Judge not, that ye be not judged

Judge not, that ye be not judged is the biblical rule Raymond Moody uses to illuminate a striking feature of the near-death experiences he collected: people described judging their own actions, rather than being condemned by the loving being of light they encountered. His discussion does not claim to settle the verse’s correct interpretation or to prove a theological doctrine. Instead, it places interview reports beside two translations of Matthew and asks how the rule’s language of judgment and measure resonates with self-assessment during an experience near apparent death.

The Rule and Its Two Translations

Moody presents the King James Version of The Bible as reading: “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” He sets this beside the rendering in Today’s English Version, also published as Good News for Modern Man: “Do not judge others, so that God will not judge you—because God will judge you in the same way you judge others, and he will apply to you the same rules you apply to others.” The difference matters to his argument. The first translation foregrounds a reciprocal judgment without explicitly naming its agent in the quoted lines; the second explicitly says that God judges and applies the rules people have applied to others.

Moody declines to decide which translation is more accurate, stating that he is not a biblical scholar. His interest is narrower: judged solely against what his near-death subjects reported, he finds the first translation more applicable. In those reports, the person appears to recognize and assess their own conduct. The passage thus serves as a point of comparison for reported experience, not as a definitive ruling on biblical translation or doctrine.

Self-Judgment in Near-Death Reports

The reported judgment takes place amid heightened awareness and a review of a person’s actions. Moody says that people who saw selfish acts felt extremely repentant, while recollections of events in which they had shown love and kindness brought satisfaction. One interviewee summarized the question at the heart of this assessment as whether a person had done things out of love for others. In Moody’s account, the moral measure is therefore not simply a tally of deeds: the motive of love gives the remembered actions their ethical significance.

The being of light, by contrast, is described as loving and accepting the people who encounter it. Moody stresses that the judgment he observed in the accounts did not come from that being; it arose within the individual. People seemed to see for themselves what they should and should not have done, then judge themselves accordingly. This contrast gives the rule its particular relevance to the reports: judgment is experienced as an inward reckoning, while the presence accompanying the person remains accepting. Moody does not equate the two translations with two settled accounts of the afterlife; he identifies a resemblance between one translation’s wording and the structure of the accounts he has heard.

The Boundary Between Experience and Final Judgment

Moody distinguishes this personal reckoning from the Final Judgment at the end of the world. He argues that there is no necessary conflict between reports of near-death experiences and belief in a future final judgment. If someone returned claiming to have undergone that event, Moody reasons, the claim would be mistaken because the end of the world had not yet occurred. The experiences described in his study do not, in his view, establish that the Final Judgment has taken place or that it will not take place.

He adds an important qualification about belief: interviewees who expected a future Final Judgment accepted it on the authority of scripture, not because they had learned or foreseen it during their near-death state. This distinction limits what the reports can support. The inward self-assessment Moody describes is part of what people say they experienced; it is not evidence, in his presentation, that they received advance knowledge of the ultimate events of religious eschatology. He groups judgment, heaven and hell, the end of the world, and God’s grace among concepts so cosmic that human discussion often approaches them through figurative language.

A Rule Read Through Reported Experience

The interpretation remains deliberately qualified. Moody says he cannot adjudicate the rival translations, and he presents his comparison as an observation about the accounts rather than a demand that readers accept his theology. The biblical rule gives him language for a pattern he believes he has encountered: a person confronts the moral meaning of their life from within, while the loving being of light does not appear as the source of condemnation. The distinction between self-judgment and divine judgment is consequently central to his reading.

Moody’s own stated religious position also remains separate from the evidentiary claim. He says he has come to accept, as a matter of religious faith, that there is life after death and that the phenomenon under study is a manifestation of it. That personal conviction does not erase the qualifications surrounding his use of the verse: he does not claim that near-death accounts settle the translation, establish the timing of a Final Judgment, or compel a theological conclusion. The rule’s role in his discussion is interpretive and comparative, connecting a biblical formulation of judgment with interviewees’ reported experience of assessing their own actions.