In recent days, several Millennial friends have expressed confusion to me on judging vs discerning. So I thought I'd write down a bit of a resource to hopefully help...
These days, we are very cautious about judging one another. We do our best to be understanding of each other's points of view, and to learn from one another in constructive and healthy ways.
For those of us who are Christians, this is a natural reaction to the former status quo, which is still present in some churches, when everyone was deeply judgemental of each other and their behaviours. (When I was growing up, a teenager being reamed out by someone for wearing jeans to an evening church service would not have been unusual.)
So, we do our best to eschew judging one another. And this is good.
However, we struggle with the interplay between Bible verses that say:
"Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."
—Matthew 7:1–2
and
But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.
—Hebrews 5:14
Wait—if we start determining what is good and evil, isn't that encroaching on God's territory? Isn't that judging other people?
In a word: no.
It is good to be aware of our judgemental tendencies, but we need to be careful about discarding wisdom along with judgementalism.
Do you know the origin of the phrase "throw the baby out with the bathwater"?
In olden times, water was scarce, so people didn't clean themselves every day. In fact, the average person would wash only once a year, along with the rest of their family. On bathing day, the tub would be filled, and the entire family would use the same bathwater. As you might imagine, that water would be filthy by the time everyone was done! To dispose of the bathwater, the family would simply throw it out the window and into the grimy streets below.
The water was so murky, that you might not be able to see anything that was accidentally left behind in it. In the intentionally-hilarious example of this saying, the family has forgotten that the baby was also in the bath, and is now hidden by the murky water.
As they go to dispose of their yearly filth, they unintentionally also dispose of something really precious: their baby!
So the idea of this saying is that we need to be careful when we are disposing of filth (i.e., harmful or toxic teachings) because there might be something good and precious that gets lost under the surface.
Actually, this prudent response is the perfect counteragent to some of Satan's strategies. He loves to take a truth, and then twist it a little bit, and twist it a little more, gradually inserting greater and greater lies and toxicity into something that started out good and pure. By the time we wake up and realize how toxic our outlook has become, our natural inclination is to throw it as far away from us as possible.
The problem is that there was often a valuable and important truth in there, hidden by layers of toxicity.
We've "thrown the baby out with the bath water."
Imagine the truth as a small nugget of gold. Over time, the toxicity and lies that Satan has introduced are like impurities that have been attached to that nugget of gold. By the time all of the impurities have been added, the gold may not look like much. It may not even be recognizable as gold.
But there is still something valuable present within that lump. And that valuable thing can still be recovered. It is not lost. It will take cracking and heating and a lot of work and intention to recover the original gold. But it can be done. And—given the value of gold—it’s work worth doing.
In the same way, it takes a lot of work to recover the truth behind Satan's lies—perhaps even melting down our ideas and theologies to remove the impurities from the precious metal of truth.
To that end, the Bible exhorts:
Make your ear attentive to wisdom,
Incline your heart to understanding;
For if you cry for discernment,
Lift your voice for understanding;
If you seek her as silver
And search for her as for hidden treasures;
Then you will discern the fear of the LORD
And discover the knowledge of God.
—Proverbs 2:2–5, emphasis mine
Discernment leads to the knowledge of God. That sounds extremely valuable!
So how do we capture discernment while jettisoning judging?
Next time, we’ll be talking about exactly that.
NOTES
