WHAT ARE OUR JUDGMENT DAY PLANS?
- Hebrews 9:27 tells us that everyone will be judged by God.
- This is something that we all intrinsically know: there needs to accountability for what we’ve done in this life.
- So many things are left undone by this life in terms of justice that there has to be a higher and ultimate justice.
1. “I WILL BE JUDGED BY MY OWN STANDARDS.”
- We believe that our own standards of right and wrong will be what God judges us by. Did I feel that something was right? Did I feel that something was wrong?
- Two examples:
a. The guy who date-rapes a woman and feels no remorse because “she deserved it for getting wasted.”
- Do you want that guy judged by His own standards? Do you want that guy judged by His own words?
- Of course not. His lack of remorse in no way diminishes the evil of his action.
b. The #bringbackourgirls guy who said, “Allah said, ‘Sell.’”
- On April 14th, 230 School girls were kidnapped from the Chibok Government Secondary School by Boko Haram Terrorists in Nigeria.
- One of the most disturbing parts of the event was that one of the Boko Haram leaders said that he had prayed about it and that “Allah said, ‘Sell.’” In other words, not only was he doing this blatantly evil act, but he was justifying it as being sanctioned and approved by God (Allah).
- I’m going to presume here (because I think it’s the most likely reason) that he genuinely believes that. (It could be true that he knows that he’s lying, but that’s a different type of evil.) If he genuinely believes that his actions are God-approved, it’s almost certain that he’ll die someday confident in what he did. He will feel no remorse.
- Do we want him judged by his own standards?
- There is the idea of absolute truth that comes in play here.
- Here we’re talking directly about the idea of absolute truth. Is there truth that is always true, whether you believe it or not?
- George Barna (Virtual American, 1994) found that 71% of Americans agree with the statement: “There are no absolute standards that apply to everybody in all situations.”
- Further, he found that this type of thinking has become entrenched in the church. 53% of those who claim that there is no such thing as absolute truth identify themselves as born-again Christians. 42% of those who identify themselves as evangelical Christians agree with the statement: “There is no such thing as absolute truth; two people could define truth in totally conflicting ways but both still be correct.”
- Harry Blamires, in his book The Christian Mind, writes, “Ours is an age in which ‘conclusions’ are arrived by distributing questionnaires to a cross-section of the population or by holding a microphone before the lips of casually selected passers-by in the street. . .. In the sphere of religious and moral thinking we are rapidly heading for a state of intellectual anarchy in which the difference between truth and falsehood will no longer be recognized. Indeed, it would seem possible that the words true and false will eventually (and logically) be replaced by the words likable and dislikable.”
- To put the question directly: is religious truth more like ice cream flavors or arithmetic?
- Your favorite ice cream flavor is a matter of your taste. You can say you like strawberry, but I’ll always say that I’m a chocolate guy. And we can both be right because it’s just a question of our personal preferences.
- Conversely, if you say 2+2=4 and I say 2+2=5, one of us has to be wrong - both of those answers cannot simultaneously be right.
- As Blamires alludes to, most people today think that religious truth is like ice cream flavors: you can have your favorite and I can have my favorite and we can both be right. In fact, though, religious truth is like arithmetic. There is a right answer and there are wrong answers.
- There is a story told about Lloyd Douglas, who was the author of The Robe. It has to do with a tradition from the boarding house where he stayed while he was in college: “On the first floor resided a retired music teacher, infirm and unable to leave his apartment. Every morning they had a ritual: Douglas would come down the steps, open the old man’s door and ask, ‘Well, what’s the good news?’ The other would pick up his tuning fork, tap it on the side of his wheelchair, and say, ‘That’s middle C! It was middle C yesterday; it will be middle C tomorrow; it will be middle C a thousand years from now. The tenor upstairs sings flat, the piano across the hall is out of tune, but, my friend, that is middle C!”
- God’s truth is truth - yesterday, today, and tomorrow. God’s truth is truth - and that presumes that Da Vinci’s conflicting claims are false.
[This “absolute truth” section is pulled from the Da Vinci sermon.]
- What most of us want to do is gently judge our own behavior by our own standards while having the rest of the world judged by a more stringent, worthy standard.
- Of course, that won’t fly. There has to be a consistency to the judgment.
2. “I’VE DONE MORE GOOD THAN BAD.”
- This is the view that if you weigh my actions on a scale, then I’ll come out on the positive side.
- Basically, if we’re 50.1% good, the scales will tip in our favor.
- An issue with this view is that we can’t have confidence. How much good is enough? How much bad is too much?
- We can hope that we’ve done enough, but not have any assurance.
- If we do believe that this is the way that God judges people – by weighing out the good and the bad and seeing which way the scale tilts – then we also have to admit that there are people who will not come out on the right side of that judgment. There are people who will have much more bad than good. That means that some will not make it. Am I one of those? How can I know? You can’t – you can just hope. That’s an unsettling place to be.
- Another problem with this approach is how quick we are to justify our own sins.
- We know the extenuating circumstances: the pressure we’re under, the callousness that she’s shown, our original intention to do better. And, knowing those, we excuse a big portion of our behavior.
- Here again, this is not what we want from God concerning everyone else. We have to acknowledge that God will be fair in His judgment and not hold one person to a lower standard.
- There’s an even bigger issue, but I’m going to hold that for later in the sermon.
3. “I CHOOSE NOT TO THINK ABOUT IT.”
- Like a doctor’s visit that you wish you could avoid, it’s easy to just shove this to the back of your head.
- Sometimes we just don’t want to think about it.
- Sometimes we promise that we’ll think about it later. That view goes along with the “get-right-with-God-before-I-die-but-not-right-now” line of thought.
- I respect those who seek and come to a different answer, though I disagree with them. At least they took the question seriously enough to seek an answer. I do not respect those who blithely ignore the question.
- Why would we do that, when it’s so obviously a poor approach?
- One reason is that we intuitively know that two of the likely parts of moving toward God are going to be repentance and change.
- I’m going to need to repent of my sins and I don’t like admitting that I’m wrong.
- I’m going to need to change and I don’t like having to change, even if it’s ultimately for my betterment.
- Which is probably one of the biggest reasons so many people have that “someday” approach.
- It’s amazing to me that some people put far more thought and planning into their next vacation than they do into what happens after this life.
- Set up for the final section.
- There is good news this morning: God has not left us in the dark.
- Many make up their own answers to the question of Judgment Day, but we can get the word from God Himself on how to be ready.
- Let’s look at two verses that point us to how to get right for Judgment Day and how to be confident about Judgment Day.
HOW TO GET RIGHT: Reach for the cross.
- Hebrews 9:28.
- This verse tells us how we can get right with God: through what Jesus did for us on the cross.
- Go back over the three earlier statements in light of the cross.
a. “I will be judged by my own standards.”
- We may want to believe this, but it’s simply not the way things work. As I shared earlier, there are all kinds of problems with that idea.
- In truth, we are judged by God’s standards.
b. “I’ve done more good than bad.”
- One of the problems with this view is that it is completely incompatible with the Christian view. Why? Because Jesus died on the cross for our sins. In other words, Jesus believed our sins were sufficiently bad that they required His brutally excruciating death of the cross to make us right with God.
- Jesus specifically asked His Father in the Garden if there was another way out. The answer was “no” – not if He wanted to save us. That’s one clear sign that we can’t earn our way out of our predicament.
c. “I choose not to think about it.”
- The Bible is clear: judgment is coming. Ignoring that because we don’t find it a pleasant thought is shallow and short-sighted.
HOW TO BE CONFIDENT ABOUT FINAL JUDGMENT: Look at the changes that obedience to Christ is bringing now.
- 1 John 4:17.
- 1 John 4:17 tells us that love is being made complete in us. That’s another way of saying that we’re growing in our faith and that our lives are coming to reflect the love of Christ more fully.
- Then he says, and this is important, that change allows us to be confident as we approach the Day of Judgment.
- How does that work? Well, instead of just hoping that we’re ok or that the scale will tip in our favor – both of which leave us with a lot of anxiety – we instead know that we are His because we’ve seen Him move in our lives regularly over many years.
