Are You Fit to Judge?

Who are you to judge one man good and another evil?

Good morning!

Can you really, truly, sit in the seat of judgment?

I watched a great movie with friends over the weekend, and there was a part of it that really stuck out to me; in conversing about good and evil, life and death, the protagonist found himself face-to-face with Wisdom, who showed him a unique perspective on life.

We tend to see good as actions that generally benefit ourselves or those around us, whereas we often perceive evil as actions that hurt us or those we love. However, using ourselves as a standard falls short very quickly the moment we realize that not everything we’ve done has been beneficial to all those we’ve come into contact with over the years.

It’s incredibly easy to judge others and their actions based purely on how we feel mistreated or wronged; however, what we don’t see and don’t immediately recognize are the deep-seated wounds inside the hearts of the people that hurt us. Yes, your boss or your coworker may have just snapped at you with the biggest insult you received in months, but you have no idea whether they just had a loved one die, are having a bad day, or are pressured to create money out of thin air to pay their debtors.

Whatever the case, I would say it is very incredibly rare for anybody to desire to be evil. Nobody wants to be wicked when they grow up. Morality is slowly bent, edged forward into ungodliness by hurts and wounds and betrayals of trust.

There’s a whole chain of events that lead up to every circumstance, and you can never know what sort of traumas and horrors people have experienced which have caused them to say or do things they really shouldn’t have.

In the end, yes, there are moral absolutes we need to live by, situations where we draw the line in the sand and say, “This action is universally accepted to be unacceptable.” However, when it comes to judging the lesser infractions in our lives, I think it might just be best to judge ourselves harsher and more critically than we judge those around us, just to be safe.

God bless you, have a great day!

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