GodSprings - 11, June, 2017

Am I Able to Judge Who I Am?

“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.”

Matthew 7:3-5

Once upon a time in Persia there was a judge. This judge was bribed. And so he rendered a wrong verdict, for money. Cambyses was the Persian king. And he heard what happened. And so he ordered the judge to be executed. And after the judge was executed, he ordered his soldiers to skin him. Strip off all his skin. He took all of the skin of that judge, and with it, he covered a chair. And on that chair sat every judge from then on who judged in that court in Persia.

We are prejudiced by our own egos and so we are unfit judges. We are partial in our own favour and tend to think we have a different standard than everybody else, because we are hopelessly and utterly blind when it comes to perception.

Most of us when we have a problem with someone else, we focus on what that person did wrong. We think the problem will get better if the other person would change. Jesus tells us what to do in such situations. Jesus says that we must focus on our own weakness and changes we need to make. This does not mean that those around us don’t have faults in their life. Jesus wants us to focus first on what we must do and how we can and must change.

The plank referred to here is the word used for a plank in a large building often 40 feet long and 5 feet around. In other words, if we have a plank this large in our eye it would be utterly impossible to see the speck in our brother’s eye.

The plank is a picture of our self-righteousness. We are totally blinded by it. When it comes to seeing the sins of others we think we have 20/10 vision not realizing that we are blinded by our own self-righteousness. Or to put it in the words of Charles Spurgeon, “we see our brother’s sin with a microscope but we see our sin through the wrong end of a telescope”

As long as we’re self-righteous, and we think we’re all right, there’s no way we are going to help anybody. We are blind and it’s a plank in our own eye.

Let us pray – Dear Lord, help us not to pull splinters out of people’s eyes with a plank in our own eyes and help us see ourselves the way we are. Amen.