The final section of the Sermon on the Mount zeroes in on how we treat others. Remember that Jesus is instructing his own disciples. He is not giving prescriptions for how sinners may be justified before God. Rather he is teaching his disciples what it means to be citizens of his kingdom.

The opening words of chapter seven are perhaps the most well known words in the Bible among unbelievers: “Judge not.” Those words are routinely taken by those who wish to remain happy in their sin to mean that it is never appropriate to correct sin and error. But Jesus most certainly is not saying to suspend all good judgment or cease discerning sin from righteousness and truth from error. Indeed, the Sermon on the Mount is filled with instructions to judge the errors of others in order to avoid them. Jesus tells us not to pray “as the Gentiles do” (6:7) or fast “like the hypocrites” (6:16). Our righteousness must exceed that of the Pharisees (5:20). In the present text, Jesus follows his command against sinful judgmentalism with a call to recognize and respond appropriately to those he compares to dogs and swine (vs. 7). As John Stott observes:

“Our Lord’s injunction to ‘judge not’ cannot be understood as a command to suspend our critical faculties in relation to other people, to turn a blind eye to their faults, to eschew all criticism and to refuse to discern between truth and error, goodness and evil.”

What Jesus condemns is made clear in his absurd illustration of a man with a log in his eye busily trying to point out specks in the eyes of others (vv. 3-5). The meaning is clear. Jesus is condemning hypocrisy. He is forbidding the sort of sinful judgmentalism in which someone excuses and even indulges his own sin while condemning the sins of others.

Discernment and sound judgment are virtues to be pursued. But the sort of hypocritical judging by which we excuse our own sin is a vice which only perpetuates itself in the church if not corrected (vs. 2). We should all remember that we live before the face of God and he knows our every sin. Such an awareness ought to make us humble in our judgments of others. But it should also make us merciful as we consider the mercy that our Judge has shown to us.