You Will Not Be Judged By God

I know that my title is stirring up some serious contemplation in a lot of you. Some are in disagreement and curious as to how can he say that? Others are intrigued and hopeful that years of stress and worry can be set aside. And many are defiantly saying that it’s just not true, after all, the Bible addresses the issue and makes it clear that there will be judgment, and by God there had better be!

Before I go further, let’s talk about the elephant in the writing, yes there will be judgment. Notice, however, I indicated it won’t be by God. So once again let me state what I believe upfront; yes I believe there will be judgment but it won’t be done by God.

What are you saying Rick?

Ok, let’s dive in: to begin with we must ask ourselves what is judgment? To boil it down to its basic level, judgment is an opinion formed after consideration. Now, we tend to think that this means that God will consider our lives and the way we lived, then form an opinion based on that consideration. We further believe that based on that consideration that God would only be able to form one of two opinions; either we were good or we were not. If we were good then we would be rewarded with heaven and if we were not then we would be condemned to hell.

Since this is not going to be a discussion about either heaven or hell or even about God’s opinions, let’s steer clear of these issues for now. Perhaps I’ll try to tackle these issues in another blog.

Well then, if I’m saying that there will be a judgment, in other words that an opinion will be formed based on the consideration (in this case of our lives), but it won’t be done by God, then who will form this opinion. The answer is quite simple, and yes Biblical, as I’ll show you, but point blank the one who will be judging you is: You!

How can this be true? Let me show you in scripture. Let’s start with John 5:22 “For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son:” Obviously the Father is God who according to scripture is a Spirit (John 4:24), the creator and again according to scripture a God can’t be seen with human eyes (John 1:18). Hence, God put on or robed himself with flesh and came down to earth to be seen in the form of Jesus who is referred to as the Son. And no I’m not playing semantics with you, since even though Jesus was fully human, he was also fully God.

So does this mean that Jesus will judge us? Again the answer is no, as we see in John 3:17 “For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.” If Jesus was going to judge us then this verse could not be true.

We also see that Jesus helps to clarify and reiterate this point in John 12:47 “And if any man hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not: for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.”

So I think we can conclusively say it won’t be God or Jesus to judge us.

So how do we make the leap to say that we will judge ourselves? Again let’s look at scripture. In a story given about talents and relationship with God, Jesus gives us insight into this in Luke 19:22 “And he saith unto him, Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant. Thou knewest that I was an austere man, taking up that I laid not down, and reaping that I did not sow:”

Even though we get the sense that the one in the story is doing the judging of the individuals, realize that the judgment is solely based upon the individuals own testimony. This is further discovered to be true when we examine Matthew 12:37 “For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.”

Therefore, we start to see that we ourselves will be our own judges. We see one more revelation of this truth in John 5:24 “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.”

What we can put together now is that we are born into this world in a sinful state (due to original sin) and that our very nature as human beings is drawn to sin. Therefore while we think we are living, we are actually dead (zombies if you will) and if we don’t do anything about our condition, we will remain like that. The sad thing is that we by ourselves could never change our condition, so the good thing is that God recognized this and came to our world to change things for us. He spoke words of life and encouragement and if we should follow them we can pass “from death to life”.

By our actions and specifically our words (to others and to ourselves) we begin to find this life because we change (repent) and start doing godly things rather than fleshly things. Hence, once it’s all said and done, God doesn’t have to judge us because we will end up judging ourselves.

I have read literally read hundreds if not thousands of near death experiences of those who have crossed over from this physical life to the spiritual life and there is one thing that seems common to the majority of these experiences. Many have told us that once they have realized that they have died they have stood with spiritual beings and been given a “life review”. It’s a moment they spend watching the story of their life from start to end. They see every choice whether good or bad and they feel every emotion that resulted within themselves and even from those that their choices affected. Then they proceed to say that while watching these reviews that they feel no judgment from the spiritual beings but only from within themselves about how they behaved. I think these stories may very well be true based on the scriptures I have shared with you.

More than anything though is that I think both these stories and scriptures show us that we have a choice while we are living this physical existence to do something to change the outcome. When we know we have failed, we can wallow in that failure or we can learn to forgive ourselves and try better next time. If we wallow, a black cloud begins to form over us making it hard to see any redeeming qualities in us even though they are there (since God’s word confirms we are wonderful – Psalm 139:14). But if we can forgive ourselves then we can also love ourselves and there is no condemnation in love. When we love ourselves we can also forgive and thereby love others. And to go further, if we can love others then we can love God. And if we can love God, then we can become one with him, since scripture tells us that God is love (1-John 4:8), which proves the point and brings us full circle to the fact that God will not judge you.

So may I encourage you to stop being so hard on yourself. Please forgive and let go! Trust God, his word, his ways and most especially his love for you!

God Bless!

Rick