MAKING RIGHTEOUS JUDGMENTS

John 7:21-30
"Jesus answered and said to them, "I did one work, and you all marvel.
"Moses therefore gave you circumcision (not that it is from Moses, but from the fathers), and you circumcise a man on the Sabbath.
"If a man receives circumcision on the Sabbath, so that the law of Moses should not be broken, are you angry with Me because I made a man completely well on the Sabbath?
"DO NOT JUDGE ACCORDING TO APPEARANCE, BUT JUDGE WITH RIGHTEOUS JUDGMENT."
Now some of them from Jerusalem said, "Is this not He whom they seek to kill?
"But look! He speaks boldly, and they say nothing to Him. Do the rulers know indeed that this is truly the Christ?
"However, we know where this Man is from; but when the Christ comes, no one knows where He is from."
Then Jesus cried out, as He taught in the temple, saying, "You both know Me, and you know where I am from; I have not come of Myself, but He who sent Me is true, whom you do not know.
"But I know Him, for I am from Him, and He sent Me." Therefore they sought to take Him; but no one laid a hand on Him, because His hour had not yet come."

Message:
The time....six months before the crucifixion.
The place....In Jerusalem.
The moment....the Feast of Tabernacles is in full celebration and Jesus has arrived in the middle of the feast. He did not go to the feast to celebrate, He went there to teach.
His teaching so amazed His listeners that they marveled, saying, "How does this Man know letters, haying never studied?"
Jesus taught as one having authority...not as the scribes who always referred to the teachings of ancient Rabbis for their authority. Jesus would say..."You have heard it said, but I say unto you." Jesus spoke with authority without relying on license or degree to legitimize His teaching. Jesus did not dress like

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a rabbi, but He applied the Scriptures as no rabbi they had ever heard.
Jesus proceeds to tell them where His teaching is from..."My teaching is not Mine, but His who sent Me." It originated from God!
Jesus kept saying that God had sent Him. That means not only that God had acted in love in the past and that He would act in love in the future, but that He was acting in love now. The mission of Jesus meant that God was taking action to bring about salvation, and that colored everything He said and did. Specifically, His teaching was the teaching of the God who sent Him on His mission of salvation!
Jesus, then, is saying that His teaching should be accepted because it was God's teaching. He knows that, but how are His hearers to know it? He says it is a matter of the will. The set of the life is important. If anyone really "wills to do His will," that person will know the truth of Jesus' teaching (v.l7). It is a matter of being completely sincere. The genuine person, the one who simply wants to do what is right and who wills to do the will of God, that person will have an inner certainty. The Spirit of God will be at work with his spirit and will lead him into, the ways of truth (John 16:13). He will have a divinely given certainty and that is above all price. Jesus is emphasizing that the right attitude towards God is all important.
Jesus continues His teachings about the genuineness of the teacher. He is speaking primarily of Himself, for it is His teaching that is being questioned, but what He says applies in lesser measure to all who teach in the name of God. The person who has his eye fixed on "his own glory" will necessarily speak "of himself"; such an attitude is incompatible with speaking the message of God. As we see from Jesus' lowly life and from His lowly service in going to the cross for sinners, He had no self-seeking. His teaching was genuinely from God.
One wise man has well said that "it is impossible at one and the same time to give the impression that Jesus is a great Savior and that I am a great preacher. If the Christian teacher is anxious to draw attention to himself, he cannot point people to Christ!

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Those who seek to know God's will and do it will be guided by the Holy Spirit to realize that Jesus told the truth about Himself. We use the following test in determining the validity of religious speakers:
(1) Their words should agree with, not contradict, the Bible in its entirety.
(2) Their words should glorify God and His will, not themselves.
(3) Their message should not only challenge our present way of living but also show us in the light of the Bible what corrections need to be made in our attitudes and way of life.
V. 19 in the chapter we are studying today, Jesus seems to change the subject to turn the attention on them instead of Himself. He says: "Did not Moses give you the law? Yet none of you keeps the law. Why are you looking for an opportunity to kill me?"
Jesus alluded to the debate He had with the Jews during His last visit to Jerusalem (5:18). Because Jesus had healed a man on the Sabbath and then directly implied His equality with God, His Father, the Jewish religious leaders wanted to kill Him for Sabbath-breaking and blasphemy. The Pharisees tried to achieve holiness by meticulously keeping the rules that they had added to God's laws. Jesus' opponents have been criticizing Him and rejecting His teaching. They maintained that they were doing this because they held to what Moses taught, and everyone knew that God had spoken through Moses. Now Jesus points out that their loyalty to Moses was suspect. "None of you keeps the law," He says. That would have been a shocking accusation to them. The Law was more than a subject that they thought of only occasionally. It was the center of their study and their model for living. Constantly they tried to live as the Law directed...or at least, that is the way they saw it!
But now Jesus asks, "Why are you trying to kill Me? This was certainly not in accordance with the Law. Remember, the multitude in Jerusalem at that time would have been largely made up of pilgrims from a wide area. Most were not aware of the plot by the religious leaders in Jerusalem to kill Him. Thus their reaction was one of shock, thus their reaction!
"Why do you seek to kill Me?"

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"Jesus answered and said unto them, "I have done one work, and ye all marvel." Christ ignored this horrible charge. When He was reviled, He reviled not again. The 'one work' which He referred to was the incident that happened the year previous when He had healed the man by the pool who was ill for thirty-eight years! To them, it was not a miracle, but a breaking of the Sabbath rules. It was a form of work!
Our Lord continued to point out how unreasonable was their criticism of Himself for healing the impotent man on the Sabbath day. He reminds them that circumcision was performed on the Sabbath; why then should they complain because He had made a poor sufferer whole on that day! By this argument Christ teaches us that works of necessity and works of mercy may be legitimately performed on the Sabbath. Circumcision was a work of necessity if the Law of Moses was to be observed, for if the infant reached its eighth day on the Sabbath, it was then he must be circumcised. The healing of the impotent man was a work of mercy. Thus are we permitted to engage in both works of necessity and works of mercy on the holy Sabbath.
By referring to the patriarchs performing circumcision Jesus was pointing to an authority and principle prior to Moses. By healing the whole person, Jesus demonstrated that His creative power was equal to God's and superior to Moses'.
Jesus argues that if the Sabbath law may rightly be suspended for the removal of a small piece of tissue from one part of the body, it cannot be wrong to heal a man's whole body on the Sabbath day. This type of argument, in fact, was used by some rabbis to justify medical treatment in a case of urgency on the Sabbath, but Jesus uses it to justify an act of healing whether the case is urgent or not.
Jesus was not saying that the Sabbath should not be kept. Nor was He saying that the rules for the Sabbath were too strict and that there should be some relaxation. He was saying that His critics did not understand what the Sabbath meant and why it had been instituted. He was saying that if they reflected on the meaning of their regular practice with regard to circumcision, they would see this for themselves. The Law of Moses provided for circumcision on the eighth day, and the need of the little baby to be included

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among God's covenant people by the use of this rite overrode the requirements of Sabbath observance. Think what this means! The person is more important than the rules. The Law itself bears witness to this. So with Jesus' healing...it was concerned not with one member of the body (as circumcision was), but with the "entire man." If His critics understood what the Law meant, they would see that the kind of thing He had done in healing the lame man was not only permitted but required by the Law!
Just for a moment, let's consider briefly this whole matter of the Sabbath. Is it still God's intention that we should continue to worship on the Sabbath? Why do Christians worship on Sunday and not on the Sabbath? Jesus kept the Sabbath, but not the Halakic interpretations of it; in the process He reminded men and women that the purpose of the Sabbath institution was for their benefit. In accordance with this He did not hesitate to heal and to carry out His authority on the Sabbath. At the same time Jesus' messianic claim in relation to the Sabbath pointed to a transcendence of the institution, just as Jesus' ministry as a whole anticipates the change to a new order, which is brought about by His death and resurrection. From the perspective of this new order, various New Testament writers are able to see Jesus' whole mission in terms of its fulfillment of Sabbath motifs and Sabbath demands. Christ is the one who has brought the true Sabbath rest and the end time into the course of history, and, though Jewish Christians continued to observe them, the Sabbath aspects of the Mosaic economy were no longer binding on believers. Instead, the first day of the week assumed increasing importance because it was associated with Christ's resurrection and His appearance on the first day of the week, and the day became known as the Lord's Day. Its significance was in terms of worship of the risen Lord and there was no transference to this day of the necessity for the physical rest that was the constitutive element of the Old Testament Sabbath and its demands. This interpretation of the early church's view of the first day of the week is reinforced in the post-apostolic literature of the second and third centuries, A.D. where the day continues to be mentioned in a similar way. So from the early days of the Christian Church, the day of worship took place on the Lord's Day which was the first day of the week!

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Back to our text in John seven...Jesus completes His argument concerning the Sabbath and their criticism of Him for healing the lame man. He then makes the demand...DO NOT JUDGE ACCORDING TO APPEARANCE, BUT JUDGE WITH RIGHTEOUS JUDGMENT." (v. 24)
At the first sight, it may appear that Jesus' words here in this verse contradict His teaching in Matthew 7:1, but upon careful reflection, there is no contradiction.
Here is what Jesus said in Matthew 7 about judging: "Judge not, that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you."
Jesus preached against judgmentalism, the act of condemning others by comparing them to our own "superior" behavior. Such self-righteousness would not fit with kingdom values. This teaching condemns false judgment based on outward appearances (superficial, physical interpretations.)
It was a very superficial judgment which condemned Him for performing such a good deed on the Sabbath. Righteous judgment would penetrate beneath surface appearances and judge according to the spirit and purpose of the law. The connection between this verse and the preceding ones is clear. Christ had been vindicating His act of healing the impotent man on the Sabbath. To His superficial critics it might have seemed a breach of the Sabbatical law; but in reality it was not so. Their judgment was hasty and partial. They were looking for something they might condemn, and so seized upon this. But their verdict, as is usually the case when hurried and prejudiced, was altogether erroneous. Jesus was exhorting them to be fair; to take into account all the circumstances; to weigh all the facts.
This is the word which each of us much need to take to heart! Let's talk about this whole matter of making judgments on others.
In the Matthew 7 passage we have just referred to, Jesus gave us three great reasons why no man should judge another.
(1) We never know the whole facts or the whole person. Long ago Hillel the famous Rabbi said, "Do not judge a man until you yourself have come into his circumstances or situation."

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No man knows the strength of another man's temptations. The man brought up in a good home and in Christian surroundings knows nothing of the temptation of the man brought up in the slum, or in a place where evil stalks abroad. The fact is that if we realized what some people have to go through, so far from condemning them, we would be amazed that they have succeeded in being as good as they are!
No more do we know the whole person. In one set of circumstances a person may be unlovely and graceless; in another that same person may be a tower of strength and beauty. Everyone has something good in him or her. Our task is not to condemn, and to judge by the superficial unloveliness, but to look for the underlying beauty. That is what we would have others do to us, and that is what we must do to them.
(2) It is almost impossible for any man to be strictly impartial in his judgment. Again and again we are swayed by instinctive and unreasoning reactions to people. It is told that sometimes, when the Greeks held a particularly important and difficult trial, they held it in the dark so that judge and jury would not even see the man on trial, and so would be influenced by nothing but the facts of the case.
Only a completely impartial person has a right to judge. It is not in human nature to be completely impartial, only God can judge!
(3) No man is good enough to judge any other man. Jesus drew a vivid picture of a man with a plank in his own eye trying to extract a speck of dust from someone else's eye. The humor of the picture would raise a laugh which would drive the lesson home. Only the faultless has a right to look for the faults in others.
Jesus reminds us in this Matthew text that with the measure that we judge, we will be judged! If you dump buckets full of judgment on others, you yourself will have buckets of judgment dumped on you!
Just a point of clarification here. Jesus does not condemn our forming an opinion of the conduct of others, for it is impossible not to form opinions. This command refers to rash, censorious, and unjust judgment expressed and acted upon. Jesus is referring of forming a judgment hastily, harshly, and without an allowance for every palliating circumstance, and then expressing such an opinion unnecessarily.

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Romans 2:1-3
"Therefore you are inexcusable, 0 man, whoever you are who judge, for in whatever you judge another you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things. But we know that the judgment of God is according to truth against those who practice such things.
And do you think this, 0 man, you who judge those practicing such things, and doing the same, that you will escape the judgment of God?"
Romans 14:4-13
"Who are you to judge another's servant? To his own master he stands or falls. Indeed, he will be made to stand, for God is able to make him stand. One person esteems one day above another; another esteems every day alike. Let each be fully convinced in his own mind.
He who observes the day, observes it to the Lord; and he who does not observe the day, to the Lord he does not observe it. He who eats, eats to the Lord, for he gives God thanks; and he who does not eat, to the Lord he does not eat, and gives God thanks.
For none of us lives to himself, and no one dies to himself.
For if we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. Therefore, whether we live or die, we are the Lord's.
For to this end Christ died and rose and lived again, that He might be Lord of both the dead and the living.
BUT WHY DO YOU JUDGE YOUR BROTHER? OR WHY DO YOU SHOW CONTEMPT FOR YOUR BROTHER? For we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ.
For it is written: As I live says the Lord, every knee shall bow to Me, and every tongue confess to God." So then each of us shall give account of himself to God.
THEREFORE LET US NOT JUDGE ONE ANOTHER ANYMORE, BUT RATHER RESOLVE THIS, NOT TO PUT A STUMBLING BLOCK OR A CAUSE TO FALL IN OUR BROTHER'S WAY."
James 4:11-12 "Do not speak evil of one another, brethren. He who speaks evil of a brother and judges his brother, speaks evil of the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law, but a judge. There is one Lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy. Who are you to judge another?"
Opinions...yes! But harsh, censorious judgments...NO!