You Be The Judge?

Prep Your Thinking…


1. Are you a judging sort of person?

2. Who do you most easily judge?

3. How often do you judge others?

4. Under what circumstances do you usually judge others?

5. How do you feel when you judge others?

6. How have you judged God?

7. Why do you judge others – what’s it do for you?

8. How do you respond when others judge you?

9. What does God think of the judgments you’ve passed?



You are a judging person.

Yes you are.

The fact is we make judgment calls all day long, every day of our lives. We have to in order to survive. Every decision we make is a judgment call of sorts. We use this protect ourselves from harm, and to insure a better future. Like it or not, you are a judging person.

For a lot of judgment calls, nobody gets hurt. My morning eggs won’t get their feelings hurt if I consider them to be bland and add salt and pepper. One shirt won’t get jealous of another if I keep passing it up in favor of one I like more.

But if I tell a person they are bland, or if I repeatedly pass one friend in favor of another, it’s a different story, isn’t it?

In William Young’s book, The Shack, Mack got caught judging. To his surprise, however, he discovered that he had not only judged the man who abducted, abused and murdered his daughter, but many others as well. Ultimately, he was judging God.

Mack judged God because God didn’t do what God was supposed to do – his little girl, Missy, wasn’t protected and her assailant, The Lady Killer, was free to terrorize again. God was negligent.

We may not readily admit it, but I think we all struggle with this to varying degrees. Why does God let kids starve to death? Why doesn’t God send a lightning bolt Osama Bin Laden’s direction? How about cancer – why not get rid of that terrible disease with the snap of a god-sized finger?

This all got me to thinking about our motives for judging along these lines – and not just toward God, but everybody. Why do I judge people I don’t really know – from neighbors to politicians and celebrities? More painfully, why do I judge people I love the most – my wife, my family, my friends? Why do I judge God?

I think we judge because it feels like protection to us. When we make the call, we are in control. We can blame others for our pain. We don’t have to own the problems we’ve helped create. And in the case of life’s biggest issues, we don’t have to struggle with a sense of hopelessness – we distract ourselves, perhaps, with our angry, hurting blame of others for our plight.

Unfortunately, judging has a nasty, horrible side effect. The more we judge, the more isolated we become – from those we love and need the most, and from our greatest advocate, God. It first happened in the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve judged God’s advice to be errant. Turned out God was accurate, and they were left naked and alone, estranged from each other and from God. Oh, how history repeats itself! How many times have each of us cast our judgment on any number of things, only to find out we didn’t quite have it right, and our brashness has left us feeling alone.

We can’t see everything or know everything. We cannot judge others because we are in no position to do so. We can pursue justice, but we cannot malign the heart of others along the way – we just don’t have the perspective required. And we can’t be God, let alone judge God for not being God the way we would if we could.

We can rest in the knowledge that God is good, that God can be trusted, that we can feel remorse for awful things that occur in our broken world, but that we can also walk in hopeful faith that God can and will bring it all together in the end, and everyone will say, “Well done.”