Matthew 7:5 Commentary and Bible Study

The hypocrite not only passes judgment on others, but he thinks he can correct their fault without giving attention to his own faults. The Lord uses a most intriguing picture to show the foolishness of this. Like our ability to pass judgment, the ability of the eye to see can be seriously hampered by a foreign body entering it. All know the extreme discomfort of having something in the eye. Until it has been removed the eye waters so that it is difficult to focus on anything clearly. The pain is so strong that it is not possible to use the eye for any concentrated close-up work. But what could require more careful use of the eye than to remove a similar object from someone else’s eye? Unless the work is done with extreme care, the eye of the other person will be injured. The eye is the organ that must be used to do the delicate operation, yet it is affected by a problem that renders it inoperable. The opening words, ‘Thou hypocrite’ show that what is really in mind is the faculty of judgment, for there is no hypocrisy involved in trying to help someone struggling with a bad eye. But, maintaining the language of the illustration, the Lord Jesus works through the solution in terms of the eye, while expecting us to translate it into the moral realm of judgment. The faculty of judgment can also have a foreign body enter it, which prevents it functioning properly. That foreign body is sin, unrepented of. This not only brings us under judgment, but it stops us offering any effective help to our brother. Sin in the conscience has a similar effect to a piece dirt in the eye. We cannot judge others properly if we have not first judged ourselves. In the moral realm, the solution Christ gives is even more pertinent than in the realm of physical sight. We cannot help anyone else with their problem of sin while we have not dealt with our own problem of sin. The faculty of judgment simply stop functioning properly when there is something lodged in the conscience which has not been repented of. It is by confessing our sins to God and repenting of them that we remove sin from the heart, and so the parallel solution that Christ offers in the realm of sight is exactly what we need to hear. Just as that beam makes it impossible that he should see clearly to do so delicate an operation as to remove a speck from his brother’s eye, so the sin in the hypocrite makes him incapable of the moral refinement that is necessary to help another with their transgressions. To attempt this he needs clear vision himself since he needs to work in what is a most sensitive area of another. If this is going to be done, it needs to be done properly, and there are few things that are more difficult than to try to help another person who has fallen into sin. The eye which has something in it starts to blink repeatedly to try to dislodge the object, and how can we scrutinize the conscience of another when we are distracted by our own sin? Christ does deny the fact that there is a genuine problem with the other person, but says that the hypocrite is the last person who is fit to tackle it. It is wonderful how he makes use of such concrete language to handle such abstract ideas and make them so clear. When the disciples plucked heads of grain on the Sabbath day, the Pharisees accused them of breaking the Sabbath (Matthew 12:1-8). Had they been aware of their sin in not entering the kingdom of heaven and rejecting the Messiah, and had they not been obsessed with putting on a show of righteousness before the people, they would not have so badly misjudged the situation.