Conflict of interest versus God's pure vision

This week is on John 5:26-30:

For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man.

"Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out—those who have done good will rise to live, and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned. By myself I can do nothing; I judge only as I hear, and my judgment is just, for I seek not to please myself but him who sent me.

Some of the verses in the New Testament urge us to judge, and others urge us not to. These verses do a great job of reconciling the seemingly opposite commands. Jesus talks about judgment here as our example. The authority given to him as God's firstborn child is also available to us as adopted children, yet we're urged not to judge others. How does that work?

By himself, Jesus says, a man can do nothing, but with God he can do anything. When we judge others, we often do so for our own reasons, or for worldly reasons, and we fail. We're not being impartial. Without deferring to God, it's almost impossible to be impartial, because each of us has our own conflicts of interest.

Lets look at a fairly straightforward example of how our interests could conflict with God's interests: Lets say you're a good Christian in a good Christian family. A robber breaks into your home and starts raping and killing your loved ones. He gets distracted for a moment and you have a chance to kill him. As a human being, and as a member of your society, and as a member of that family, and even as a righteous individual, the right thing to do would clearly be to kill the guy before he hurts more people. But what if that guy would have gotten saved a year from now if you hadn't killed him? Your act of righteousness just added one person to the number of people being tormented for eternity and robbed heaven of a potentially grateful citizen. And what would that gain you? What could you possibly offer to pay for sending someone to hell and denying someone a chance at their salvation?

But you might ask, "How could you stand by and allow that sort of thing to happen?" How can we suspend what seems like the right thing to do, if God has a greater plan? If we were put in Jesus' shoes, we probably would never have died for our sins if we'd ignored the divine perspective and looked at things through modern eyes. Maybe we would have argued our case in court. Maybe we would have encouraged the disciples to mount an armed rescue on us from jail. Maybe we would have taken any one of a number of opportunities we had before that to escape. From a self-centered, or world-centered, perspective, the right judgment is to stay alive, to share more gospel, to touch more lives, and so on. But that's not what Jesus did, yet he was absolutely correct.

Jesus judged only as he heard, not in the moment, but in the eternal perspective. People were so wrong to him, but he let it go. He still addressed evil, and he still intervened in some cases, but his judgment was God-centered, not man-centered. God can see eternity, but man can only see the moment, fantasize about the future, and speculate about the past. How can we make a truly right decision without God? Maybe we can get it mostly right through study and good character, but we'll never come close to what we can get with God's informed, impartial counsel.

So, we're supposed to make judgments in what we do, and they need to be God-centered judgments, not selfish and mortal. Decide for grace, for forgiveness, and for second chances, not for condemnation and revenge. Would you condemn someone, or be condemned, eternally, for a tiny moment of evil in a life that's otherwise perfect? Because that's what our lives are when compared to eternity.

And sometimes good stuff we do is worthless, because God has a better plan. What if you worked your whole life, neglecting friends and family, in order to pay for an operation to heal your mother's paralysis, only to find out that God heals her on his own? If you lost your fortune before that point, you'd be furious, because you spent all of that time working towards something, yet God can do a lifetime of our work in an instant. In this case, you spent all that time trying to do one good thing, only to cheat your family and friends out of your love, and not even be able to do that one good thing. From a worldly perspective, you're a total saint, until the day God does something so much better than you could ever do that it's clear that you're a fool!

Unless you include God in your decisions, and defer to him in making your judgments, you're not going to do anything worthwhile for the eternal kingdom of God. We need to judge things in order to make decisions, but those judgments need to be centered in God's value system, not our own. We need to be connected to God because we're blind to eternity, yet we exist in it. The authority we have to judge is only as good as the life we have in us from God. It shouldn't astonish us that when we're lined up at the end of the world together to be judged, that a lot of people are not where we thought they were going to be. Get your place by his side now, while there's still a chance.