Who Art Thou That Judgest

It runs constantly and it is not loud and she cannot switch it off, and she has never told anybody it exists.

Week one, the woman who talks the most in that group. Week two, the man who says the very spiritual thing and then does not come the following week. Week three, the couple who arrive late and leave early, every time, and she has an opinion about that which she has refined over three weeks into something quite precise.

None of it comes out of her mouth. She is warm to all of them and the warmth is real, and if you asked any of those people about her they would say something kind and mean it.

But there is a scoreboard, and it updates in real time, and she is on it too, and she is doing better than most of them, and knowing that about herself is genuinely horrible.

She is thirty-four and she cannot remember a group of any kind, ever, in which this was not running.

If yours is running now, come and sit down. Nobody in here is being scored.

The question is about jurisdiction, not about attitude

Here is the sentence Paul aims at the person doing what she does, and the useful thing about it is what kind of question it is.

Who art thou that judgest another man's servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth. Yea, he shall be holden up: for God is able to make him stand.Romans 14:4

Who art thou. That is not a rebuke about being unloving. It is a question about standing, in the legal sense. Who are you in this matter. What is your relationship to the person you are assessing.

And then he answers it, which is the part that does the work: another man's servant.

In that world, if you had a complaint about somebody's household servant, you did not raise it with the servant. You raised it with the master, because the servant did not answer to you, and your opinion of their performance was not merely rude, it was irrelevant. You had no standing.

That is what she has been doing for three weeks with real precision, and Paul's answer is not that she should be nicer about it. It is that her verdicts have no jurisdiction. The couple who arrive late do not answer to her. They never did. Her assessment of them is a court with no authority sitting in a building it does not own.

You have no jurisdiction here, and it is already off you, and it was never yours to carry. Romans 14:4 is where that sits, in a question about standing rather than about attitude, and the same Spirit who moved Paul to answer his own question with three words is the one who lets a woman off a bench she never wanted.

What the scoreboard is actually for

Now the harder half, because getting off a bench is only possible if you know why you climbed onto it.

Notice she is on the list too. That is the tell. A person who genuinely felt superior to a room would not be assessing themselves in it constantly, and would not describe the whole business as horrible.

A scoreboard is not contempt. A scoreboard is orientation. It is what a person runs when they do not know where they stand and cannot bear not knowing, and it produces a position, continuously, at the cost of turning everybody in the room into a measuring instrument.

And that is why it will not switch off by being disapproved of. She has been disapproving of it for years. You cannot turn off a device you are using for navigation until something else tells you where you are.

Which is exactly what the second half of the verse does. He shall be holden up: for God is able to make him stand. That sentence is about the person being judged, and it works just as well pointed at her, and the whole of her standing is in it and none of it is comparative.

You have a standing that is already fixed and is not relative to anybody in that room. He promised it, in the words about being made accepted, where the acceptance is in Christ rather than in a ranking (Ephesians 1:6), and His Spirit does not locate a woman by telling her who she is ahead of.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one.

And this matters especially for a woman who scores things. Nothing on this site can be done better or worse. There is no version of it where the person who does it is further along than the person who does not, and if any of this ever becomes a new column on the board, close the page.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your husband is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You are not being measured here, and you were not being measured in that group either. Scripture settled that where God is named as no respecter of persons (Romans 2:11), and the Spirit of God has never once been distributed on a ranking.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.