Paul speaks of the need to refrain from judging and evaluating a person. Obviously, here he has in mind the same thing as Jesus Himself, who called His followers not to judge their neighbors. This is precisely the feature that distinguishes...
Paul speaks of the need to refrain from judging and evaluating a person. Obviously, here he has in mind the same thing as Jesus Himself, who called His followers not to judge their neighbors. This is precisely the feature that distinguishes true servants of Christ. The point, of course, is not the evaluation of particular actions or results of activity, for without such evaluation no interaction with people is possible, but the evaluation of the person himself. Often we transfer an evaluation of a person’s particular action or spiritual condition to the person himself, considering him to be nothing more than what he appears to be at the present moment. Yet people are capable of change, and the source of all change is a person’s spiritual “I,” the very thing the Bible calls the heart and that only God sees fully, down to the final depth. Therefore only He can evaluate a person adequately. We can judge fairly only particular words, actions, and results.
But even in this case it is important not to use such evaluations to determine a person’s place in one’s own world, in the world of one’s relationships. In the end, God gives each person his evaluation, and it is not at all important to Him what we think about one another, not because we and our opinions are indifferent to Him, but because our mutual evaluations are almost always quite far from the reality that is open to Him. That is why Paul does not attach special importance to people’s opinion of him and his ministry, and advises others to do the same. But in that case it hardly makes sense to demand from those around us that they take into account our opinion of them. At least when the matter is the evaluation of the person himself and not his actions.
Still, even when the matter concerns actions, it is important to keep in mind the motives that moved a person, and they can sometimes be very difficult to understand. All the more, one should not determine a person’s place in one’s own world on the basis of his words, actions, or passing conditions, whether spiritual or psychological. Otherwise every person will inevitably please us at one moment and not at another, seem close and understandable at one moment and alien and distant at another; we will consider him a friend, then an enemy. In reality this person may well be none of the things he appears to us to be.
Of course, his states, words, and actions can and inevitably will affect the possibility of interacting with him, but such interaction is only a function conditioned by the situation. To give a final evaluation of a person on the basis of the ways and forms of his functioning is, at the very least, rash. For often spiritually empty people turn out to be extremely active and “correct,” so that it may seem as if they are the very model of Christian life. But often such activists, having exhausted their strength and lost their former enthusiasm, prove bankrupt precisely spiritually, not having within themselves that life of the Kingdom which gives meaning to every kind of activity. That is why the apostle advises us not to judge and not to give evaluations before the day of the Savior’s return and the triumph of the Kingdom: for only then will it become clear who has walked his path and who is truly worth what.
