their own standard.

     Jesus said to them in John, chapter 7, verse 24, "Judge not according to appearance, but judge righteous judgment."  Because it was their habit to judge in a very superficial manner.  Also in Luke 16, the Bible tells us in verses 14 and 15 that the Pharisees were covetous, and they heard all these things and were scoffing at Him, that is, at Christ, and He said to them, "You are they who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts, and that which is highly esteemed among men is an abomination to God."

     In other words, you think you've got the answers.  You think you've got the system.  You think you're the judges.  But you're wrong.  Their judgment was inevitably the reverse of God's judgment.  For example, in the classic illustration of this problem, in Luke 18, it says in verse 9, "And Jesus spoke this parable unto certain who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others." 

     Now, that's the Pharisees.  They trusted in themselves.  They put all their confidence in their own self-righteousness.  And because they had set their own standard, and they were the standard, and because of their pride and egotism, everybody else they looked down upon, they despised, they hated. 

     And so the Lord confronts them with this parable.  "Two men went to the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, the other a tax collector."  Now, from a Pharisee's viewpoint, a tax collector was the most wretched, rotten, vile person in human society, because he would be a traitor among the Jewish people who had aligned himself with the Romans to collect taxes on the behalf of Rome, and for all intents and purposes to rip off the Jewish population in doing it.  He was a traitor of the first order.

     And these two went into the temple to pray.  "And the Pharisee stood and prayed with himself, God, I thank you that I am not as other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector."  You notice, the Pharisee prayed with himself.  The Pharisee was not interested in associating with anybody, because nobody came up to his level.  So he went off to a place where he stood alone and apart, to demonstrate his self-righteousness as being unattained by any other person.  And he said, "I'm so thankful I'm not like that vile tax collector.  I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess."  And the tax collector over in the corner was beating upon his breast and saying, "God be merciful to me a sinner."  And Jesus said that tax collector went home justified and not that Pharisee. 

     In other words, they made judgments, but their judgments were wrong.  They sat as condemning, critical judges of other people.  This is the one thing that marked their relations with others:  a judgmental, condemning attitude.  And, frankly, folks, it belied their claim to be citizens of God's kingdom.  They couldn't be and be that kind of person.  And so the Lord, in recognizing this particular problem, speaks to this issue.

     Now, in Matthew, chapter 7, verses 1 to 12, you have the sum of teaching in the Sermon on the Mount relative to human relations.  You might not think you could sum up all there is on human relations in 12 verses, and I suppose a man couldn't, but Jesus can.  I mean, there are books on behavioral psychology ad infinitum, ad nauseum, trying to figure out how to coordinate human relations.  Jesus says more in 12 verses than all of them put together.  And He has an amazing way of summing up the whole world of human relationships in very simple terms, because He sees the whole come together.

     Now, in this 12-verse section, you have, first of all, in terms of how we are to act with one another, how we are to deal with one another, what we are not to do, that's verses 1 to 6, and then what we are to do, verses 7 to 12.  First a negative and then a positive.  And the sum of the two is enough to govern all our human relations.  If you want to know how to act in your family or on your job or in your neighborhood or in your recreation, or you want to know how to deal with people in business, this is the sum of it all.  The negative and then the positive.

     Now, for this morning, we're going to look at the negative, what not to do, verses 1 to 6, and the principle appears in verse 1.  Note it.  "Judge not."  Now, you can stop there.  That's the principle.  Don't judge.  Now, you say, "Well, you can't reduce all of human relations down to that."  Oh, yes, you can, from the negative, as we shall see as we move along.  Don't judge. 

     Now, that sounds so simplistic.  Don't judge.  And you hear people throw that around.  "Judge not, lest ye be judged."  I've heard that.  "Who are you to judge?" 

     Now, there are many people who've misunderstood this.  Tolstoy, for example, the Russian novelist, said, "Christ here totally forbids the human institution of any law courts."  Now, that is a gross misunderstanding of this.  But there are other people who equally misunderstand it, only with another aberration.  They say, "We should never criticize.  We should never condemn anybody for anything.  We should never evaluate anything at all.  We don't want to judge, lest we should be judged." 

     And that phrase sort of fits our time, I think.  Because we live in an age when the wrong use of "judge not" would find a ready audience.  Our time hates theology.  Our time hates dogma.  Our time resists doctrine.  Our time doesn't like convictions.  People speak about love, and they speak about compromise.  They speak about ecumenism.  They speak about unity, anything to get everybody together.  And somebody who talks about doctrine or dogma or convictions is generally unpopular in many circles.

     I know this week we received a phone call from a church.  They wanted to know if we had a young man who might be interested in candidating for their pulpit, and they said, "We want someone who will teach holiness, not doctrine."  Holiness and not doctrine.  There is a resistance to any conviction.  Our time dislikes strong men, even though I think we're waking up to the fact that we could use a few.  Our time dislikes men with convictions, who speak up, who confront society, who disturb the status quo, men who know what they believe and why they believe it and are not intimidated about saying it.  Such men today are branded as troublemakers.  They're branded as controversial.

     I received a book this week, and someone was writing in the book.  They wanted me to review the manuscript of it.  And basically the book says the one thing we've got to eliminate in Christianity is doctrine, and we've got to go all out for love and fellowship, because doctrine is dividing us, and people who want to always talk about doctrine are the dividing ones in the body of Christ.  And that was the thesis of the whole book.

     But, you know, as you go back, if you have any sense of perspective in church history, you know there have been times in history, the history of the church, when men were praised for being men of conviction.  They were praised for being men of principle, men of standards, men of dogma.  Frankly, there wouldn't have even been a reformation if there hadn't been men like that.  But today such men are difficult, non-cooperative, self-styled, unloving.  And the man who is praised is the compromiser.

     And so some people have taken "judge not" and just fit it into the mentality of the time.  But the Lord is not condemning law courts.  I mean, the Bible instituted that.  The principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is based upon a law court, and Romans 13 affirms the right for a nation to rule its people.  And the Bible is not condemning any kind of judging or discriminating.  The Bible tells us, as believers, that we must discern.  Right?  That we must know the truth from the falsehood.

     And the whole of the Sermon on the Mount is predicated on a clear understanding of the distinction between true religion and false, between hypocrisy and reality.  We're not to be undiscriminating.  We're not to be blind.  We're not to be flabby sentimentalists.  For example, look at verse 6.  it says, "Give not that which is holy unto the