Sermon for CATM – May 25, 2008 - Recovering the Meaning of Our Sacred Words: Judgment
A priest and a rabbi were standing by the side of the road holding up signs. The rabbi’s read, "The End is Near!" The priest, on the other side of the road, held up a sign which read, "Turn before it’s too late!"
They planned to hold up their signs to each passing car. "Get a job." The first driver yelled. The second, immediately behind the first, yelled, "Leave us alone you religious freaks"! Shortly, from around the curve, they heard screeching tires and a splash followed by more screeching tires and another splash.
The rabbi looked over at his companion and said, "Do you think we should try a different sign"? The other man responded, "Perhaps, ’Bridge Out’ might be better"?
Of all the words we’re going to look at in our current series, “Recovering the Meaning of our Sacred Words”, today’s word, “Judgment” is perhaps the least popular and the most controversial word.
The idea of God judging humanity doesn’t have a lot of currency in our world today. I was surprised recently at the Ontario Prayer Breakfast when a United Church minister introduced herself as one who loved and served her judge and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
I don’t know if mine was the only head to turn, but I know for sure that I wasn’t the only one who thought that was a pretty counter-cultural thing so say. I was impressed actually, because in stating that Jesus Christ is her judge and her Saviour, she was really stating something pretty profound.
What are you more comfortable with? Thinking of Jesus Christ as your Saviour, or your Judge? Why do we lean toward preferring Jesus as our Saviour? [Judge is theologically limited; Saviour conveys what Christ actually is; we don’t want to be judged, we want to be saved; we like salvation a lot more than accountability]
So, we perhaps get ‘Jesus as Saviour’, and maybe we find the notion of ‘Jesus as Judge’ just a little bit scary.
So, today we’ll look at some Scripture passages that will hopefully shed some light on what the judgment of God is, why it’s important to understand what it is, and then to perhaps grasp even more that we already do, just what an amazing Saviour we truly do have. What a fate He is saving us from! What love that makes Him do so!
I’m going to ask Shannon to read our first passage from Exodus chapter 6, verse 1 to 7.
Exodus 6:1 Then the LORD said to Moses, "Now you will see what I will do to Pharaoh: Because of my mighty hand he will let them go; because of my mighty hand he will drive them out of his country." 2 God also said to Moses, "I am the LORD. 3 I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name the LORD I did not make myself known to them. 4 I also established my covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, where they lived as aliens. 5 Moreover, I have heard the groaning of the Israelites, whom the Egyptians are enslaving, and I have remembered my covenant. 6 "Therefore, say to the Israelites: ’I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. 7 I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the LORD your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians.
Here we have a passage that might surprise us a bit in its use of the word “Judgment”. The situation here of course is the captivity and enslavement of the people of God. For 400 years the Jews had been under the thumb of the Egyptians and living as people enslaved.
They were enslaved initially due to their large numbers and the fear that the Pharaohs had of their numbers. They were still slaves because their slavery served the economy of the Egyptians…free labour. The Israelites were brutalized under the Egyptians and they cried out to God for deliverance.
Let’s look at verses 6 and 7. Here we have God’s promise, a divine promise, to bring freedom from slavery, to bring redemption THROUGH His judgment upon the Egyptians. To take the Israelites AS HIS OWN PEOPLE, that He would be their God. That is how God was going to choose to reveal Himself.
And of course, He did. With great power and authority, God did deliver the Jews from slavery. So here we see that God’s judgment brought about freedom, brought about redemption. God did not want the Jews to suffer under slavery, and He heard their cry and brought them to a place of liberty.
Now, there’s a LOT more to the story, of course. But perhaps when we think of this situation and when we think about the purpose and function of judgment here, we can see that God’s judgment is not always so much about a final verdict. That’s the thing that makes us a bit nervous when we usually think of ‘judgment’.
The hammer’s about to fall and we know that, truth be told, judged by our own actions and thoughts, much of the time we’d be in big trouble. But here we see an example among many other examples in Scripture of the purpose God’s judgment being: to bring freedom. To bring redemption.
Now…there is a judgment day. You and I will all stand before God on that day to give an account for our lives. Jesus spoke of that day more than once: Matthew 12:36 “But I tell you that men will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken”.
Elsewhere the Bible speaks of that day: Romans 2:5 But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed.
Everything we’ve ever done will be laid bare. Lack of repentance for sin and the kind of stubbornness that leads to such lack WILL be judged by God.
I don’t plan to dwell too much on this aspect of judgment, but I need to give it its due by saying that when the Bible speaks of God’s judgment in this manner, it does so because judgment is coming, and because we are helped, I believe, by knowing of God’s coming judgment, to take our lives more seriously. To take our actions more seriously. Even…to understand and appreciate much more deeply the price that Jesus paid to redeem our lives from death!
Ecclesiastes 12:14 says: For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.
Now, this is perhaps where we can begin to get our heads around the notion this phrase: “The Fear of God”. I’ve had more people than I can remember come up to me and say that they don’t understand why anyone would fear God. “What is there about God to fear?
Isn’t God all-forgiving? Isn’t God just suppose to be a comfort in times of trouble and an anchor of affirmation when life gets tough?”
I’m going to ask Paul to read this passage from 1 John, chapter 4, verses 7 to 13.
1 John 4:7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. 13 We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.
We begin with love. Why do we begin with love? Because God calls us to love, because love comes from God, because God is love, and because love is the defining feature of those who have a relationship with God.
I’d even go so far as to say, if we don’t love…if our lives aren’t characterized by love, if we’re known primarily for our opinions, for our judgments, for our crusty personality, for the hurtful things we say to others, we don’t know God.
Why do I say that? 1 John 4: 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
So it begins with love. It’s all about love. Even God’s judgment, as scary as it should be to us…even God’s judgment has to do with love.
Our passage continues: 1 John 4:9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Life is a bitter pill to swallow for a great many people. For a lot of folks life mostly just hurts. It is filled with frustrations, it is filled with struggle. Life can be pretty empty.
That’s why so many folks get caught up in addictions of various sorts…the internet, smoking, drinking, sex, tv, drugs…you name it. There’s a whole lot of ways that we try to either add substance to life to make it seem worth while or to numb ourselves from the pain of life. God knows how empty life is for a lot of folks. And God knows that part of that empty feeling is due to the fragmented relationship we have with Him.
The hurtful things we do to ourselves and others…the sins that we commit…lead to a kind of trap. A kind of slavery, a kind of bondage where the sin feeds on itself and becomes an endless oppression in our lives.
Living life without God, a lot of us who’ve tried that can testify, living life without God is, again, pretty blank or pretty empty.
And sin keeps us at a really unhealthy distance from God because by its very nature, sin can’t be close to God…because of His nature, which is perfect, holy, right and righteous, beautiful and giving. Sin is the opposite of all those things, so of course sin and God can’t share the same space.
Sin keeps its distance from God. I think we can all relate to that. But here we see God’s solution to this problem. We see how it is that God chooses to take us out of our spiritual slavery, how he chooses to redeem us from the wages of sin, from the consequences of sin…
1 John 4:9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
That word “Live”, “Zao” in the original Greek, means: to live, breathe, be among the living (not lifeless, not dead), to enjoy real life, to be in full vigour. Now in John’s gospel, Jesus highlights in a very easy-to-understand way the difference between Satan’s work…and then God’s work in Christ.
And this is an important difference: John 10:10 “The thief (Satan) comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full”.
Jesus came to bring us liberty from sin, It’s not intended to be an abstract idea or a theological ivory-tower thing that we’re suppose to wax poetic about. Jesus died to give us life to the full, abundant life as the KJV says.
But why was Jesus sent to atone for our sins? Let’s look at this phrase: Rom 6:22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. Rom 6:23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
“The wages of sin is death”. What does that mean? It means sin pays… but it pays poorly…it pays death.
So if sin pays death, and I, if I’m honest, know that I sin. And if I, if I’m honest, say that I don’t particularly want what sin pays, then what am I to do?
The message of the gospel is this: I turn to Jesus Christ. Jesus is the atoning sacrifice for our sins. That is why we say that Jesus PAID our debt. The debt I could not pay without my own death, Jesus paid it…with His own death.
Rom 5:8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Rom 5:9 Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! Rom 5:10 For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!
There’s that “wrath” word. What’s that about? Simply put, God’s wrath is toward sin and all of its expressions. If I embrace sin, I become its slave because it doesn’t pay actual wages…it pays death, as we’ve discussed. Paul puts it pretty bluntly as he describes this: Rom 7:14 We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin.
Elsewhere Paul’s talking about his time with the Thessalonians, where he preached the gospel and planted churches that ended up sending out a ton of folks who were eager to share their faith in Jesus. Paul said this:
1 Th 1:8 The Lord’s message rang out from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia--your faith in God has become known everywhere. Therefore we do not need to say anything about it, 1 Th 1:9 for they themselves report what kind of reception you gave us. They tell how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, 1 Th 1:10 and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead--Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.
You and I are “rescued from the coming wrath” by Jesus who even though He Himself never sinned, took our sin upon Him. 2 Cor 5:21 “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God”. That wrath is God’s judgment on sin, which we need to understand is very serious, very, very serious.
Have you ever wondered about Jesus’ prayers when He was in the garden of Gethsemane. Remember, He prayed this:
"My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will." And then a little later He prayed: “"My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done." Matthew 26:29,42
What was that cup that Jesus was to drink, that He DID drink. I admit, this is a strange expression for us. What does it mean to take away a cup? What ‘cup’ was Jesus referring to?
Several of the Old Testament prophets, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel among them speak about the cup of God’s wrath. God’s fury is compared to being forced to drink a cup of wine in which the bitter-tasting particles sink to the bottom. The cup of wrath is the cup of God’s judgment, which Jesus was to drink in our place. Again, He who had no sin was made to be sin for us.
Let’s move on here. 1 John 4:11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
I want to talk just briefly about a really important difference between divine judgment and human judgment, between God’s righteous judgment and the judgments that often happen between humans. The first point is this, and I mean to be very brief here: God is always right.
His judgments are never misplaced. They are never influenced by his pain. They are never tinted or twisted by anger or jealousy or sin or anything, ever. Deu 32:4 He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he.
That means when God makes judgments, He is always spot on. On the day of judgment, when we stand before him and all our stuff is out there in a way that can’t be hidden or excused or relativized or trivialized, on that day that we will each face, on that day…His judgment will be just.
Our plea, as Billy Graham says so well, is that we rely on nothing that we’ve said or done…we rely only on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ who gave himself as a ransom for many. This is our one plea. And God’s promise is to receive us into His presence for all eternity. John 3:36 Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on him."
That’s divine judgment, and it’s all based on Jesus Christ. Human judgment on the other hand is fraught with problems. We are each so limited. We’re so limited that Jesus tells us, in fact, to NOT judge. We’re not capable. We’re not competent to pass judgment on one another.
In John chapter 8, a passage that gives us amazing insight into the character of God, a bunch of men are swarming
around a young woman caught in adultery. They bring her to Jesus to get him to pass judgment on her... they’re testing him.
Will He honour and apply Old Testament law to a woman who, strictly speaking, the law itself condemned for her actions? Jesus, while not disputing the law itself directly, redirects the question with his words. “If any of you have never sinned, then go ahead and throw the first stone at her!"
We sometimes make judgments as though we had the right to make judgments when we’re not, truly, equipped to make judgments. And that’s the problem. Each of the men in John 8 had sin in their lives that they were not dealing with while at the same time wanting desperately to deal most severely with the sin of another person.
If I search my own heart and come clean with God about all the flaws I have, I’m not going to have the time or the energy or the inclination to wrongly judge you, to condemn you. And then we can get on with the business of loving each other, which, by the way, is what Jesus recommends above everything. That’s what I want to say briefly about the difference between human and divine judgment.
1 John 4:14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. 16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. 17 In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. 18 There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
Jesus is the Saviour of the world. He’s not one of a number of Saviours. He’s not A way to God. He’s not one way to deal with the issue of sin that separates us from God, as though there was any other way to do that.
He is THE SAVIOUR. And this is so important that verse 15 says that ANYONE who acknowledges Jesus as the Son of God has the truly amazing privilege of having God live in them.
Because of this (V.16) we need not live in fear of God’s judgment for our sins. There will be a day of judgment for our sins. But we don’t rely on our good works to somehow atone for our sins. What do we rely on?
We rely on the love God has for us. The love that was expressed when Jesus, the Saviour of the world, took our sins to the cross. Jesus said: “John 15:13 Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends”.
And here is the whole framework, the whole context, and the key to all of God’s acts…from creation to our redemption, our salvation: (V.16) “God is love”. Here again is why we’re not called to live in judgment of one another, to spend our energies criticizing and finding fault. What are we called to do?
We’re called to (v.16) “Live in love”. When we do so we live in God and God lives in us. “In this way” verse 17 continues, “love is made complete in us that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him”.
Rather than living in fear of the day of judgment, the Bible says that “we will have confidence on the day of judgment”.
Rather than dreading the coming day of judgment, we can cleave to the Word of God.
The book of Romans uses the word “justified”. The word ‘justified’ means “to declare, pronounce, one to be just, righteous, or such as he ought to be”. It means “approved of or acceptable to God”. Let’s look again at a key passage from Romans that really bears revisiting .as we wrap up.
Rom 5:8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Rom 5:9 Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! Rom 5:10 For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! Rom 5:11 Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
Let’s pray. Holy God, You are good and we hear today that You are Love. We hear today about judgment. We recognize that on our own we truly don’t have a leg to stand on in the judgment that is to come. But we hear also of the love of our Saviour, who died so that we might live in God and God in us. Who died to take away the penalty of our sin, who Himself paid the wages of our sin by dying on the cruel cross. What a mighty God we serve. What a gracious and kind and unexpected gift for one as sinful as me. Cause each of us, holy God, to love you with our whole being, to live as people who are reconciled to God. And may we bring word of your love and reconciling grace to those we know and love, to those we have yet to meet. In Jesus’ matchless name we pray. Amen
