Welcome to Part II of our series, “Untwisting the Bible,” where we yank twisted Scriptures back into their rightful context. In today’s spiritual battlefield of “gotcha” theology, few verses are weaponized as much as Matthew 7:1 and 7:5: “Judge not, that you be not judged,” and “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye…” Boom! Mic drop. End of discussion. Or so some people, mostly leftists, think. This verbal arsenal is most often deployed to shut down any Christian daring to challenge immoral behavior or false beliefs. But, wait a minute! Is this passage a divine mandate for moral anarchy or a gag order against speaking truth?

First off, context is king. Jesus introduces these zingers during His Sermon on the Mount, a discourse that covers everything from the beatitudes to how to be salt and light in a decaying world. He was taking a spiritual sledgehammer to the self-righteous legalism of the Pharisees and Scribes—those first-century masters of religious spin who perverted God’s law into a merit badge for heaven.

Jesus wasn’t telling us to zip our lips and abandon discernment. No, He was detonating a truth bomb about the human tendency to be self-righteous judges while glossing over our own glaring sin problem. In a sense, Jesus was cutting through the religious hypocrisy of His day and pointing to the heart of the matter—self-examination. Before you go pointing out the speck in someone’s eye, take a look in the mirror. Are you guilty of the same? Are you preaching a gospel of works while neglecting the weightier matters of the law—justice, mercy, and faithfulness? If so, you’re not just confused or in error, you’re playing a dangerous game with eternal consequences.

To put it in no uncertain terms, it’s not that we’re forbidden from making moral judgments, it’s that we’re warned against making them hypocritically. This is a far cry from the foolish “tolerance camp” that asks us to turn a blind eye to sin. To pretend that God is somehow indifferent to immorality or false doctrine is spiritually suicidal.

The call to repentance isn’t a sidebar to the Gospel—it’s the headline! The whole point of Jesus’s mission was to save sinners, and you can’t save sinners if they don’t know they’re lost. Like a skilled surgeon wielding a scalpel, our task is to cut away the cancer of sin, not to pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s not judgmental to tell someone their house is on fire, it’s life-saving.

So, the next time someone tries to use these verses as a knockout punch against proclaiming the truth, hit back with some context. Remind them that it’s not you who’s made the judgment, it’s God. Your job? To deliver the celestial verdict wrapped in the grace and truth that only come through Jesus Christ.

This is the crux of the Gospel: acknowledgment of sin, repentance, and faith in Christ alone. Don’t cheapen it by wrenching verses out of context to suit an agenda that’s miles away from God’s will. The Gospel is too important and the stakes are too high.