The Madness of Unforgiveness: Can I Judge Others?

by David Chadwick

When it comes to forgiveness, there are so many steps to carry it through to completion.

There is a fine line between discerning clearly what is good from what is evil, and being able to fully release someone of the debt they owe to you. On one hand, you must maintain a measure of conviction when something bad happens to you because it allows you to rightly judge truth from error, which is a crucial skill to have while living in a broken world. But on the other hand, you don’t want your rumination on the reality of your correct diagnosis of evil to take you deeper into the pit of unforgiveness.

A question that often comes my way is, “Can I judge others?” Jesus talks about this in depth in Matthew 7:1-6.

Some people, when hurt, are unable to step over the offense. As followers of Jesus, they don’t know what to do with their pain, for they think they can’t judge others. After all, in Matthew 7, Jesus said to judge not, lest we be judged. People often read this and think they should swallow all hurt and never confront any evil done to them.

But this wasn’t what Jesus was saying at all.

Think about this for a moment. We judge people all the time. To protect ourselves. To rightly determine whether we can entrust ourselves to someone. To determine if we can trust what they are saying to us.

So, what Jesus meant was this, BEFORE we judge someone, we must realize that how we judge others is how God will judge us. We set the standard and if it’s hard, harsh, and unrealistic, then that’s how God will treat us.

Jesus also said that we must take the log out of our own eye before we try to take the speck out of someone else’s eye. We must recognize how we have hurt others before we determine how they have hurt us. In prayer, ask the Lord to reveal these things to you.

Read Galatians 6:1. It hints at this same idea, suggesting that you remain vigilant to watch over your own heart whenever you seek to restore a fallen brother or sister in the faith. After all, we are all susceptible to falling into sin.

So, the answer to today’s question is, “Yes!” You can judge other people, but it must be done with the utmost humility and awareness of your own sin.

Tomorrow, we will look in greater detail as to how the Bible calls us to go to someone else who has hurt us.