I am a judgmental person. I’m often amazed and dismayed by how quickly I leap to judgment, often without facts, without knowledge, without sympathy. Of course there are times when judgment is right and good. God calls us to be discerning, and discernment necessarily involves judging what is true and what is false. Yet there are two broad categories in which judgment is sinful and forbidden by God.
Going beyond What Is Written
The first kind of sinful judging is hypocritical judging or judging people on the basis of what is hidden from us. In the opening verses of 1 Corinthians 4, Paul exhorts the people of this church not to judge one another. Yet when he does this, he refers to a specific kind of judgment and provides several conditions. First, he puts a limit on the time, saying that we are not to judge “before the Lord comes” and second, we are not to judge “beyond what is written.” This shows that there is an objective standard by which we may judge, but that we cannot proceed further than this standard. The standard, of course, is the Bible. We may judge doctrine and
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