They Are Not Your Judge and You Are Not Theirs

I have lived long enough now to have watched a thing all the way through, from the start of it to the far end, which is not something you can do in a hurry.

Here is what I have watched.

I have known a good many people who had something happen. Some of it their own doing and some of it not, and I am not going to sort that out on a page. And what I noticed, over forty years, is that the thing itself is almost never what finished them.

What finished them was the arrangement they made afterwards.

There is a peace that gets offered to a person in your position, and it is offered kindly and by people who love you, and it goes like this: they were unfair to you. They were harsh. They should have known better, and if they had known what you were carrying that year they would never have looked at you that way, and honestly, when you consider what some of them have got in their own cupboards, they are hardly in a position.

Now. I want to say two things about that, and I want to say them in the right order.

The first is that some of it is true. It is often true. People are frequently harsher than they ought to be, and they do frequently have things in their own cupboards, and if you have felt the unfairness of it, you were not imagining it.

The second is that a peace built out of those sentences will not hold, and I have watched it fail on a great many good people.

Because that arrangement requires the other people to be small. It only works while they stay small. Which means you have to keep them small, and keeping a person small is daily work, and it is the kind of work that hollows out the one doing it long before it ever reaches the one it is aimed at.

I have sat with people at eighty who were still doing it. Sharp as anything, hands like paper, and still keeping five people small in a room where four of them had been dead for a decade.

So no. We are not going to build your peace out of that. There is a plainer arrangement in Scripture, and it costs less and lasts longer.

I will not ask you what happened, either. It is not mine and I do not need it.

One bench, and it is not yours and it is not theirs

Paul says something in Corinthians that is so plain it takes a minute to feel how much it moves.

For I know nothing by myself; yet am I not hereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord.1 Corinthians 4:4

Three steps in one verse, and each one takes something out of your hands.

The first: I know nothing by myself. He means his own conscience is clear as far as he can see. He is not aware of anything against him.

The second, and this is the one that stops people: yet am I not hereby justified. His clear conscience does not settle it. A clean feeling about yourself is not a verdict, and Paul will not treat it as one.

The third: he that judgeth me is the Lord. One bench. One person on it. And it is not Paul, and it is not the Corinthians who had been picking over him for a year.

Look what that does to the whole room at once.

You are not on trial before anybody in that room and you have not been appointed to try them either, and 1 Corinthians 4:4 clears both benches in one sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who walks an old grievance out of a house it has lived in for years.

Do you see how much lighter that is than the other arrangement? Nobody has to be made small. Not them, and not you. The verse does not require you to decide they were wicked, and it does not require you to decide you were fine. It simply moves the whole business to the only bench that was ever going to hold it.

And there is mercy in the middle step that people miss. Not hereby justified means that your own verdict on yourself does not count either, and if you have been the harshest judge you have got, that is where the sentence lands.

You have been holding a court you were never seated in, and 1 Corinthians 4:4 says the Lord is the one who judges, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to reach a finding about anybody before He gives you rest.

I want to say a word about those people now, since we have got this far.

They owe you nothing. Not an apology, not a changed mind, not the afternoon where it is finally put right. Some of them were hurt, and if they were, that is real and it is theirs, and none of it gets tidied up by a paragraph from an old woman. Some of them may be carrying things about that time that you will never learn about.

And you are not their judge, which means you do not have to work out which of those is true before you can be at peace. That is the part that gets missed. The verse does not just release you from their bench. It releases you from having to hold the file at all. 1 Corinthians 4:5 says the Lord brings the hidden things to light in His own time, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting on your findings before He gives you rest.