Specks and Planks

"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?" (Matthew 7:3); "Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time..." (1 Corinthians 4:5a).

In the descriptive parable of the wheat and tares (Matthew 13:24-30) the servant asked the owner if he should uproot what he thought were the tares. The owner replied that the man should let them grow together until the harvest. The lesson is explicit: we cannot possibly know who are the wheat and who are the tares. God alone is the Judge of minds and hearts.

"...You are clean, though not every one of you" (John 13:10b). If ever there was a tare that tore mankind it was Judas, yet Jesus washed his feet and showed him every courtesy in a supreme and final effort to save Judas from himself. How it must have grieved Jesus to know that this man, who had walked and supped with Him for over three years, was about to betray Him. And yet we want to tear out the tares from our lives, tares that we are!

"Did I Myself not choose you, the twelve, and yet one of you is a devil?" (John 6:70). What possible reason could Jesus have to choose His very betrayer as one of His inner circle? Was Jesus using Judas to teach us several of His great lessons? Judas left all to become a follower, only to finally become the greatest blot on humanity. Surely Judas was given every opportunity to repent. One wonders how Judas' heart could have been so dark and hard as to not melt at Jesus' continued love and kindness. We ask, why did Jesus choose Judas? Why did He choose me?

Is Jesus warning us that we have no right to judge who will be His chosen because we happen to think we know who are the tares? May Jesus save us from ourselves!