Jesus warned people not to judge unrighteously. Of course, in daily life we must make decisions, value judgments, and personal assessments. But we must do this carefully, realizing that if we judge unrighteously, God will ultimately hold us to our own unrighteous standards. Elder Oaks taught:
I have been puzzled that some scriptures command us not to judge and others instruct us that we should judge and even tell us how to do it. I am convinced that these seemingly contradictory directions are consistent when we view them with the perspective of eternity. The key is to understand that there are two kinds of judging: final judgments, which we are forbidden to make; and intermediate judgments, which we are directed to make, but upon righteous principles. … There is a doctrine underlying the subject of gospel judging. It was taught when a lawyer asked the Savior, “Which is the great commandment in the law?” (Matthew 22:36). Jesus answered: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets [vv. 37–40].”
Thus, Jesus mentions “the law and the prophets” in 3 Nephi 14:12. Judging, in the sense of deciding, is not the problem, but the problem is judging incorrectly, in an ungodly fashion, or selfishly, in an unneighborly fashion.
Thus, President Brigham Young wisely taught:
I am very thankful that it is not our province … to judge the world; if it were, we would ruin everything. We have not sufficient wisdom; our minds are not filled with the knowledge and power of God. … And we must also acquire the discretion that God exercises in being able to look into futurity, and to ascertain and know the results of our acts away in the future, even in eternity, before we will be capable of judging. (Journal of Discourses 19:7–8)
The risk here is that we may want to play it safe and not judge at all, attempting to avoid judging unrighteously, but we are commanded to “judge righteously” (Alma 41:14), so we may not be keeping the whole commandment if we try to play it too safe. We are commanded to help our brother by casting the fleck of sawdust, the “mote,” out of a brother’s eye (13:5), but in order to do so, we must first get the huge wooden ceiling beam out of our own eye or field of vision.
Obviously, we have to be careful. We need to consider how we will be judged and what the final judgment will look like. Notice that the judging principle is similar to the forgiveness concept. If we forgive a lot, we will be forgiven a lot. How we judge is how we will be judged. In the end, combining these principles, Jesus teaches that mercy triumphs over judgment.
Dallin H. Oaks, “Judge Not and Judging,” BYU Devotional, March 1, 1998.