The Hard Yoke of Judging and the Trees of the Garden

As those created in the image of God, part of our humanness is to judge. This is part of what it means to "govern" or "have dominion", as mandated by God when He created Adam and Eve.

But when the first humans took the bait of the tempter and ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they opted for an alternative way of judging from the way God had set up for them, which was to make judgments and to govern by eating from the tree of life. The tree of knowledge was attractive to them for various reasons, one of which is that it would save them time, and they could do the job of governing more efficiently. All they would have to do is to trust in their own thoughts and feelings and desires (i.e., their own limited and subjective knowledge and wisdom), and not have to spend the time and effort to go to a Source outside of themselves for knowledge and wisdom; that requires intimacy with Him which requires time and effort...; not that they didn't want God in their lives, but they saw this as a way of doing God's work and will more efficiently.

The entire world system, the flesh, and the devil all agree that this is the way to govern and judge. As those who have given up personal independence to live and operate under the Lordship of God the Creator in Christ, we are faced many times a day with the choice to live and operate from one of these two trees - the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or the tree of life. (Those who are not in Christ don't have a choice, but we have been given grace in Him to empower us to live daily in His system of governing and judging.) The flesh - that which declares itself independent of God - continually clamors for dominion in us followers of Jesus, and when we give in to its demands, we end up judging according to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Most of us are unaware of how much emotional and intellectual energy is spent on fleshly judgments being made in a day. (Much of this happens in our hidden thought life and it seeps out into the open at times and is expressed in negative judgments of others; in common everyday language, you could call this "giving your personal opinion on people and situations and preferences, etc".) Greg Boyd says, "Of all the sinful burdens that we place upon ourselves in our fallen state, none is weightier than the presumption that we can judge others."

The tricky part of this is that when we descend into fleshly judging (tree of knowledge), it can feel so right, and sometimes we may be technically "right", but life for the hearer doesn't come from being "right"; it only comes from Jesus' life being released from within us out to others. At times abstaining from fleshly judgment and opinion-giving actually feels "wrong", and that's because the Lord's ways run cross grain with how we've been raised and programmed by the world's mind and systems.

Proverbs 3:5 is an amazing summation of the two ways of judging and governing: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart (tree of life), and do not lean on your own understanding (tree of the knowledge of good and evil)." Trusting our own wisdom and understanding is in direct opposition to trusting in the Lord and will produce evil fruit, as per James 3:13-18.

Last week I applied this to earthly/fleshly judgments of political leaders and issues. God's ways always transcend the best human ways which is why we dare not trust any political party. Their source of knowing what is right and wrong is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, even when they may sound like they're aligned with Scripture. We must know, not only the written Word, but have an intimate walk with the Living Word so that we sense His nudges and hear His whispers throughout the day and, like Jesus, judge by and through the Father, not by what our natural eyes see and ears hear. (Beyond the realm of politics, this truth, of course, applies in all areas of our lives.)

God bless you this week as you walk in His ways and strengthen you with might in your inner being to trust Him with all your heart and therein experience His easy yoke of not having to have an opinion about everything, and when we do need to judge/evaluate/govern in our sphere of influence, leaning heavily on Him...