Don’t Judge Me!—And Why It’s Dumb to Downplay Judgment Day

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a million times—don’t judge me! Or, Who made you to be the judge?—as said arbiters of judgey-ness judge me for being too “judgey.”

For my part, I have no qualms with judgey-ness. Here are my top judgey credentials:

• I don’t let pedophiles babysit my kids.

• I don’t let my kids watch rated-R movies (or PG-13 films for that matter) if there’s a lot of inappropriate content—and yes, me, myself, and I am the sole determiner of what is “inappropriate”).

• I don’t send my kids to secular, Caesar-sanctioned schools.

• I don’t let my kids play with just any ol’ hoodlum in the neighborhood.

• I don’t vote for left-leaning, liberal socialists who want to destroy America.

• Oh, and I never cheer for the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders. Ever. And if heaven-forbid someday something awful were to happen to my gorgeous wife and she died before me—and I felt the Lord’s leading to remarry—under absolutely no circumstances would I (as a lifelong Kansas City Chiefs fan) marry a diehard member of Raider Nation. Period, non-negotiable.

Okay—all football banter aside—now that I’ve established my own judgey tendencies, here is what you need to know about Judgment Day.

Judgment is coming

In Acts 24 the Apostle Paul stood before a governor named Felix and reasoned about the “coming” judgment (24:25). Paul did not mince words. He did not downplay the final day of reckoning. The Bible never does. Throughout the biblical storyline, God warns of wrath to come. The Judge of all the earth regularly preambles a future day of accounting with many present, lower-case “j” judgments. These pronouncements and punishments—like the flood of Noah’s day, fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, plagues on Egypt, and countless others—foreshadow unhappy things forthcoming for the enemies of God.

So yes, “judgey” is a thing. And no, Matthew 7:1 (“Judge not, that you be not judged”) does not mean what you think it means—although I always marvel when unbelievers and quasi-Christians suddenly decide they want to lean on God’s Word for wisdom, especially for how best to “judge” Christian attitudes and actions.

Judgment is alarming

Some folks mistakenly assume all Judgment Day talk is a modern (or even medieval) invention to control people through fear. It’s the “opium of the masses,” they say, in order to subdue taboo or salacious behavior, as though church leaders simply “scare because we care”—you know, a little fire-and-brimstone beatdown to keep our parishioners in check; after all, those prudish Puritan pastors and priests get nervous anytime someone somewhere is having fun.

Yet fear is not necessarily a bad thing, is it? We tell our children not to get too close to the hot stove. We warn our teenage drivers to buckle up, be careful, and not to take any chances. Certain dangers demand we speak up, out, and often. And for good reason—precisely because we know what’s at stake. The cost is too high to not say something. And as for fear, yeah, it’s like an early morning alarm sounding off, which tells you to get out of bed and not keep sleeping, lest you miss an important appointment. And believe me, your upcoming interview with your Maker qualifies as a pretty important meeting indeed. You’ll definitely want to be ready for that little get-together, even if my blunt words in this post do cause a little shivering of the boots.

And of course, boots do tend to shiver at the mention of eternal matters. They did for Felix, anyway. The Bible says the governor became “alarmed” at the Apostle’s words. The word here for “alarmed” in the original Greek is emphobos, which is the word for “frightened.” If you take another look at the Greek word emphobos, you’ll easily see where we get our English word phobia, the term for fear. Some people have arachnophobia, for example, which is the intense fear of spiders. Others have claustrophobia—the strong dread of tight, enclosed spaces, like elevators, tunnels, crowded rooms, and so forth. Now one might argue that many of these phobias tend to be irrational or overblown. (As a young kid, for example, I had an irrational fear of volcanoes. The kicker is that I lived in Kansas. Go figure.) A soul-shaking phobia of Judgment Day is hardly irrational or overblown; no, the fear of final judgment is well-founded (see Rev. 20).

Judgment is often dismissed

But just because something makes sense and should in fact cause alarm does not mean it will be acted upon and not dismissed. People tend to put off the inevitable, don’t they? Ever snooze your alarm clock? Yeah, you can procrastinate your get-up time, but you cannot delay the morning dawn, no matter how hard you try. And believe me, some people by their alarm clock-snoozing endeavors try really hard to slow down the sunrise, but to no avail.

Such was the case for Felix in Acts 24. “Go away for the present,” he said to the preacher. “When I get an opportunity I will summon you.” Ah yes, preacher-on-demand! Who needs Uber Eats when you can have Uber Preach? Don’t call me; I’ll call you. Felix knew that eternity—indeed his very soul—was at stake, but the governor quickly dismissed it. And such an easy dismissal often happens when a preacher like myself starts to talk about “judgey” things. I’ve presided over a lot of funerals in my day. Here is what I’ve observed: People will smile and laugh and even tear up when you offer a wonderful and well-worded eulogy about their deceased loved one, and rightly so. But boy howdy, the moment in the service when I transition to more “spiritual” matters, a.k.a. eternity and heaven and hell, suddenly the scene shifts. Eyes turn away and people re-situate in their seats. Happy hour is over and drinks are no longer half off. It’s about to get real. People who haven’t been in church for years, if ever, wish they could escape but can’t. There will be no snoozing of the alarm this time. The loud beeping and buzzing must go on for the full length of the preacher’s homily.

How will his hearers respond? How will you? Felix thought he had time to wait even though he didn’t. Daytime is coming. Don’t delay.