14. Judgment And Immortality
In order to get ideas clear, it is necessary to
begin this chapter by setting question marks against certain familiar ideas
about the Second Coming which are not as well-founded in plain testimony of
Scripture as perhaps they ought to be.
One of these is the concept of a secret coming of
the Lord. And linked with it is belief that the great Day of Judgment will take
place at mount Sinai.
The idea of an unperceived coming of the Lord
seems to be based entirely on the repeated warning: "Behold, I come as a thief";
"the day of the Lord cometh as a thief in the night", and so
on.
But is it not true that " he shall so come in
like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven" (Acts 1: 11). He went away
visibly, bodily; and his disciples saw him go in a cloud of glory. "He shall
come in the glory of his Father, with his angels" (Mt. 16: 27). "As the
lightning shineth from one part of heaven unto the other, so shall also the
coming of the Son of man be" (Lk. 17: 24). "Behold he cometh with clouds (the
clouds of the Shekinah Glory), and every eye shall see him" (Rev. 1: 7). "The
Lord shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel,
and with the trump of God" (1 Th.4: 16); nothing very secret about these
testimonies!
Alongside these is the Lord's plain warning: "If
any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it
not...Wherefore if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert
(Sinai?), go not forth: behold, he is in the secret chambers (ever since 1914,
say J.W.'s), believe it not" (Mt. 24: 23,26).
But what about the "thief in the night,'
passages? A careful examination of all these verses quickly reveals that in each
instance the context is that of unprepared disciples. It is to them that
the Lord's coming is as a thief. The depredations of a burglar bring the
unpleasant realisation that the material things, which you have prized so
highly, have gone. What was most valuable is now valueless- to you. And so it
will be concerning the misplaced affection on worldly things that the faithless
disciple has set great store by.
It is difficult to see why Sinai should be deemed
to be the site of the Judgment. Three passages - Dt. 33: 2; Ps. 68: 17; Hab. 3:
3 - are cited in support of this belief. Yet not one of them mentions judgment,
either directly or indirectly: The first of these clearly refers to the Law of
Moses given at Sinai. The second is obscure and doubtful as to translation, and
occurs in a context, which explicitly says that Zion, not Sinai, is the mountain
that God has chosen. The third comes in a chapter, which is fu 11 of allusions
to the activity of God in the midst of His people, so it would be strange indeed
if verse 3 also were not a reference, like Dt. 33. to the theophany at Sinai,
especially since v. 2 has the prayer "Lord, revive thy work. .
."
A man has to want to believe in Judgment
at Sinai if he considers this evidence as adequate for such a weighty
conclusion. When this idea was first pronounced, it was difficult to find a
Biblical site lonelier than Sinai. The common assumption that the Judgment will
proceed at Sinai whilst the world goes on unheeding, presents difficulties in
modern times. This predilection is too slender a thread on which to hang so
important a concept.
Over against this is the very explicit word of
Jesus himself:
"When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and
all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his
glory, and before him shall be gathered all nations; and he shall separate
them one from another as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats" (Mt. 25:
31,32).
Will Christ have any throne of glory other than
the throne of David in Jerusalem (Lk. 1: 32)?
Some like to insist that this is a judgment of
nations and not individual saints. But such an idea will not hold. Here
are a few of the many difficulties in the way of such a
reading:
- Where else is there a judgment of nations spoken
of?
- How is it possible for a nation to be judged?
e.g. the U.S.A. produces the biggest villains and also the most gracious and
kindly believers in all the world. And what nation could be described as "the
righteous", for there is no righteousness except in
Christ.
- "Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from
the foundation of the world" (Mt. 25: 34). It is impossible for these words to
apply to any but saints in Christ.
- Not infrequently
"all nations" means "people out of all nations" (Is. 25: 7); the context there
describes the resurrection of the dead.
A further important conclusion follows from this
Matthew passage: In this Judgment Jesus is "the King" sitting on "the throne of
his glory". There he is already King of the Jews. This means that before ever
the saints are gathered to Christ, the Jews have been rescued from their
hopelessness and despair, and have been regathered from captivity. Now they know
Jesus of Nazareth to be not only Son of David but also Son of God. He is their
Messiah.
Such an order of development is to be expected,
because of the divine principle: "First that which is natural, then that which
is spiritual".
But will not the very first item in Messiah's
programme be the raising of the dead and the gathering (with them) of those
"which are alive and remain"? Does not Paul insist that "the dead in Christ
shall rise first"?
So many read the word "first" as meaning "first,
before anything else happens"; whereas the context in 1 Th. 4: 17 plainly
requires this: the dead will rise first, before the living in Christ are
gathered to him.
Thus there will be another test of faith for the
readers of these words, especially if it has been dinned into them that before
ever the world knows a thing about the Lord's coming they will have been
mysteriously snatched away.
In fact, very differently, there will be a
rehabilitation of Israel and an elimination from Abraham's Land of those whose
forefathers Abraham himself had sent away eastward (Gen. 25: 6). In unbelievably
quick time the Holy Land will also become a Land of unmatched fertility and
blessing. Arab prosperity, now being squandered in frivolous and empty-headed
vainglory will become the glory of Jehovah - the "silver and gold" of Ezekiel
38: 13.
Two other questions related to the foregoing are
worth spending some time on. The first has so much clear positive Bible
testimony to support it that it is something of a mystery that ideas regarding
it have not long ago crystallized out into dogma. Put baldly and simply it is
this: The saints in Christ will receive their immortality at
Jerusalem:
- As already intimated, it is when the King sits on the throne
of his glory that he says to those on his right hand: "Come, ye blessed of my
father, inherit the Kingdom". It would be a strange unnatural reading of the
words to postulate that these blessed ones had already been made immortal
elsewhere. It they had been, would they need to be separated off from the
"goats" when standing before the King on his
throne?
- Psalm 133 is explicit: "For there (in
Zion) the Lord commanded the blessing, even life for evermore". On this, see
"Psalms" by G. Booker.
- “In this mountain (which
mountain? see context)... he will swallow up death in victory: and the Lord God
will wipe away tears from off all faces. . ." (Isaiah 25: 7,8, interpreted in 1
Cor. 15: 54 and Rev. 21: 4).
- "He that is left in Zion...
shall be called holy, every one that is written unto life (Hebrew, literally) in
Jerusalem" (Is. 4: 3).
- "And of Zion it shall be said,
This man was born in her" (Ps. 87: 5). Is there any Scripture, which says that
God has a special esteem for a man whose natural birth, was in Jerusalem? But of
course the new birth of God's New Israel is a thing of unmatched importance.
Compare also Ps. 102: 16-18, if anything even more emphatic, and certainly given
a Messianic interpretation in Hebrews 1.
- Joel 2: 28
foretells an outpouring of the Spirit in Jerusalem. Peter applied these words to
Christ's gift of the Spirit on the early church at Pentecost (Acts 2: 17,18).
But, as the Joel context very plainly intimates, there is to be another yet more
impressive fulfilment of these words in the Last Days- and where? The prophet
mentions nowhere except Jerusalem.
