Judging the Weights on a Balance

When I went to Sunday school at a Lutheran church at the age of eight, my kind teacher challenged me to memorize the Ten Commandments. When I succeeded, she was impressed. She gave me a little pocket Bible with this inscription: “Good work for a good little boy!” But her gift did not make the impression on me that she had hoped. I was disturbed to be called a good boy, precisely because I had just learned the

Ten Commandments, and learned I was not a good boy.

I realized the commandments were a practical school for loving being good. I had broken some of these commandments that God had commanded me to obey including, “whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.” (James 4:17) I now knew exactly how I wasn’t doing good—an im - pression opposite to what my teacher expected. The commands were a mirror into my conscience. “If anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror.” (James 1:23) Not only did this mirror reflection of me show me that I was not good, but the Word also schooled me in the vital first fact of life. I would be judged. I was a sinner. “For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like.” (James 1:24) I couldn’t just walk away from this mirror, or forget what I was, the reflection had to be changed somehow. It wasn’t just my scolding parents that told me this. Now, I knew I didn’t meet this high standard. Worse yet, I knew God knew it.

It took a few years before I could believe Jesus was not just a good man but much bigger—big enough to pay for the sins of an eleven-year-old. I was good at math, so I could add. He would have to be big enough to pay for millions of other people’s sins as well, to have the capacity to pay for mine. A man wasn’t big enough to do this. Only a man as big as God could. I knew I needed a way to escape sin. I was not good. Alone, I would be poor company for eternity. An eternity with sin is sustainable for no one. Being old enough to add and think about the reality of death is old enough to help add up the years of eternity while alone or in the company of love. There are years where the heart feels and weighs this balancing line, since almost every age group is intuitively aware of such a crisis choice. God “has put eternity into man’s heart.” (Ecc. 3:11) Some might laugh at an eleven-year-old repenting any weight of sin. Some might say, what great sins had I accomplished before puberty had the opportunity to turbocharge the wonderful but vexing mystery of that alien species called girls? Young people are sensitive to many truths. They can be aware of universal truths that older, more sophisticated versions, grown-ups, have grown used to ignoring.

I had the great gift of a shame-sensitive conscience. At eleven years old, I was an 80-pound weakling with one wish—to be a 90-pound weakling. I was balancing the weighty line of a two-handed barbell at eleven and trying to pump it more than a few times when neighbor girls who were visiting our family walked in on me. My face began to burn since the only weight on the barbell was the barbell itself. But maybe they wouldn’t notice this. Then one of the girls asked. “Why don’t you put any weights on the barbell?” Thinking fast, I said, “Well, it’s really all about the repetitions, you know.” The problem is that evil just loves weighty opportunities. This fact explains my pumping an amazingly heavy barbell without weights. You see, I had my share of bullies, so I knew I just needed the opportunity to get strong enough to fight back. If I had exercised this capability once I was a stronger adolescent,

I might have tried to kill them all. But I was just starting neighborhood yardwork and mowing yards for money. I couldn’t even kill weeds. The only difference between me and the opportunity to be a serial killer might likely be just 100 pounds of muscle. Evil loves opportunity. Victims, like me, have the angry heart to possibly end up even more evil than the bullies. And I knew it. Jesus emphasized the dangerous sensitivity of this fact by explaining that everyone angry without just cause will be judged. (Matt 5:22) I could confess countless sins even at eleven. Although I couldn’t quite count them all, I could judge well. I could add well enough. It’s really all about the repetitions, you know.

A fashionable virtue of our time is non-judgmentalism. This has even become the popularized notion of the meaning of “judge not, that you be not judged.” (Matthew 7:1) It is presumed that this means judging people for their sins is unfair, and that generic judging of the staggering destructiveness of sin is unkind. This is a deliberate and clever fraud. How long can such destructiveness be sustainable before it is judged and ended by the Final Judge? My Sunday schooled ability to judge my own sinfulness at such a tender age was the balancing weight that rescued me at eleven.

A Little League friend invited me to an Awana meeting. We played exciting games and learned about eternity. I learned that God’s gracious kindness in forgiving my sins was every bit as big as the weight of my evil. Not only did it balance, but he also lifted that weighty balance for me! It became a bigger gift with the count of my days since such great mercy gave me new life, new hope, a new look at what every kid knows is forever looming, eternity.

The twisted truth that we should judge nothing, and no one, is designed to steal our only hope of heaven— our conviction of sin. The resulting self-judgment is the pathway of repentance that calls to God’s mercy. Selfjudgment is the purpose of and the required response to God’s commandments. We are expected to judge our own behaviors and fellow Christians and those actions of others by the high standards and beauty of the greatest law of all—the law of love—the law that balances the great weights of justice and lovingkindness. It is the expected “graduation” for us in the school of love. “Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases?”

(1 Cor. 6:2)