History Is Not a Moral Scoreboard - We are Not God’s Referees

 

Introduction

There is a very human instinct, when something bad happens to someone, to wonder what they did to deserve it. And there is an equally human instinct, when we read the harsher parts of the Old Testament, the sudden deaths, the divine punishments, the apparent scorekeeping, to feel that we understand what is going on: God is rewarding the good and punishing the bad, and we are meant to learn from that.

Both instincts feel reasonable; they can even feel religious. But when we take the Gospels seriously, when we let Jesus Christ be the lens through which we read everything else, something unexpected happens. It puts real pressure on them both. Again and again, in His words and in His parables, Jesus dispels the idea that we can read God's verdicts off the surface of events, or that we are qualified to do that kind of reading.

This is not comfortable, but it’s deeply reassuring. It means that no suffering person need wonder whether God is punishing them. And it means that no prosperous person should mistake their good fortune for a sign of divine favour. The Gospels will not let us use the visible circumstances of a life as a window onto God's hidden judgements.

To be clear, none of this denies that God judges or that Scripture speaks truthfully about that judgement. None of this requires us to smooth over revelation or pretend the difficult passages are not there. It’s a shift of focus from questioning God’s justice to questioning our authority to read it. Jesus never denied that God judges. He denies that we are competent to decode those judgements. To read the world as a moral scoreboard is not faithfulness to God's justice; it’s a way of putting ourselves in God's place.

Human Judgement Is Unreliable

Jesus returns constantly to the gap between the way we judge and the way God judges, and the danger of confusing the two.

He begins the Sermon on the Mount with a warning easy to misread as mere niceness: “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged” (Matthew 7:1-5). This isn’t just a call to be kind. It’s a warning that our moral measuring sticks are unreliable, and that they will turn back on those who wield them. The image He adds is painfully ironic: before you remove the speck from your neighbour's eye, do something about the log in your own. The problem with human judgement is not just that we’re sometimes wrong. It’s that we systematically deceive ourselves, and that distortion colours everything we think we see in others.

Jesus makes the same point in John's Gospel: "You judge according to human standards (the flesh); I judge no one" (John 8:15). He’s not saying divine judgement doesn’t exist; John's Gospel has some of the strongest judgement language in the New Testament. Nor is He teaching moral relativism. What Jesus refuses is that shallow, surface-level verdict-making that reads God's mind straight off what it sees. That kind of judgement is precisely what He warns us not to do.

This matters enormously when we think about religious rules. One of the subtlest temptations is to mistake our own moral confidence for God's will. Jesus sees this happening all around Him. When He says: "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27), He shows how easily a command from God can be pressed into a shape that contradicts what God intended. And when He says: "You leave the commandment of God and hold fast the tradition of men" (Mark 7:8), He draws a sobering line. Our moral-religious systems, however sincerely held, are not the same thing as God's will.

Perhaps the most arresting statement comes in Luke's Gospel: “You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of others; but God knows your hearts; for what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God” (Luke 16:15). That’s not a gentle qualification. It’s a warning that the things we admire and reward can point in the opposite direction from what God values. For Jesus, the test of whether something is "from God" is never simply "does it feel right to us?" It’s whether it conforms to the Father's character as revealed in Jesus Himself, a character shaped above all by mercy, humility, and truth.

History Is Not a Scoreboard

If we cannot fully trust our own moral judgement, we might still hope that history itself is reliable, that the pattern of who prospers and who suffers gives us a readable map of God's verdicts. Jesus addresses this hope directly.

He’s told about the Galileans whom Pilate had killed. The implication is clear: they must have done something to deserve it. Jesus has none of it. “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you” (Luke 13:2). He says the same about the eighteen people killed when the tower of Siloam fell (Luke 13:4). Disaster is not a verdict. Suffering does not map neatly onto guilt. That connection, however instinctive, doesn’t hold.

In John's Gospel, the disciples ask about a man blind from birth: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” It’s a natural question, but Jesus refuses the premise. “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.”  The man's suffering is not a punishment. It’s not a message. It is, in ways the disciples cannot yet see, a place where God is quietly at work (John 9:1-12).

The parables press the same lesson. In the wheat and the weeds, the servants want to pull up the weeds straight away, to do the sorting now. The master says no, wait until the harvest, because in your eagerness you will damage the wheat (Matthew 13:24-30). Good and evil are tangled together, and premature moral accounting isn’t just unreliable. It’s also not ours to do.

There’s the parable of the vineyard workers, where Jesus deliberately offends our sense of fairness. Those who worked all day receive the same wage as those who came at the last hour. When they complain, the householder replies: “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?” (Matthew 20:1-16). Jesus is not adjusting our moral ledger. He’s dismantling it. God's justice is not a stricter version of our fairness. It operates from freedom, from grace, from generosity that doesn’t owe us an explanation.

And there’s the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man lives well; Lazarus begs at his gate. By every outward measure, the rich man looks favoured. The truth about both lives is only revealed on the other side of death. The parable is a quiet warning: do not read God's verdict from those who seem to be doing well. The ledger we see is not the only ledger (Luke 16:19-31).

At this point, a reader might object. The Old Testament is full of stories where God does seem to act as a moral counter: the Flood, Sodom, and the destruction of the Canaanites. If those are real acts of divine judgement, doesn't that undermine everything said so far?

The Catholic tradition has always insisted that these texts are inspired and that they record real acts of divine judgement. But it has also insisted that they must be read through Christ, not as self-contained moral lessons or as a code for decoding individual suffering.

First, these judgements belong to unique moments in salvation history. They’re not a template for how God always operates. The Flood is a response to a world saturated in violence, not an itemised verdict on individual private sins. Sodom's fall is the judgement of a culture that had closed itself to God. These aren’t judgements about specks and logs that Jesus warns against. They are declarations of God's holiness at the level of peoples and epochs, and they are never offered as an invitation for us to read our neighbours' suffering as divine punishment.

Second, these Old Testament judgements are provisional. They point beyond themselves. They reveal how serious sin is. But they also expose humanity's inability to carry out justice without becoming entangled in violence. They prepare the way for a judgement no longer carried out against enemies, but borne for them. The Cross is not the cancellation of divine judgement; it is its deepest revelation. There, the innocent one absorbs the full weight of human sin and, in doing so, redefines forever what temporal judgement looks like.

So the Old Testament does not undermine Jesus' teaching. It prepares the way for it. The judgments are real, but they are not the final word. And they certainly don’t license us to go back to reading individual suffering as a divine report card. That’s precisely what Jesus forbids. In those cases, the judgement is revealed through prophetic authority within salvation history itself, not inferred by observers from unexplained suffering.

None of this means sin has no consequences. Human sin has real, collective weight; our failures ripple outward and shape the world we inhabit. But this is a different claim from reading individual misfortune as divine punishment.

The Cross Proves It

All of these threads, the unreliable judgement, the unreadable history, the hard texts that cannot be tamed, are finally answered in one place. At Calvary.

If history were a transparent register of divine approval, the Cross wouldn’t be just difficult to explain but actively misleading. Here is the most innocent person who ever lived. Here’s the one human being of whom it could truly be said: He deserves none of the bad and all of the good. And what happens to Him? Public condemnation, torture, and execution.

If we apply the reward-and-punishment template to the Cross, we arrive somewhere unbearable, but Jesus doesn’t ask us to apply that template. He asks us to see, in the Cross, something our moral instincts could never predict: That when God becomes man and enters history to deal with sin and death, He does not sort the good from the bad and punish accordingly. He takes the punishment on Himself. He goes to the place where innocent suffering is most acute and remains there.

That’s why Jesus can say, without contradiction, both that judgement is real and: ^“I came not to judge the world, but to save the world” (John 12:47). It echoes what He tells Nicodemus: “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17). The movement of God into history is not, in the first instance, a movement of condemnation. It’s a movement of rescue. The judgement is real. It falls on sin, on death, on everything that diminishes human beings made in God's image, but its shape is not what we expected. It is a Cross, not a throne.

This changes everything, including how we read wealth and poverty, success and failure. The prosperity gospel, the teaching that wealth, health, and success are signs of God's favour, is exactly the moral scoreboard that Jesus refuses. This instinct is not confined to religion. In secular language, it becomes the conviction that the world is basically fair and people mostly get what they earn and deserve. Meritocracy is just-world thinking in a business suit. The instinct runs deep in all of us.

When preachers tell their congregations that God wants them to be rich, or that illness is a sign of insufficient faith, they are reading history the way Jesus warns us not to. They are repeating the disciples’ mistake when they asked about the blind man. Jesus' answer is as relevant now as it was then: "It was not that this man sinned" (John 9:12).

The prosperity gospel is not just theologically mistaken. It’s pastorally cruel. It tells the person with cancer that their faith is weak. It tells the family in poverty that they’re doing something wrong. It tells the grieving parent that God is displeased with them. And it does all this while calling itself good news. Jesus confronted that instinct in Luke 13 and in John 9. His answer is always the same: that is not how God works.

True faith doesn’t come with a prosperity guarantee. It comes with the promise of a God who is present in suffering, not absent from it. The God whose Son was executed as a criminal, and who called it the moment of His glory. And if the Cross reorients our understanding of suffering, it also reorients our understanding of wealth. The answer to the prosperity gospel is not simply "God does not promise you riches." It’s that the God who took the side of Lazarus calls His followers to do the same.

Conclusion

What are we left with? We’re left with a calling to humility, and with something that turns out to be, underneath the discomfort, genuinely good news.

The humility is this: We are not God's referees. We do not have access to God's final verdicts on the lives of other people, or on our own. When we read the Old Testament's harder stories, we are not meant to extract a simple algorithm for individuals. Jesus blocks that move, not by dismissing those stories, but by insisting that only God can read them, and only God can judge. The harvest will come. The sorting will happen. But it is not our job, and it is not our timing.

This does not mean that sin cannot be named, or that the Church has no authority to teach, correct, or discipline. Jesus commands holiness and gives His apostles real authority. He says: "be perfect" (Matthew 5:48), a call to reflect God's character in every aspect of life, and He means it. He gives the power to His apostles to bind and loose. But naming sin is not the same thing as decoding providence. To say that an act is wrong is within the Church's commission. To say that a person's suffering is God's punishment is not. The first belongs to moral truth; the second presumes knowledge of God's hidden judgements. The Church may declare what sin is. She does not thereby claim to know why this particular person suffers now, or how God will judge them in the end.

The good news is this: if suffering is not a verdict, then no one who suffers needs to wonder whether God has abandoned them. The person who is ill, the family that’s grieving, the community that’s struggling, none of them need to read their circumstances as a message about their standing before God. Jesus looked at a man blind from birth and said, in effect: This is not what sin looks like. It’s what grace looks like when you wait long enough to see it.

And the model He leaves us with is not of a judge with scales, but the Father running down the road, the shepherd leaving the ninety-nine, the woman turning the house upside down for one lost coin. That’s the picture of God's judgement Jesus keeps returning to. Not a ledger being balanced, but a love that will never stop looking.

He puts it simply enough that we might let it settle: "Be merciful, just as our Father is merciful" (Luke 6:36). Not: be accurate in your assessments. Not: be fair in your distributions. Be merciful, because that, in the end, is what God turns out to be, and the proof of it is that when He entered the world, He did it by going to the Cross, instead of by letting us wield the sword. The Cross reveals the character of judgment. Final judgment remains in the future, and at its heart stands a Cross. The Cross is God’s refusal to let us turn suffering into accusation. If we are to judge as He judges, we must learn mercy.