You know “Don’t judge”. But did you know the same paragraph ends with helping your brother get the speck out of his eye?
1 “Don’t judge, so that you won’t be judged.
Matthew 7:1, World English Bible
The story around it
He held no office and had no famous teacher behind him. In his home town they asked, “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?” He went up a hillside, sat down and began to speak, and the world has not finished listening.
He did not lean on the great names. He spoke as if the last word was his to give. Love your enemies. Pray for those who mistreat you. Take the beam out of your own eye first. When he stopped, Matthew says, “the multitudes were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them with authority, and not like the scribes.”
Some of it had been said before. Israel’s Scriptures already told God’s people to love their neighbor and to feed an enemy who is hungry (Leviticus 19:18, Proverbs 25:21). What Jesus does is gather it, sharpen it and ask for all of it, from the heart, toward everyone.
The astonishment never quite wore off. Centuries later, people far outside the church were still stopped by this sermon, as the voices below show.
Background from outside the Bible. The sources are listed below.
What others have said
But the New Testament produced a different impression, especially the Sermon on the Mount which went straight to my heart.
Mohandas Gandhi, Hindu leader of India’s independence movement, in his autobiography. Source
there will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.
Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, in a letter of 1813 about the words of Jesus he had gathered from the Gospels. Source
The moment
The people on that hillside had come from everywhere: “from Galilee, Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond the Jordan”. Many were there because someone they loved was sick. Matthew says that when Jesus looked at crowds like this he was moved, because they were “harassed and scattered, like sheep without a shepherd”.
Earlier in the same sermon he had told them that their righteousness must go deeper than that of “the scribes and Pharisees”, the religious experts of their day. Now he shows what deeper means. It does not begin with the faults of other people. It begins with your own eye.
What stands around it
The next verses give the reason and a picture: “with whatever measure you measure, it will be measured to you”, and a man with a beam in his own eye offering to remove a speck from his brother’s. Jesus does not end by leaving the speck where it is. He ends: “First remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother’s eye.”
What happened next
When Jesus came down from the mountain, “great multitudes followed him”, and Matthew tells what happened first. A leper came to him and asked to be made clean. The law of Moses said of a man with that disease, “He shall dwell alone.” Jesus “stretched out his hand and touched him”. A sermon about how to see other people was followed by a hand laid on a man the law kept apart.
Paul gave the church in Corinth the same warning: “judge nothing before the time, until the Lord comes”. Near the end of the first century that church was torn again: a few of its members had pushed some of their elders out of office. The church in Rome wrote to them, through its leader Clement, and asked them to remember what the Lord Jesus had taught about gentleness and patience, including the warning that the way you judge is the way you will be judged.
Some years later Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, wrote to the Christians in Philippi and passed the same saying on. In that letter he also had to face a painful case. Valens, who had been an elder among them, had failed in the office given to him, and the warnings around his name are about greed. Polycarp did not pretend it was nothing, and he did not write Valens off. He wrote that he grieved for him and his wife, prayed that the Lord would give them true repentance, and asked the church not to treat such people as enemies but to call them back, as members who were suffering and had lost their way. Polycarp himself died a martyr around 155.
How people have read it
This is one of the best-known sentences Jesus ever spoke, and people mean very different things by it.
Some take it as a ban on every moral judgment: nobody may call anything wrong. But in this same chapter Jesus tells his followers to watch for false prophets, and adds: “By their fruits you will know them.” That takes discernment.
Christian teachers have mostly read it as a warning against one kind of judging: the kind that condemns, that enjoys another person’s failure, that never turns the light on itself. In John’s Gospel Jesus holds the two sides together in one line: “Don’t judge according to appearance, but judge righteous judgment.”
So the verse does not ask for silence about right and wrong. It asks who you are when you speak.
Who has argued over it
In March 1865, with the Civil War nearly over, Abraham Lincoln gave his second inaugural address. Both sides, he said, read the same Bible and pray to the same God. He found it strange that anyone should ask God’s help in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, and in the same breath he added: let us judge not, that we be not judged.
Lincoln named the wrong and still would not condemn the people on the other side. Leo Tolstoy went much further. In 1884 he argued that the words should be taken at their plain meaning, as a ban on courts of law: judge not in courts of justice; take no part in them.
Almost fifteen centuries before him, Augustine drew the line elsewhere. Some deeds, he wrote, plainly cannot be done with a good intention, and those may be judged. But in the case of those actions respecting which it is doubtful with what intention they are done, we are to put the better construction on them.
A president at the end of a war, a novelist who would close the courts, a church father who asked for charity toward motives: each heard the same sentence, and each drew the line in a different place.
Background from outside the Bible. The sources are listed below.
What the context adds
The warning is against hypocritical judgment, the kind that sees faults in others and not in oneself. The passage still expects followers of Jesus to help one another see clearly, after looking at themselves first.
What it means for you
Think of the person whose faults you could list without stopping. Most people have one. Jesus does not ask you to stop seeing. He asks you to turn and look at your own eye first, and to stay there long enough to find something.
There is freedom in that. You are not anyone’s final judge. That seat belongs to God, who sees the whole heart, yours included, and who has been patient with you too. You can stop carrying the work of sorting people into good and bad.
Before you speak about someone, try praying the old words of Psalm 139: “Search me, God, and know my heart.” Then, if you still need to go to your brother or sister, go gently, the way you would want someone to come to you.
If you do not share this faith, the sentence still asks something any honest person can try: give other people the same patience you hope they will give you.
Other verses that say it too
“Therefore be merciful, even as your Father is also merciful. Don’t judge, and you won’t be judged. Don’t condemn, and you won’t be condemned. Set free, and you will be set free.
Luke 6:36-37. In Luke’s account the same saying follows straight on from “Therefore be merciful, even as your Father is also merciful.” Not judging is what the Father’s mercy looks like between people.
Therefore you are without excuse, O man, whoever you are who judge. For in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself. For you who judge practice the same things.
Romans 2:1. Paul lists the wrongs of the world, then turns to the reader who agrees with every word: “For in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself.” The beam and the speck, in a letter.
Brothers, even if a man is caught in some fault, you who are spiritual must restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness, looking to yourself so that you also aren’t tempted.
Galatians 6:1. Like Jesus, Paul expects a fault to be dealt with, and he says how: “restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness, looking to yourself”. Your own eye first, then your brother’s.
Only one is the lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge another?
James 4:12. James writes to believers who quarrel and speak against each other. He reminds them that “Only one is the lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy”, and asks, “But who are you to judge another?”
Why we say this
Bible passages this page rests on, in the World English Bible:
Written with the help of an AI model. Scripture quotations are checked against the World English Bible. Approved by HisFullGlory. Not reviewed by a theological reader.
