Sunday sermon: "Who's the Judge?"

It's a whole lot easier, and more fun, to judge other people than to be judged ourselves. If you watch one of the myriad of TV shows that involve competitors putting themselves through the wringer of performance for a panel of judges, it seems like the judges are having the better time. They can criticize, comment, joke, or insult, and there is no one to call them on the carpet. No matter what they say, the microscope is trained on the competitors, not the critics.

Some of the judges are well-qualified, but others are just there because they are celebrities. It quickly becomes obvious which judges know what they're talking about and which don't. The funniest ones are those who think they know what they're talking about, but demonstrate their ignorance on a regular basis. Still, it must gall someone who works so hard at trying to successfully complete a task when they are criticized by someone who doesn't understand what they are trying to accomplish.

In Romans 2 we find a group of h=judges who are enjoying their time criticizing others when they are not qualified to judge. These judges seek to make everyone else conform to a standard which they don't apply to themselves. What's more, their standard is inadequate. These are people who ought to know better, but who ignore the true standard for one of their own making.

We can fall into that trap ourselves. We hold up the standard of God's Word to the world, but don't follow it ourselves. We make our own rules the standard by which we live, and of course no one else can quite live up to them. By making our own standard, we can make sure that we can live up to it.

Paul tells the Romans that won't work. We aren't the standard; God is. We should know that we don't live up to God's standards, even if we refuse to look at His Word. The scope of creation and our own conscience are enough to tell us we aren't the people we ought to be. We fall short of the standard we see revealed, but instead of looking for a way to meet that standard we simply substitute a lesser one.

The result is that we find ourselves under a more serious judgment. Our Judge is fully qualified to pronounce an absolute and true judgment on us, and it isn't a pretty one. We deserve eternal condemnation. We deserve to be rejected by God and punished for our violation of His holy standard. Until we face up to that reality, we can't hope to be saved from God's wrath.

There is another way to meet that judgment, however. Jesus came and gave Himself as a sacrifice for us, taking on Himself the judgment that we rightly deserved. In His death, Jesus fully paid the price for our sin, and took the judgment of God on Himself. Through faith in Him and His work, we can be freed from the consequences of our judgment, since they have already been paid for by Jesus. We meet God's standard in Jesus.

Judgment is real, and we are subject to it. But God made a way through Jesus Christ to free us from that judgment. Is our faith in the right person? Are we seeking to meet God's standard, or one of our own? We can't look at others and think that we're all right; we have to look toward Jesus and realize we aren't, except in Him.