Matthew 7:3 Commentary and Bible Study

This is not an extra point, as if judging is bad, but hypocritical judgment is worse: hypocritical judgment is of the essence of what Christ is forbidding. The fault is not applying the standard uniformly; the hypocrite applies it in one way to others but in another way to himself. It is obvious therefore that what he loves is not justice itself or the application of God’s law, righteousness, or fairness, but something else. If he loved righteousness he would start with himself where it is easiest to apply. No one else has access to his heart as he does, and no one is in a better position to apply the law to his own case and yet he fails to do so. He sees the motives and the secret workings of his own heart which it is impossible for him to see in others. In the case of others he is forced to conclude something about their motives based on their outward actions alone, but in the case of his own heart he has direct knowledge. If there were really a love of truth, he would take advantage of this knowledge to make his own heart clean first. Instead he judges others to put them down or to boost himself, perhaps driven by hatred in his heart towards his neighbour, which has little to do with a love of justice. It is love for God’s honour and not our own that motivates true judgment. This situation gets so bad that the hypocrite not only ignores the same sin in his own heart, but ignores sin that is far greater than what is in another. He is evidently searching for something to condemn in others, while all the time - if he really wanted to be the Lord’s policeman, cleaning up the moral universe for God - there was a much more obvious place to start, a much more severe case that warranted attention first. Who does not start with the worst case when tackling a problem? Your desire to find fault means that you pick up the slightest problem. You get into this state where everything that person does is noticed. The word ‘beholdest’ is a strong word meaning study, inspect, peer at. This is not just an accidental seeing.It is this love of judging that makes the hypocrite focus on such little things in others. A mote is a splinter, any tiny particle, even a speck of dust. Here is someone trying to extract an almost invisible speck from another’s eye when all the time there is a massive beam in his own eye. This is not just a plank but a joist. A beam is a huge thing. We could interpret it as an individual sin being compared to the whole body of sin. The hypocrite may never have repented at all. Of course the illustration is ridiculous and deliberately so. Who ever saw a man with a beam in his eye? How could he possibly be unaware of it? And yet the hypocrite is doing something analogous to this, for he ignores what is blindingly obvious to all others and presumes to do what he is quite incapable of doing effectively. There is a strong element of self-righteousness in what is going on here. The Pharisees were particularly guilty of this. Every sin they identified in others was a sin that they thought they did not have. Of course hypocrisy is skilful and subtle in the way it proceeds. It does not pick sins in others that are exactly the same as its own sins, but carefully chooses something that it thinks it has stayed clear of, hoping that by doing so, it can ignore its own sin altogether. Martin Lloyd Jones says, ‘Was there ever such sarcasm? Was there ever such a perfect example of irony?’ The illustration is setup to make any realistic prospect of help completely impossible. Of course he is utterly incapable of helping anyone in that condition.