Matthew 7:4

Or how will you say to your brother, Let me cast out the splinter from your eye,

And lo, the plank is in your own eye?

So He asks them to consider the folly of the person who with a great plank sticking out of his eye goes up to his brother and offers to remove the splinter from his eye. The picture is intended to be ludicrous. The plank will make the one he approaches stare at him in bemusement. For not only will the plank make the person unable to do the job, but it will hardly encourage confidence in the patient. If such a person cannot remove the plank from his eye, how on earth can he hope to remove a mere splinter? The person is thus rendered unsuitable on all counts. But Jesus is saying that that is really no more ludicrous than one man criticising another harshly. For the truth is that we need to recognise that we are all sinners together, and must therefore be mutually supportive and helpful, and if we cannot cope with dealing with our own sins how can we possibly assist another with regard to their sins?

The plank represents all the sins that prevent men from seeing clearly in spiritual matters, (which in the end means all sin, but here more specifically hypocrisy and censoriousness), because they have as a result ceased to see singly (Matthew 6:22), and are spiritually squinting. Thus the point is that if we are to help another our own lives must be attuned. The gifted musician who has been lazy, and has not practised sufficiently, may sound well and good to the layman, but to other gifted musicians, (and, if he will face up to it, also to himself), his failure will be obvious. He will not be perfectly attuned. So is it too in our spiritual lives. If we fail to pray regularly and to study God's word, and to walk rightly with Him in all things, walking in His light and ‘keeping short accounts with God' (1 John 1:7), it may not be immediately obvious to others, but it is something of which God and the angels will be keenly aware, and it will eventually become obvious to all men. And it renders us spiritually useless.

This is a position that we all find ourselves in time and again in our spiritual lives, and until it is put right we are in no position even to ‘judge' others helpfully. For censoriousness and a sense of superiority and condemnation renders us immediately disqualified. There is no greater sin than harsh judgment of others, when we ourselves are forgiven sinners. To judge harshly is the greatest evidence of our own lack of fitness to help others. It is demonstrating our failure to recognise how deeply we have been forgiven (compare Matthew 6:14; Matthew 18:23). Rather the one who would help another must do so humbly, conscious of the depths of their own failure, and therefore esteeming the other better than themselves (Philippians 2:3). (They must remember that they have just got rid of a plank from their own eye, while their brother only has a splinter). Then only will they be in a position to help the other. For our approach in such cases must always be in sympathy and love and understanding, not with a view to passing the judgment that only God can dare to pass.

Thus Jesus' point is that until the person in question has had the plank removed from their own eye, by true repentance of all wrongdoing and of all failures to do the right, and by humbling themselves before God, and coming back to full fellowship with Him in the light (1 John 1:7), and are thus walking in humility and love (1 Corinthians 13:4) and having been reconciled to all who have anything against them (Matthew 5:23), they are in no position to remove splinters from anyone's eyes. To seek so to help others is to be seen as no light matter, and requires a true heart and great delicacy, something only possible to the one who is right with God on all matters, and goes about the matter fully conscious of his own sinfulness and unworthiness. For any other approach is but to bring condemnation on ourselves (Matthew 7:1).

Strictly the illustrations are of the beams that hold up the roofs of houses, a compared with a splinter of wood or a speck of sawdust. In those days those were familiar to all because of the ways in which their houses were constructed. We have used here the ideas of planks because for many of us these are more familiar than beams. (In the same way as the prophets spoke of heavenly things using earthly pictures which would be familiar. Communication must always be through what is understandable at the time).