A Good Judge

The recent happenings here at Penn State serve as a vivid reminder that man is woefully deficient as to basic fairness, wisdom and judgment while God is and will always be absolutely impeccable in His evaluations. Decisions have been made without regard to due process and a finding of all the facts so as to quell public emotion for understandably horrendous sins against children.  Yet now more in our area are rightly upset that a knee jerk reaction will continue to hurt an entire community not to mention athletes who had nothing to do with the crimes committed.  Man’s idea of justice is far inferior to the Lord’s   He, unlike many involved with this scandal, never jumps to conclusions or is rash when He judges. His ways are perfect !

Some folks have often asked me as a pastor why God would consign people for eternity to hell, doesn’t that detract from Him being a God of love (1Jn.4:16)?  I argue, how loving is it to reject what He has done to forgive all your sins, reconcile a sinner to a holy God and then enable you to live forever in glory !  He is perfectly within the confines of justice to do with us as He wishes. And it is the unsaved sinner who rightly has put himself in a Christless eternity by living life (that which God graciously gave him) every day for hundreds and hundreds of days caring not for God nor what He’s so graciously done for us all.

But when we hear of apalling verdicts in our courts, knee jerk reactions due to the court of public opinion, unfair punishments meted out by liberal thinking  entities,  it is a lesson to us all that (A) God is always just and  (B) we must strive to be just in all our dealings too.   I preached a message recently about judging from Matthew 7 and there are some sobering and powerful principles  Jesus relates to make us fairer judges when He stated, “. . . with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged. . . first cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote (speck) out of thy brother’s eye.” (vss.2-5).    We must bear in mind how we judge is noticed by God and we’ll be held accountable by Him for it, so this should temper our judgment to be in line with His.  Then we so often tend to do a lot of inspecting of others where Christ says we have our priorities backward: introspection must precede inspection of others !   If we’d keep that straight and evaluate our own heart before others we’d be better prepared to judge/criticize in a  spiritual manner.     Be a good judge/critic and show a warped world that God’s justice is still out there !!