If I had to choose one word to describe the suburban Texas Christianity that pushed me from faith as a teenager, it would be easy: judgmental. As a closeted queer kid growing up during the same-sex marriage debates, I found the behavior of Christians around me cruel but also almost absurd. In my hometown, Houston, I saw up close the struggles that homeless people, undocumented immigrants, and poor families faced. How could any sensible person think LGBTQ families were worth the church’s attention? Did the world really need more judgment?
As I got older, though, I realized that judgment doesn’t have to be bad news. Passages like Isaiah 1 challenge our simplistic, earthly view of judgment with one more freeing than my teenage self could have ever imagined. Far from being about anger or hatred, God’s judgment is the other side of love; far from papering over injustice, God’s judgment defends the oppressed, the orphan, and the widow.
The crux of Isaiah 1 is its call to judgment in verse 18: “Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord.” Other translations have “let us settle the matter” (NIV), “let us reason together” (KJV), “let us debate your case” (NASB). There are two important facts about the Hebrew word here, both difficult to render in English: it is a legal metaphor for judgment, but it is also collaborative. Think of a judge working together with the defendant, not merely imposing a sentence. We find the same Hebrew word in Job 13:3, when Job calls out, “I desire to argue my case with God.” Job wants to come to an understanding with God, not to have simple answers imposed on him. It isn’t like a modern-day court, where the jury renders a guilty verdict and the judge passes a sentence. Judgment is a two-way street, not a final proclamation.
