Naming Judgment

Maybe it is because I make so many snap judgments based on my impressions of someone or something said.  Maybe it is because I sense we are living through a time when we are more prone to making judgments about people and things than we are prone to recognize our own accountability for situations and circumstances we experience.  So placing blame is much easier than owning up to responsibility.  Or maybe it is because "yes" and "no" seem to be two sides of a single coin. 

Well, for whatever reason, judgment has been on my mind .  Not just any judgment, God's judgment, which unfortuantely has generally been perceived in religious circles as a "dooms day" expression of God's intense anger and fury.  I remember how I was exposed to the idea of judgment.  It was God's retailation for evil done, for sin and sin's consequences. God's backlash or God lashing out at a rebellious, sin-sick world.

So if good things happened to us, we celebrated God's blessing.  If something bad happened we begin to assume God was angry and had struck back. What  faulty and misguided perceptions!

Eugene Peterson, author of The Message, writes "The biblical word  judgment means 'the decisive word by which God straighening things out and puts things right'...Judgment is not a word about things, describing them; it is a word that does things, putting love into motion, applying mercy, nullifying wrong, ordering goodness."  (A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, pp. 54-55)

I have come to realize that God's judgment is a response of God's intense sadness and grief, a cry of divine pain for the brokeness of human life.  It is God's appraisal for what needs changing in my life and the world around me so that God's hopes and dreams may take shape and form.  In that sense judgment is mercy directed toward our restoration and healing.  Biblically the end product of judgment is not destruction but restoration and renewal. 

Such judgment is worth pondering.