June 28, 2016: Day 30 – Romans 2

Isn’t it nice to know that God shows no partiality?  Wait, did you catch the context in which God doesn’t show partiality.  It is for those who fall short of the glory of God, that is all of us, and so all of us deserve the death that follows a sentence.  Vs. 11 tells us that God shows no partiality within the context of judgment and that stems from a very strong statement in vs. 1 that we have no excuse when we judge others.  Judging others is an interesting topic.   

Consistently when Jesus commands us not to judge others (Matthew 7:1-6), he doesn’t say flatly: don’t judge.  Rather, he says we are not to judge, otherwise we will be judged with the same judgement.  The same happens with the adulterous woman.  When she is brought into the square to be stoned Jesus says whoever is without sin can throw the first stone.  So once again reinforcing that judgment comes only when we are not guilty of the sin against which we are judging.  We must take the log out of our own eye before we take out the miniscule splinter.  But having said that, Jesus does not say: Do not judge.   Period.   

Every single day we make judgments.  We have to in order to survive.  We evaluate what is good for us and what is bad.  We make decisions and judgments based on all sorts of input and analysis.  You cannot go through life without judging, without placing value and importance on some things and less value on others.  It is what we do when we make decisions.  When we make decisions in regards to people, then Jesus gives us a whole separate framework under which to work.  The framework comes from the thought that we are all made with the same clay/dirt/muck and mire that was on the ground on that 6th day of creation.  God did not make some from special mud and others from the mud that he got on the discount shelf.  We are all judged by God the same…we are sinners who have been redeemed by the blood of the lamb.

With that in mind then we can judge others if we take inventory of our lives and see the sin of our lives and address it.  I think what we will find is that as we address our own sin, the sins of others tend to get murkier and murkier until we find ourselves so engrossed in making ourselves right before God that we forget the sins that we were “outing” in others.  In the legendary words of Dire Straits…”When you point your finger cos your plan fell through
You got three more fingers pointing back at you.”  If you want to hear the song…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Adz7yCXZG18

Nuff said, I’ve always wanted to end a blog with the lyrics of Dire Straits.