Christ the King Sunday
Psalm 94, Ezekiel 34:11-17, 1 Corinthians 15:20-28, Matthew 25:31-46
Today is the last Sunday of Trinity season, the final Sunday of the liturgical year, and we celebrate it as the Feast of Christ the King. It is a fitting idea for the end of the liturgical year, for as Paul tells us in the Second Lesson appointed for today, God’s great work of redemption will be conclude with the rule and reign of Christ his Son. “25 For He must reign till He has put all enemies under His feet. 26 The last enemy that will be destroyed is death.”
Did you notice a theme running through the lectionary for today? We began with Psalm 94, which opens with the cry “O God, to whom vengeance belongs, shine forth!” And the rest of the Psalm continues in the same vein – a plea for God to come forth to judge the wicked and put an end to them.
In the OT Lesson from Ezekiel we find God promising his people that he will come to rescue and to redeem them, and to judge their enemies. At the end of that passage, God says 16 “I will seek what was lost and bring back what was driven away, bind up the broken and strengthen what was sick; but I will destroy the fat and the strong, and feed them in judgment.” The NT lesson, as we have already seen, speaks of Christ’s coming rule and reign until death itself is finally destroyed. And, of course, the Gospel lesson today shows us a scene at the end of the age, when Christ comes in judgment and in this scene he is judging the nations.
The doctrine of judgment doesn’t get a lot of exposure in pulpits these days. The preaching of judgment, or sermons or homilies on the judgment passages of Scripture are not often heard among Christians. Instead, such messages from the pulpits of Christendom have become a kind of charicature for all that was supposedly bad and wrong and misguided about that old-time religion, which traded on fear of a wrathful God in order to keep social order. And, yet, the theme of judgment is probably the one theme in all of Scripture which has more words devoted to it than any other topic.
It is emblematic of the spiritual indifference of our age that the Church in any of its forms is saying less and less about judgment, less and less about what the Bible mostly is concerned with. And, I would suggest to you that the judgment which God promises will come on both the living and the dead, upon the small and the great, upon every soul that has ever lived – that coming judgment is a key ingredient to all normal and healthy spirituality.
We see this most dramatically in the Psalm appointed for today, but we also see it in the other passages we heard read. I’d like to lay before you four ways in which God’s judgment at the end of the age is critical to your present spiritual health. Without a firm conviction of the coming judgment, your own service to Christ is impaired, your own stability as a Christian is weakened. How, then, does the knowledge of the coming judgment make you a better servant of Christ?
First of all, the coming judgment gives you strength to bear with the evil in this world. And, most certainly, the evil in this world is abundant, the wickedness around us often appears to be incorrigible, and the sheer injustice inflicted on the weak and the innocent and the helpless seems to be beyond repair.
So it is that the Psalmist in verses 6 and 7 complains about the oppression of the wicked. 6 They slay the widow and the stranger, and they murder those who have no father. 7 Yet they say, “The LORD does not see Nor does the God of Jacob under- stand.”
Over the years I have noticed a regrettable characteristic of some very old men. Some of them become fountains of complaining, often bitter complaining, about the wrongs of the world. Sometimes it is the wrongs done to them, or to their loved ones that they complain about; but many times it is the same complaint that you find here in Psalm 94 – that the wicked go about their wickedness, and nothing happens to them. They face no judgment, there are no brakes on them, they are never restrained in their wickedness, nor are they ever resisted by a greater or more righteous force. In their younger days, these old men were often galvanized by injustice and oppression, in order to rise up against it and to turn it back. But as they grow older and older, what they see is that the tides of evil come in and out over and over again during their lifetimes. And, so they grow despairing, and bitter, and the end of their years is perpetually stained by complaining.
Friends this will happen to you and to me if we forget that Jesus is returning in judgment. The wicked commit their wickedness and God does not judge them immediately. They think in their hearts, “Oh, there is no judgment. God does not concern himself with me or what I am doing.” And, so they advance more and more in their wickedness.
The righteous see the same things, and if they make the same inference as the wicked man makes, they have only disappointment and bitter complaining for their lot. But the wicked man is wrong, and so is the righteous man wrong if he thinks God forgets. No, God does not forget, and he promises from end of the Bible to the other than he is coming in judgment. In Psalm 94:3, the believer cries out 3 LORD, how long will the wicked, How long will the wicked triumph?” The answer is this – until the Jesus returns to judge the living and the dead.
You and I have both seen things in our own lifetimes that fill our mouths with ashes and our hearts with disgust and despair UNLESS we set beside those things the coming judgment of Christ.
And, this leads to the second thing that a belief in judgment brings to a believer. It not only helps him bear with the evil that he sees in this world, it gives you and me patience in suffering that same evil.
In verses 12 and 13 of Psalm 94 we read this: 12 Blessed is the man whom You instruct, O LORD, And teach out of Your law, 13 that You may give him rest from the days of adversity, Until the pit is dug for the wicked. What gives the blessed man rest here is the Lord’s teaching. If we do not know the Lord and his ways – and knowledge of him and his ways are impossible apart from a knowledge of his word – then we will fail to receive this blessing. And, as I have said, the coming judgment is one of the fundamental tenets of the Bible’s message about God and this world.
Did you catch that phrase “until the pit is dug for the wicked?” Do you realize the implications of that phrase? It means nothing more or less than this: that the wicked go on with their wickedness because God is not yet ready to judge them, the pit which he purposes for them and their wickedness is not deep enough yet. We have a striking example of this in Genesis 15 when God promises to give to Abraham and his descendants the land of Canaan. But, before they take possession of that land, they must wait four hundred years. And, why wait? God tells Abraham that it is because the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full. God is going to judge the nations of Canaan, he purposes to use the nation Israel to do this, but not until the iniquity of these nations is fully ripe.
And, in the meantime, what the righteous must do is to trust in the Lord, to trust in his promises, to bear with the evil around them, and to endure the suffering that many times is the price of that patience. As the Psalmist sings in verses 14 and 15: 14 For the LORD will not cast off His people, Nor will He forsake His inheritance. 15 But judgment will return to righteousness, and all the upright in heart will follow it.
Without a knowledge of the coming judgment, without a conviction that this judgment is certain, Christians are ill-equipped to bear with the evil of this world, or the pain in inflicts on the righteous in it. And, the certainty of this coming judgment is what vindicates a believers trust in God’s righteousness.
“9 He who planted the ear, shall He not hear? He who formed the eye, shall He not see? 10 He who instructs the nations, shall He not correct, the One who teaches man knowledge?”
And, so it is that Jesus in today’s gospel shows us the time when all nations will come before him and he will separate them into two groups, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 34 Then the King will say to those on His right hand, ‘Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” The thrilling thing we see here is that their reward was planned for them before they individually were ever created. But, there’s more that the King says, “Then He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” This too is right and good, and it is the end of all who abide in wickedness, thinking to themselves that God doesn’t care, that he doesn’t pay attention to such trivial things as petty human disputes. On the contrary, God keeps a careful eye on it all, and at the end, His promises are vindicated, as He is vindicated.
Finally, a confidence in the coming judgment by our King Jesus Christ fosters in us a right and godly fear of the Lord. You know, of course, that the final judgment that Jesus speaks of in today’s gospel isn’t the only judgment God brings in human history. History is full of times when God judged nations. He judged judged Sodom and Gormorrah for their wickedness in the days of Abraham. And in the days of Moses he judged the nation Egypt. He judged the nations of Canaan when their iniquity was fully ripened. And most instructive for us, God judged his own nation Israel when it ignored him and his Word. The last judgment of this sort affords a thrilling and chilling reason why we should never take the Lord’s promises of judgment lightly.
The oral traditions of the Mishna were set down in writing around the year 200 A.D., and the commentaries on the Mishna were accumulated and written down in the several centuries thereafter. There are two similar commentaries that pertain specifically to the destruction of the Temple. One of them, found in Ta’anith 29a, reads like this:
"Good things come to pass on an auspicious day, and bad things on an unlucky day. It is reported that the day on which the First Temple was destroyed was the eve of the ninth of Ab, a Sunday, and in the year following the Sabbatical year, and the [course] of Jehoiarib were on duty and the Levites were chanting the Psalms standing on their [platform]. And what Psalm did they recite? - [The Psalm] containing the verse, `And He hath brought upon them their own iniquity, and will cut them off in their own evil.’ And hardly had they time to say, `The Lord our God will cut them off,’ when the heathens came and captured them. The same thing also happened in the Second Temple."
[Ta’anith 29a, similarly Arakin 11b]
The Psalm which the gemara refers to here is the Psalm appointed for today, Psalm 94, the psal that begins with a cry for God’s judgment, and ends with a promise that God’s judgment will not fail. The last words of this Psalm say 23 He has brought on them their own iniquity, And shall cut them off in their own wickedness; The LORD our God shall cut them off.”
Preserved in the memory of the Jews is this astounding fact, that in the destruction of the first Temple in 586 B.C., as well as in the destruction of the Temple Jesus worshiped in when the Romans destroyed it in 70 A.D., the Levitical singers were just concluding the singing of the 94th Psalm at the moment when the promises of that Psalm were fulfilled. As they sang the words “He has brought on them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off in their own wickedness,” the Babylonian soldiers in 586 and the Roman soldiers in the year 70 A.D. were storming the gates if the Temple courts and carrying off those who were singing those words.
These things, and a host of similar smaller judgments in history should foster in each of us a godly fear of the one who will one day come to be our Judge. He who sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven will one day from there as the Creed says, to judge the living and the dead, and from thence his kingdom will have no end. In view of that coming judgment, may we find strength to bear with the evil of this present age, to endure the suffering which this age directs toward those who belong to Christ. May we also confess our confidence that God is not slack according to his promise, longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
