"Judge not, that ye be not judged" Matthew 7:1 may be among the most misused Bible verses in the entire Bible. You find people who do not even profess to believe in Christ quoting this verse. People quote this verse even though they may reject the authority of the Bible. One of the greatest insults is that many of the individuals using this verse quote it out of context and would not be able to show you where the verse is found if their life depended on it.

The context I've often heard this verse used in, is where a person is trying to defend some action that is contrary to biblical Christian behavior (for example: someone trying to justify sex outside of marriage between one man and one woman - see I Corinthians 6:9). When this person is shown that the action does not please God, this person will possibly resort to a perverted interpretation and quotation of Matthew 7:1. Essentially, this person uses this perverted interpretation to incorrectly show that Christians should never say someone's actions are wrong. We will look further at what Jesus was saying in Matthew 7:1. But, before we do that, we should look at the word "judge" and at least a couple different types of judgement which one might be party to.

Definition-
Check any decent sized dictionary (i.e. Webster's New Collegiate) and, among the most prominent explanations, you will find the word "judge" defined as follows: "to assess or evaluate the merit, worth or correctness of"

Now, before you say that you never participate in any type of Judgement, let me ask you if you ever assess or evaluate the freshness of grocery products before you purchase them. When you looked at those green bananas, which should be yellow if they were properly ripened, you said something such as: "These bananas are not ripe!" When you made that statement, you have judged (assessed) the ripeness of those bananas. Whether or not you have the authority to make the grocer stop selling un-ripened bananas is an independent issue from your judgement that the bananas are not ripe and therefore not fit for you to buy.

But, you say: "Show me in the Bible where it is okay to judge." There are a number of scriptures which show instances where we must judge. In the following discussion, we share just a few.

St. John 7:24 reads: "Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgement." Here, we have Jesus commanding us not to judge on appearance, as in the case where people look at someone who is dressed in old worn clothes and thereby judges (prejudicially) that person to be untrustworthy or a thief. But, in the same breath, Jesus does tell us to judge righteously - to assess or evaluate based on the relevant evidence.

Now of course there are some things that are not our business to judge. It would be improper for me judge you to be unholy because you eat certain meats which do not appeal to me personally - Indeed, there are no scriptures for the Christian that prohibit you from eating horse meat, or dog meat, or escargot (snails), etc. (see Colossians 2:16)

Or, there may be an issue that is within our sphere in which we must postpone making a judgement because we have insufficient information to make an assessment. The very postponement of judgement is an act of judging itself: we had to judge/assess that there was insufficient information.
 

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