Sermon Notes 7/11/10: “Unveiling the Judgment”
Part One: Introductory Issues
The subject of the future judgment, that point in the future when God judges the entire world, is not a subject often spoken about in churches. The reason for this, I think, is because we perceive it as an uncomfortable subject. We live in a day and age when churches value comfort over conviction, when pastors value how well they’re liked over and against how well they proclaim the gospel. That a day is coming when God will bring all careless and casual living to book, when he will deal fairly and decisively with all creation, not least with his rebellious image-bearing creatures, is uncomfortable. We don’t like to think about such things. We are creatures who would rather just dwell on sweet and pleasant things rather than those things that bring us mental discomfort. And I think that this perception of judgment, which makes us squirm to say the least, is flawed. We often perceive judgment simply as the moment when God will send all the bad people to hell. Yes, judgment involves the “calling-out” of all that is evil, including people, and dealing with that evil in the appropriate manner—but judgment involves so much more. When we grasp what judgment is, we can, as the early Christians did, really hope for it and, dare I say it, even celebrate it.
For the person of God, judgment is not something to be feared. It is something to be hoped for, longed for, yearned for. The knowledge of future judgment should give us strength and endurance amidst all of life’s unpleasant and even grueling trials. Thanks to a negative view of judgment that portrays God as this Deity in the Sky who nonchalantly deals out pain and suffering, Christians will often be terrified of judgment, and thus we will push it to the sidelines of our minds, trying to ignore it. The very idea of hoping for it, celebrating it, feels foreign and even, for some, evil. If we are to find hope, encouragement, and endurance in the knowledge and anticipation of future judgment, we must understand what, exactly, that future judgment is.
Part Two: The Biblical Portrait of the Future Judgment
The coming judgment is a future and public event not yet experienced within history. Foretastes of it have happened throughout history—these are signposts and echoes of that future judgment, and they include, most notably, God’s judgment on Jerusalem in A.D. 70 under the Romans, and the earlier judgment on Jerusalem under the Babylonians in sixth century B.C.—but the main event, to which these pointed, is yet to happen. All of these smaller judgments are signposts and echoes of the great future judgment, and when it happens, it will be the climax of history, what history has been pointing toward all along. When judgment comes, the present age—what is called “the last days” or “the current evil age” in the New Testament—will end, and the new age—when God will be “all in all” according to 1 Corinthians 15—will be fully realized.
This public event is not a Christian invention. The idea of a future judgment is drawn straight out of the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, the future “Day of Judgment” is referred to as “The Day of YHWH.” One of the most popular texts regarding this is Malachi 4.1-3. For the Jewish person in Jesus’ day, the coming judgment, the future Day of YHWH, was the fulfillment of the age-old Jewish hope, the answer to the tear-soaked prayers in the psalms, and it would be a final statement, such as that of Daniel to Nebuchadnezzar, that the Lord Most High rules over the kingdoms of the mortals. From the Jewish perspective, the coming Day of Judgment incorporated many themes: first, it involved the overthrow of oppressive pagan nations. Second, it involved the vindication of all God’s people throughout all of history. And third, it involved God’s peace and justice flooding the entire world. Judgment—when God would deal with the evil in creation and when he would set everything right—would bring people to shout for joy, and, as Psalm 98 tells us, even the trees of the field would clap their hands in gladness. The Jewish conviction of God is not a God who is remote and far-away, disinterested and detached from his creation. The Jewish God is concerned for his creation, and he is devoted and destined, according to his covenant with Abraham, to rescue his creation; and this ultimate rescuing will take place when judgment comes. Faced with a world steeped in rebellion, exploitation, and downright wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment. Judgment flows primarily not from God’s anger but from his love: it is not so much him pouring out his wrath on all those who refused him (though that’s part of it), but it’s God, in his love, doing what he has promised to do: rescuing creation—all of creation, from microbes to galaxies, from lightning bugs to human beings—from the present state of death and decay.
In Daniel 7, the prophet Daniel wrote about the coming judgment. In this apocalyptic text, the oppressive pagan nations are envisaged as ugly, nasty, and powerful monsters, reminiscent of something even Stephen King could hardly come up with. Israel—the people of God—is a small and defenseless human being at the mercy of the terrifying and tyrannical beasts. The entire chapter is set out as a court scene that climaxes as the Judge, the Ancient of Days, takes his seat and rules in favor of his terrified people and against the brutalizing monsters. The son of man is then given authority and dominion over all the nations of the beasts. When we come to the New Testament, we find Jesus calling himself the “Son of Man,” a reference pointing straight back to Daniel 7. Jesus doesn’t use this title to identify himself with humanity; it’s his identification with the one who, in Daniel 7, is given authority and dominion over the nations, the one who will perform the judgment of the Ancient of Days.
Within the New Testament, the future hope of judgment—when God doles out his justice in all creation, setting the earth free from corruption, decay, and death; the day when God gives all those who have persistently and obstinately rebelled against him their due; the day when God vindicates his people, Israel, now reshaped around Jesus the Messiah—is not abandoned. When Paul speaks before the debating philosophers in ancient Athens, he tells them, “[God] has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.” (Acts 17.31) In 2 Corinthians 5.10, Paul writes, “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each may receive what is due him for the things done in the body, whether good or bad.” The point is that everyone—not just Christians, and not just non-Christians—will stand before God in judgment. God will judge us all according to our deeds, and this judgment will involve all of our secret motivations and intentions that propelled our behaviors and choices, as Paul makes clear in Romans 2.16.
The question arises: “What about Christians?” Christians are to stand before the judgment seat, yes; but is our verdict in question? In Romans 8.1, Paul says, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Messiah Jesus.” We will stand before the judgment seat, but we have nothing to fear! We who have been justified by faith have thus been declared by God in the present time that when the future day of judgment comes, we will not only be acquitted but glorified; we will not only “get off the hook”, so to speak, but we will be vindicated. At the judgment, says Peter in 1 Pet 1.7, we will receive honors, praises, and glories from both God and all of creation. This is because, in Christ, we are already a member of God’s family, and our condemnation has been exhausted upon Christ on the cross, and our sins have been forgiven. On that future day, we have nothing to fear. The judgment we will experience will be based upon our deeds, not to determine whether or not we are part of God’s full and realized kingdom, but rather to determine the rewards we receive in that kingdom. These rewards are about our work for God and his kingdom, works we’ve done empowered by the Spirit, and they’re dependent upon our faithfulness to Christ, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3.14.
When the Day of Judgment comes, God will deal with all the evil within creation, not just that within his image-bearing creatures. The Bible tells us, not least in Genesis 3, that all of creation is infected with evil. Exactly what that means is a matter of debate, and most likely we won’t know the full implications of it until we see what creation is like without the infection. At the Fall, evil rippled throughout the universe. Like gangrene that spreads throughout the flesh of the infected, so evil rippled out and continues to ripple out throughout the entire created order, affecting everything from the subatomic level to the organization of galaxy clusters. Human beings have not been unaffected: outside of Christ, outside of the cross, we are, as Paul says, enslaved to Sin, infected with evil to the core of our beings (the redemption from Sin that a person experiences in faith, repentance, and baptism deals with this problem). At the Great Judgment, God will eliminate all of the evil that permeates and saturates his good and physical creation (evil has already been defeated in Jesus’ death on the cross, but it is currently limping around, bloodied and bruised, mortally wounded and destined for death and annihilation, but still wreaking havoc wherever it can). When God does this, when he liberates creation from its bondage to death and decay due to evil, the response will not just be a sigh of relief and a breath of fresh air but it will produce shouting for joy from the trees and the fields and from the seas and the floods (Psalms 96 and 98). The prophet Isaiah in Isaiah 11 envisages the liberation of creation in the image of a world where the wolf and lamb will lie down side-by-side. The entire creation—the entire cosmos—will be restored and rescued and renewed, put-to-rights.
Judgment will also involve God dealing with evil people, giving them what they deserve. Though outside of Christ we are enslaved to Sin, we are not without guilt. Mankind embraces courtship with death and evil, plunging into evil with laughter and singing, reveling in it like the Israelites partying around the Golden Calf while Moses was up on Mount Sinai. Ironically, those who celebrate evil are also enslaved by it; and in their celebration and indulgence of evil, they partake in the guilt of it. That God will deal with such people is an uncomfortable thought for many of us who have friends and family who are not members of God’s covenant. We don’t like the idea of God judging them in the negative sense. Our apprehension to this, I believe, is due to the fact that we fail to recognize what wickedness is all about. Wickedness is, according to the Old Testament, an abomination; and the Hebrew word for abomination literally means, “that which makes one vomit.” Ultimately, the greatest wickedness is not that people lie, steal, or even murder; but that people refuse to worship God and instead worship themselves. Worship of the Self is the greatest act of idolatry; and when we worship ourselves rather than God, we fail to live out our intended purpose of being God’s image-bearers and instead become our own image-bearers. The person who continues in sin, who rejects God, is, at the heart, refusing to be what God has created him to be; he is saying “No” to God’s kingdom and is saying “Yes” to his own kingdom. When judgment comes, God is, in effect, giving the person what he has always desired: his own kingdom, albeit a kingdom of death and destruction. The person who refuses to submit to God and his kingdom will have no part in God’s future and fully realized kingdom; not just because he “didn’t make the cut”, so to speak, but because throughout the entirety of his life he consistently rejected it. At the judgment, those who have worshipped themselves rather than God as creator, those who have persisted in living lives of idolatry in whatever shape that entailed, those who have continuously rejected the offer of grace and mercy, those who have dehumanized themselves, some to the point of being beyond hope and beyond pity, will be dealt with as they deserve. Many people outside God’s covenant laugh about that day, mocking it. I once met a man who said he worshipped the devil and was excited about the coming judgment, because then he would give God the finger. He’s grossly mistaken: in Psalm 2, the Gentiles tremble when Messiah is enthroned—because they know what’s coming! Unless he repents, he’ll find himself collapsed onto his knees in fear and trembling when Messiah comes back to execute judgment.
When God remakes the entire universe, freeing it from death and decay; and when God deals with all the evil people in the world alongside all the evil within the world, he will also vindicate his people. We Christians are often persecuted, and in parts of the world, this persecution leads to extreme torture and death. We are often mocked for our beliefs, accused of things of which we are innocent; our reputations are trampled, our endeavors foiled; we are often misunderstood and thrust into all sorts of suffering due to our allegiance and loyalty to Messiah Jesus. When judgment comes, we will be exalted over our persecutors, above our mockers, above our enemies. The text from Malachi speaks of the people of God trampling underfoot those who have persecuted them, and many Intertestamental texts speak of the glorified people of God doling out the judgment upon their enemies. Paul seems to say something like this in 1 Thessalonians 4: when Jesus returns, those who are in him will join him and participate alongside him in the judgment of the world. It is a strange idea, and one to be pondered: that when judgment comes, the people of God will have part in the judgment on the evil within the world, the evil within humanity.
The day of judgment is coming, and it will be accomplished through the Messiah (though, strangely enough, as I mentioned, it seems that those who are members of his family may somehow be involved). Judgment will come when Jesus appears from heaven, from the Realm of God, when the veil between heaven and earth is torn apart, ripped asunder. In that day, according to Paul in Philippians 2.10-11, “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is King, to the glory of God the Father.” When Jesus appears, all of humanity—the living and the dead—will acknowledge Jesus’ kingship and confess him as king. The dead will be resurrected—both the righteous and the wicked—and they will experience judgment: Jesus says in John 5.28-29 that the resurrected righteous will experience a judgment unto life, and the resurrected wicked will inherit a judgment unto damnation. When that day comes, when all stand before Jesus, everyone will bow down and confess Jesus as King. Those who are his people will do it with gladness and singing, adoration and love; those who have rejected him, mocked him, and persecuted him will see the folly of their ways, the blindness of their hearts, and in trembling and in terror they will bow down before him (though the time for repentance will have passed, and their fate will be sealed). Upon seeing Jesus in all his glory and majesty, the only response even of the most wretched sinner will be to bow down in mortified terror. But those who are his people, those who will be vindicated, will bow down in honor and adoration (but they shall not remain bowed; we will be lifted up, exalted, and glorified, set above all the pagans and over creation itself).
Part Three: Living Between Then & Now
The future judgment is coming, when the present wicked age will end and the future age when everything is put-to-right will be fulfilled. But what does this mean for us who live in the present evil age? First, it means that we have something to hope for. Our hope is in Christ and in our inheritance, and when judgment comes, our inheritance will be made complete: heaven and earth will be wedded together, and we will inherit the restored physical universe in restored physical bodies animated by God’s own Spirit (this is what Paul is talking about in 1 Corinthians 15). Amidst all the trials of life, amidst all the pains and sufferings and heartaches and disappointments and let-downs; amidst all the times when we find ourselves in our own Garden of Gethsemane, crying tears of blood; amidst all the times when it feels as if we have been abandoned by God, when we are drawn from our bruised and wounded hearts to echo Jesus’ words upon the cross—“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”—it is amidst all these times that we are to find hope in the coming judgment. The judgment promises that a day is coming when evil will be eliminated, when we will be vindicated, when all of our enemies will be dealt with, when we will share in God’s glorious future for the entire cosmos.
Second, it means that we must put our loyalty in Christ. This is what faith is all about: putting our loyalty and allegiance in Christ. When we confess Jesus as Lord, we are saying, “Jesus is King, and I am now his loyal subject.” Faith is about committing oneself to Christ. When judgment comes, only those who are committed to the King, only those who are members of God’s people through what Christ has done in his death and resurrection, only those will be the ones who will partake in God’s future, when he is “all in all.” To refuse putting loyalty in Christ—or, in other words, to remain loyal to ourselves over him, to our own kingdoms (whatever they may be) over God’s kingdom—is to embrace the fate of being shut-out from the full and realized kingdom of God when it comes to a head at the future judgment.
Third, it gives us a mission. All Christians have the mission of proclaiming the future judgment. Jesus died and rose again. He is the Son of Man from Daniel 7 who will execute justice upon the world (justice is, after all, at the heart of judgment). In proclaiming future judgment, in word and deed, in signs and symbols, we are not to just focus on what happens to all the “bad people”; yes, proclaiming the future judgment involves declaring that those who persist in dehumanizing, destructive, and rebellious manners of living are not merely inviting but ensuring destruction upon themselves and their own world, in the present and in the future. But the proclamation of future judgment goes beyond that: it involves the declaration that God is not finished with the cosmos. He isn’t just going to scrap it and throw it away (to do so in his dealings with evil would be akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater). God is going to renew creation, restore it, rescue it. Proclaiming the future judgment is acknowledging that a day is coming when God will do what he’s always promised to do—namely, to deal with evil and restore the creation, including his image-bearing creatures, to its good and rightful and originally-intended place—and that those who put their loyalty and allegiance in Christ will be able to partake in that future day. In calling people to faith, repentance, and baptism, we are not just calling people to escape the destruction they’re courting for themselves; we are inviting them into a future where they will receive new bodies and will dwell with God and with one another in a restored and pristine and beautiful new universe free of death and decay. This is the meat of evangelism: inviting people to become participants of God’s kingdom, God’s new world order, in the present and in the future.
Heaven is not a supra-spiritual realm where we will sing hymns to God for all eternity. Heaven, in the ultimate sense, is, as I've said in an earlier post regarding Hell House, the rescue and renewal of God's good creation, not least his image-bearing creatures. It would be interesting to see a dramatization of this, where tourists were led room-to-room and given different scenes of heaven: perhaps a scene of people swimming with dolphins, followed by a scene of people kayaking down the Amazon; and then maybe show an image of the New Jerusalem, a beautiful city that rivals anything we've ever created, rivaling even the Gardens of Babylon. Perhaps we ought to creatively show that heaven is not what many of us are expecting, and that it is something to be longed-for, hoped-for, yearned-for. It is the substance to which this current world is the shadow. It is where we will live full human lives, which will make our current lives pale in comparison. It is where we will experience exhilaration, joy, peace, excitement. It is where we will laugh and play and explore and conquer. Perhaps it is time we contrast the popular conception of heaven with what I would say is a more biblical conception of heaven:
Instead of trying to terrify people into becoming Christians, perhaps we should inspire them? Perhaps we should give them Good News--"Look what God has planned for his world!"--instead of giving them Bad News--"God wants to destroy you, so you'd better turn to him so he spends his anger on Jesus' cross instead of on you." At the least, it would help people see that Christians aren't dualistic platonists, that we're not stupid, that we have a hope, and that it's a pretty damned good hope. At the least, it would make people question their understanding of Christianity, perhaps make them want to look deeper into it. Would that be so bad? When people walk out of Hell Houses, their conceptions of Christianity as a rule-enforcing religion that seeks to terrify people into loving Jesus are solidified. Maybe a "Heaven House" can devastate such conceptions and force them to rebuild, or at least make them admit that not all Christians view God as this Old Man in the Sky who is angry with everyone. Just a thought.
