We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

Q&A: Condemning Sin
Q: I have a question about how you answer the rare occasions when Jesus apparently felt it necessary to publicly condemn sin: like the cleansing of the temple and his very strong judgments on Pharisees and rulers in Matthew 23. Also John the Baptist who not only preached strongly regarding public sins but was imprisoned for judgmental condemnation of Herod taking his brothers wife?
A: Thanks for the question. It’s important to remember that both Jesus and John the Baptist were operating under the First Covenant where it was understood that the job of prophets was to hold fellow Jews, and Jewish institutions, accountable to the terms of the covenant. So you find Jesus cleansing the Jewish temple, but he didn’t concern himself with pagan temples. And John the Baptist confronts Herod, the Jewish King, but he doesn’t go after Pilate or Caesar.
So too, we are only permitted to exercise discernment with people we are in covenant relationships with. So, for example, Paul tells the Corinthians to expel an unrepentant man from the church, but tells them, “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Judge [or practice discernment with] those inside the church” (I Cor 5: 9-13). Outside of such covenants, I contend, we are allowed only ONE opinion about people…”Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2).
Hope this helps.
Photo credit: dhammza via Visual hunt / CC BY-NC-ND
Related Reading

To My Offender
We’re happy to introduce you today to Brandon Andress. He is the author of AND THEN THE END WILL COME! and UNEARTHED: How Discovering the Kingdom of God Will Transform the Church and Change the World. He has served as an elder and teaching pastor at The Living Room Church in Columbus, Indiana. Brandon writes…

How Details in the Gospels Support Their Historicity
*This essay is adapted from G. Boyd & P. Eddy, Lord or Legend? (Baker, 2007). For a fuller discussion, see P. Eddy & G. Boyd, The Jesus Legend (Baker, 2007). There are a number of questions historians ask when they are trying to assess the historical value of an ancient document that claims to report…

On Attending to the Light in Darkness
Joe Spurr via Compfight Donald Miller has posted a reflection on his Storyline blog about highlighting goodness and thereby pointing to Jesus in the aftermath of events such as the bombing in Boston this week. We want to emphatically declare together that “an enemy has done this” (Matt 13:28). But we also want to be a people…

The Cruciform Beauty of Horrific Divine Portraits
“Only a person who is aware of the crucified Christ can properly understand Scripture.” Luther (Table Talks) In the last three posts I’ve been wrestling with how insights from Matthew Bate’s book, The Hermeneutics of the Apostolic Proclamation might help us interpret violent portraits of God in the OT in a way that discloses how…

Love and the Other Attributes of God
If we keep our focus on Christ, we see that God’s power and God’s love are not two separate attributes, as many people assume. As I often state, love is not merely something God does; love is what God eternally is. Everything God does, therefore, expresses perfect love. God’s power, therefore, is simply an aspect…