Judging
This week's study is on the magnificent 1 Corinthians 5, the whole chapter:
I was caught up reading the Bible last night. I tore through Romans and kept on going into 1 Corinthians. I couldn't put it down. Reading the Bible is like drinking water. Sometimes you just sort of choke it down because you know it's healthy, but other times you're just so thirsty for it that you can't stop yourself.
The question had been on my mind about what judging is. "Don't judge" is our society's way of saying "Move along, go back to sleep." For the most part, it helps people to get along with one another, but as a result, people have no concept of sin. There is no idea of wickedness. Everything is made out to be OK in our society, except for being intolerant or offended. Everyone is free to do as they want, except for those who are awake and feel the grief of the Holy Spirit. We live in a society that has not forgotten God, but who has made a conscious effort to reject and ignore him. The only people who are the objects of shame in our society are those who obey and understand the word of God and acknowledge Him as Lord.
But what happens when that creeps into the church as it did in Paul's day? A man was having an affair with his father's wife. (By saying his father's wife and not his mother, they're probably implying an older man who remarried with a younger woman, who then had an affair with his son who was closer to her age.) This was an outrageous thing, just deep serious immorality. It would have been shocking to anyone at the time. Instead of realizing how out of order it was, the people in the Corinthian church proudly embraced it.
Other translations describe them as being arrogant. Arrogance deadens people to the conviction of the Holy Spirit. (How can someone so right possibly be wrong?) People boasted about themselves, perhaps about their church. "Look at how much grace we have! Can any church be as awesome as our church?" Maybe they boasted about the adulterous son too. "Look at what Jimmy gets away with! He's so awesome! His old dad probably doesn't even know!"
Paul's response is that it is not awesome at all, certainly nothing to brag about. It's the opposite. It's horrible. They should be mourning for it. "Oh no! Please tell me it isn't true! Not Jimmy! That's terrible! How did it happen? Oh God, why?" The guy they're celebrating has chosen a road that leads out of God's kingdom. He hasn't left yet, but he's on his way. If you start ignoring God's will in one area, pretty soon you've ignored him entirely.
And they're celebrating that? Would they be celebrating him getting ready to jump off a bridge, swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills, or putting a gun in his mouth? Why would something that leads to death be a cause for celebration? Paul's prescription was to excommunicate the guy, throw him out on the street for awhile and let him fend for himself. Tell him to quit pretending he's a Christian if he's going to ignore God's will and do what he wants. Harsh.
That response is at odds with what our society tells us. "How can you say that someone is wrong? You might offend them. You might not be fully understanding their circumstances. You might be subconsciously perpetrating the oppression of the patriarchy. You might be narrow minded, racist, intolerant, bigoted, a bitter clinger who refuses to get with the program. Aren't all values and opinions equal?" If you imply that there is a right and a
wrong, you threaten that whole system of control. To imply that there is a concrete right and a concrete wrong implies that there is a God and that he is known to us. No other argument makes a position like Paul's defensible.
So are incest and adultery really wrong? Is it possible that Paul was just quibbling over some detail of the law that was specific to the Israelites' ancient wanderings? In almost every case where God challenges men, in the Old Testament and in the New, he condemns sexual immorality, idolatry, murder, etc. He is remarkably consistent. So if you combine the conviction of the Holy Spirit with a God who is consistent throughout the Bible in his position on these issues, your best conclusion is that there are some things which are absolutely wrong every time. So what do you do with that? Ignore it like the Corinthian church did? That's what society says to do. What does God say?
But before we get to that, does it do you any good to challenge someone on something when they don't believe in God or read the Bible? No! That's why Paul says we're to judge the church, not the world around us. You need only look at the sandwich board guys outside college campuses to see how ineffective that is for sharing God with people. "YOU FORNICATORS AND DRUNKARDS! YOU ARE ALL GOING TO HELL WITHOUT JESUS!" Without a concept of a God, or of a hell, or of God's redemptive power, those words mean nothing. What makes fornication wrong? What makes idolatrous addictions wrong? Without the stuff Christians should know, those things mean nothing. And that's what's destroying America, in a nutshell. People have rejected God, ignored his voice, and have chosen lawlessness without seeking redemption. So in being good citizens, we're being bad Christians.
So why judge the church? Doesn't Jesus say not to judge? Was Jesus wrong? Doesn't Paul say all over the place not to judge? Is Paul a hypocrite? No! We're not supposed to judge in terms of superiority or in terms of traditions. There's no gleeful "You're going to hell but I'm not because I have tassels on my robe and you don't." The Pharisees separated themselves from the people around them in an air of superiority. That's what Jesus was condemning. The air of superiority. The need to fix everyone else without fixing themselves. But what if you are trying to fix yourself too? Jesus talks about confronting sin in Matthew 18:15-17 Is Jesus a hypocrite then, or is a blanket legalistic interpretation of "do not judge" wrong?
As Christians, as Christ's Body, we're supposed to look out for our own. Why did God create our bodies with immune systems and gag reflexes? If a servant who loves his master sees his fellow servant sleeping on the job or stealing from his master, should he turn a blind eye and keep his mouth shut? Only if he loves neither his master nor his fellow servant. Should a shepherd ignore the wolf in the flock because he doesn't want to hurt any of God's creatures by slinging a rock at it? How are you supposed to tell the wolf from the sheep if you don't judge by actions and appearances? "Hmm. It doesn't look like the sheep, or act like them, and the other sheep are running from it, and it's ripping the throat out of one of the sheep. Hmm. I should order another book from Amazon on wildlife identification because I could still be wrong about this."
So what Paul describes is judging in love, not in hatred. It's identifying the wolf. In the case of the sexually immoral man committing adultery, he was a man who claimed to be a spirit-filled Christian but was ignoring the Spirit of God, even denying it by his actions. Is that helpful to people who are learning to hear God's Spirit? Is it helpful to the adulterer to think that what he's doing is right and good and that no change is necessary? Is it behavior you want modeled, something you want others to emulate and copy? Do you want people to stop and say "This is good enough," denying God's power in changing them fully into Christ's image?
Just as arrogant legalism spreads through the body like yeast through bread dough, arrogant lawlessness will infect those around it. Paul says don't even eat with those people when they're like that, when people have reasoned with them and they've still chosen to ignore the conviction of the Holy Spirit and continue in defiance of God, all while calling themselves Christians. Their compromise quickly becomes yours.
Excommunication is mercy. It's saying "In the Old Testament, we'd have had to drag you out into a field and bash your head in with rocks until you died a horrible death. We don't want to hurt you, let alone kill you. But we can't have you pretending to be one of us and leading people astray. Go do what you want, but do it elsewhere." It's temporary. We should always accept them back when they've turned away from the sin we sent them away for. Paul describes it as turning them over to Satan to get it out of their system now before they're held accountable for it in eternity.
It's like exiling someone who does something that's illegal in your country but not in the one they came from. "Go live in Saudi Arabia if you want to practice Sharia law, but we don't cut people's hands off here. And maybe in the process, you'll remember why you left Saudi Arabia in the first place and leave that stuff behind this time." If you want to ignore God's word and do what the people who don't know him do, do it there, not here where it infects the innocent.
Nobody excommunicates anymore. The Church was so corrupt in our early history that it was abused to the point of ridiculousness. But in retiring it, have we lost a sense of the seriousness of sin? And in our eagerness to please and not judge and be all multicultural and accepting, have we begun to do the same with the conviction of the Holy Spirit? In our back-slapping celebration over having defeated the mercilessness of legalism, have we invited lawlessness among us as our new conquerer?
Take some time to think and pray about this. Is it worth allowing wolves to devour the flock just to avoid getting judged for judging? Is it worth losing a friend to save your friendship? In the process of not living under the law, is it worth rejecting the God who wrote it? There has to be a happy medium between confronting everything and confronting nothing. The only way to get it right is to really know the heart of God. Paul's attitude on the subtleties of judging things is the closest I've seen yet, but it can't stand alone without a connection to God himself.
It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: A man is sleeping with his father’s wife. And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have gone into mourning and have put out of your fellowship the man who has been doing this? For my part, even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit. As one who is present with you in this way, I have already passed judgment in the name of our Lord Jesus on the one who has been doing this. So when you are assembled and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.
Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people.
What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked person from among you.”
I was caught up reading the Bible last night. I tore through Romans and kept on going into 1 Corinthians. I couldn't put it down. Reading the Bible is like drinking water. Sometimes you just sort of choke it down because you know it's healthy, but other times you're just so thirsty for it that you can't stop yourself.
The question had been on my mind about what judging is. "Don't judge" is our society's way of saying "Move along, go back to sleep." For the most part, it helps people to get along with one another, but as a result, people have no concept of sin. There is no idea of wickedness. Everything is made out to be OK in our society, except for being intolerant or offended. Everyone is free to do as they want, except for those who are awake and feel the grief of the Holy Spirit. We live in a society that has not forgotten God, but who has made a conscious effort to reject and ignore him. The only people who are the objects of shame in our society are those who obey and understand the word of God and acknowledge Him as Lord.
But what happens when that creeps into the church as it did in Paul's day? A man was having an affair with his father's wife. (By saying his father's wife and not his mother, they're probably implying an older man who remarried with a younger woman, who then had an affair with his son who was closer to her age.) This was an outrageous thing, just deep serious immorality. It would have been shocking to anyone at the time. Instead of realizing how out of order it was, the people in the Corinthian church proudly embraced it.
Other translations describe them as being arrogant. Arrogance deadens people to the conviction of the Holy Spirit. (How can someone so right possibly be wrong?) People boasted about themselves, perhaps about their church. "Look at how much grace we have! Can any church be as awesome as our church?" Maybe they boasted about the adulterous son too. "Look at what Jimmy gets away with! He's so awesome! His old dad probably doesn't even know!"
Paul's response is that it is not awesome at all, certainly nothing to brag about. It's the opposite. It's horrible. They should be mourning for it. "Oh no! Please tell me it isn't true! Not Jimmy! That's terrible! How did it happen? Oh God, why?" The guy they're celebrating has chosen a road that leads out of God's kingdom. He hasn't left yet, but he's on his way. If you start ignoring God's will in one area, pretty soon you've ignored him entirely.
And they're celebrating that? Would they be celebrating him getting ready to jump off a bridge, swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills, or putting a gun in his mouth? Why would something that leads to death be a cause for celebration? Paul's prescription was to excommunicate the guy, throw him out on the street for awhile and let him fend for himself. Tell him to quit pretending he's a Christian if he's going to ignore God's will and do what he wants. Harsh.
That response is at odds with what our society tells us. "How can you say that someone is wrong? You might offend them. You might not be fully understanding their circumstances. You might be subconsciously perpetrating the oppression of the patriarchy. You might be narrow minded, racist, intolerant, bigoted, a bitter clinger who refuses to get with the program. Aren't all values and opinions equal?" If you imply that there is a right and a
wrong, you threaten that whole system of control. To imply that there is a concrete right and a concrete wrong implies that there is a God and that he is known to us. No other argument makes a position like Paul's defensible.
So are incest and adultery really wrong? Is it possible that Paul was just quibbling over some detail of the law that was specific to the Israelites' ancient wanderings? In almost every case where God challenges men, in the Old Testament and in the New, he condemns sexual immorality, idolatry, murder, etc. He is remarkably consistent. So if you combine the conviction of the Holy Spirit with a God who is consistent throughout the Bible in his position on these issues, your best conclusion is that there are some things which are absolutely wrong every time. So what do you do with that? Ignore it like the Corinthian church did? That's what society says to do. What does God say?
But before we get to that, does it do you any good to challenge someone on something when they don't believe in God or read the Bible? No! That's why Paul says we're to judge the church, not the world around us. You need only look at the sandwich board guys outside college campuses to see how ineffective that is for sharing God with people. "YOU FORNICATORS AND DRUNKARDS! YOU ARE ALL GOING TO HELL WITHOUT JESUS!" Without a concept of a God, or of a hell, or of God's redemptive power, those words mean nothing. What makes fornication wrong? What makes idolatrous addictions wrong? Without the stuff Christians should know, those things mean nothing. And that's what's destroying America, in a nutshell. People have rejected God, ignored his voice, and have chosen lawlessness without seeking redemption. So in being good citizens, we're being bad Christians.
So why judge the church? Doesn't Jesus say not to judge? Was Jesus wrong? Doesn't Paul say all over the place not to judge? Is Paul a hypocrite? No! We're not supposed to judge in terms of superiority or in terms of traditions. There's no gleeful "You're going to hell but I'm not because I have tassels on my robe and you don't." The Pharisees separated themselves from the people around them in an air of superiority. That's what Jesus was condemning. The air of superiority. The need to fix everyone else without fixing themselves. But what if you are trying to fix yourself too? Jesus talks about confronting sin in Matthew 18:15-17 Is Jesus a hypocrite then, or is a blanket legalistic interpretation of "do not judge" wrong?
As Christians, as Christ's Body, we're supposed to look out for our own. Why did God create our bodies with immune systems and gag reflexes? If a servant who loves his master sees his fellow servant sleeping on the job or stealing from his master, should he turn a blind eye and keep his mouth shut? Only if he loves neither his master nor his fellow servant. Should a shepherd ignore the wolf in the flock because he doesn't want to hurt any of God's creatures by slinging a rock at it? How are you supposed to tell the wolf from the sheep if you don't judge by actions and appearances? "Hmm. It doesn't look like the sheep, or act like them, and the other sheep are running from it, and it's ripping the throat out of one of the sheep. Hmm. I should order another book from Amazon on wildlife identification because I could still be wrong about this."
So what Paul describes is judging in love, not in hatred. It's identifying the wolf. In the case of the sexually immoral man committing adultery, he was a man who claimed to be a spirit-filled Christian but was ignoring the Spirit of God, even denying it by his actions. Is that helpful to people who are learning to hear God's Spirit? Is it helpful to the adulterer to think that what he's doing is right and good and that no change is necessary? Is it behavior you want modeled, something you want others to emulate and copy? Do you want people to stop and say "This is good enough," denying God's power in changing them fully into Christ's image?
Just as arrogant legalism spreads through the body like yeast through bread dough, arrogant lawlessness will infect those around it. Paul says don't even eat with those people when they're like that, when people have reasoned with them and they've still chosen to ignore the conviction of the Holy Spirit and continue in defiance of God, all while calling themselves Christians. Their compromise quickly becomes yours.
Excommunication is mercy. It's saying "In the Old Testament, we'd have had to drag you out into a field and bash your head in with rocks until you died a horrible death. We don't want to hurt you, let alone kill you. But we can't have you pretending to be one of us and leading people astray. Go do what you want, but do it elsewhere." It's temporary. We should always accept them back when they've turned away from the sin we sent them away for. Paul describes it as turning them over to Satan to get it out of their system now before they're held accountable for it in eternity.
It's like exiling someone who does something that's illegal in your country but not in the one they came from. "Go live in Saudi Arabia if you want to practice Sharia law, but we don't cut people's hands off here. And maybe in the process, you'll remember why you left Saudi Arabia in the first place and leave that stuff behind this time." If you want to ignore God's word and do what the people who don't know him do, do it there, not here where it infects the innocent.
Nobody excommunicates anymore. The Church was so corrupt in our early history that it was abused to the point of ridiculousness. But in retiring it, have we lost a sense of the seriousness of sin? And in our eagerness to please and not judge and be all multicultural and accepting, have we begun to do the same with the conviction of the Holy Spirit? In our back-slapping celebration over having defeated the mercilessness of legalism, have we invited lawlessness among us as our new conquerer?
Take some time to think and pray about this. Is it worth allowing wolves to devour the flock just to avoid getting judged for judging? Is it worth losing a friend to save your friendship? In the process of not living under the law, is it worth rejecting the God who wrote it? There has to be a happy medium between confronting everything and confronting nothing. The only way to get it right is to really know the heart of God. Paul's attitude on the subtleties of judging things is the closest I've seen yet, but it can't stand alone without a connection to God himself.
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