A Word Of Ministry

THE JUDGMENT SEAT OF CHRIST & OTHER JUDGMENTS   (Part 1)

Romans 14:10;  1 Cor. 3:11- 15; 4:4-5; 2 Cor. 5:10.

Standing before Christ at the Bema or the Great White Throne.

            Every human being will face judgment of the Lord, either before the ‘Judgment Seat of Christ', or at least 1007 years later before the ‘Great White Throne'.

            There are 7 notable judgments in the New Testament Scriptures, but first we should consider how sin came into God's creation to occasion His judgment.  God put Adam in control of His creation and made him head over all including his wife Eve.   For so long as Adam and Eve were obedient to God's word, they would live in innocence, in peace and harmony with all around them with neither need, nor enemies to worry them, and God would come down in the cool of the evening to commune with man whom He had made and placed in His creation.   In time, Satan, being more subtle than any beast of the field, spoke in the ear of Eve, planting a doubt in her mind about what God had said.  So instead of listening out for when God would come into His garden to commune with her and her husband, she closed her ear to God's voice and opened it to hear and respond to Satan's subtle wiles, and by so doing disobeyed God.  Eve compounded her sin by persuading her husband to sin.  Eve was deceived, but Adam disobeyed.   Adam's failure lay in the abandonment of his responsibility to exercise headship in the fear of God.  So, ‘By the offence of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation....for as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of One (the Lord Jesus Christ) shall many be made righteous' (Romans 5:18-19).  Now, God has said that, ‘All have sinned and come short of the glory of God' (Romans 3:23).

            The only way man's communion with God could be restored would be by the sacrifice of God's only begotten Son on Calvary's Cross and the shedding of His precious blood to atone for the sin of the world.  Thus we come to the first of the 7 judgments.

1.         THE JUDGMENT OF SIN AT THE CROSS.  The issue of this judgment is Salvation from sin and its blessed results.  The Judgment for our sins and the sin of the world was laid on the Lord Jesus Christ during the three hours of darkness He hung on the Cross.   We read in 1 Pet. 2:24; "Who His own self bore our sins in His own body on the tree".   God punished the Lord Jesus Christ instead of punishing us.  God is now satisfied with the great sacrificial work of His Son, the Saviour of the world.  God has come out to be just and the justifier of all that repent and believe on the complete work of redemption and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.

            Your sins are said to be remembered no more.  God puts those sins out of His reach as far as the East is from the West (Psalm 103:12). He is said to have put our sins out of His sight, behind His back, ‘Thou wilt cast all my sins behind thy back' (Isaiah 38:17); they are said to have been put out of His mind, ‘their sins and iniquities will I remember no more' (Hebrews 8:12 & 10:17).   God does not forget our sins, because ‘forgetting' is a failure of the memory, but He has by an act of sovereign will, taken our sins and removed them for ever from the eternal files and records in heaven. Satan may challenge the Throne of God about your sins as a Christian, but God will reply, ‘what sins', I have no record of their sins here, because those sins have actually been removed from all the records in heaven.  For the Christian, the judgment of our sin is for ever in the past. 

2.         THE JUDGMENT OF SELF IN THE BELIEVER'S LIFE.  1 Cor.11;31.  The issue of this judgment is preservation from discipline.  If we live with unjudged sin in our lives, God will not sit idly by and watch the slow disintegration of a Christian life without intervening to do something about it.  The reason for that is given in 1 Cor. 10:17; for all believers form part of the ‘one body'; since if my small finger hurts, then the whole of my body feels the hurt.  If I lose a limb, the whole body (person) suffers loss, and so it is with a body of believers.  If I am living with unjudged sin in my life, the sin is going to affect the temperature, harmony and spiritual quality of the local assembly.  It will affect the worship of God in the assembly, and hinder me from worshipping in spirit and in truth; and if I do not deal with the problem in self-judgment, God will move in to deal with the matter by His judgment.   It is better that we judge ourselves, as the scripture says (1 Cor. 11:31), than to be judged.   If a serious and unjudged fault persist in an individual, then God may remove such a person from the local assembly, or set them aside in sickness for a longer period; or in a most severe case, the individual may be removed from this scene of testimony (1 Cor. 11:30).

3.         THE JUDGMENT OF THE BELIEVER'S LIFE AND WORKS.   The issue of this judgment has to do with ‘crowns and rewards'.  The truth of this judgment should inspire us to holy living and zealous service.    The judgments of the believer are three-fold.  We have judgment as a sinner, judgment as a son and judgment as a servant. 

            THE JUDGMENT OF A BELIEVER AS A SINNER.   This judgment is for ever in the past.  We should never worry about this judgment for it is the devil who alone constantly brings up your past sins to disturbed your peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.  If we confessed our sins honestly before God, He will forgive us (1 John 1:9).  They are removed from the record; God will never again bring those sins up.  The devil will bring up your sins for remembrance if you let him, but God never will, their record is removed for ever.  Rest assured, we shall never suffer the penal consequences of our sins at the Judgment Seat of Christ.  What peace and joy this should give to the believer, but it does not give him license to sin.  ‘Should we continue in sin that grace may abound, God forbid' says the apostle (Romans 6:1-2).   The Lord Jesus Himself said, ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent Me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life' (John 5:24). The judgment was borne by our blessed Saviour Who died under the mighty hand of God at Calvary's Cross that we might go free.

            THE JUDGMENT OF A BELIEVER AS A son OF GOD.  This judgment is an ongoing judgment as sons, and happens every day.  Every day of our lives, the Lord is dealing with us as to our relationship and fellowship with Him, and this judgment is applied by three laws.  This is very important.  There is the law of retribution that is in effect right now.  We are taught it in the scriptures; ‘Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.  For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting (Galatians 6:7-8).  Remember, God is dealing with every Christian now as sons by the ‘law of retribution'.  In other words, if I sin against God, in that very realm I will feel the discipline of God in my life again.  e.g. Egypt sinned against Israel, and the Lord called Israel ‘My Son', My firstborn.  The Lord told Pharaoh to let His firstborn go, but Pharaoh would not let Israel go, so the Lord in the judgment of retribution took out the firstborn of all the Egyptian families, man and beast.

            The children of Israel chose not to let the land lay fallow every seventh year as God had instructed them, and after 490 years there were seventy fallow years the nation owed to the land.  God therefore said you are going to let the land lay fallow for seventy years.  How did He do it; he took the people away into captivity into Babylon for seventy years so that the land of Israel never yielded a crop for the duration that time.  That is the teaching of the ‘law of retribution' and we live under that law at the present time as sons of God.

            Then there is the ‘law of Instruction'.  For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.  Every believer will in their lives feel the chastening hand of God.  The chastening of God is not punishment for sin, but has to do with instruction, teaching us and bringing us into living, fruitful lives for His glory.  If we do not have a fruitful life, the Lord will get that fruit one way or another.  His chastening will yield the peaceable fruits of righteousness to them that are exercised thereby (Heb. 12:11). 

            Then there is the ‘law of discipline'.  In 1 Cor. 11:29-30, we read, ‘He that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord's body'.  For this cause, many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep (the sleep of death); that is the ‘law of discipline'. 

            D.V. we shall consider the 3^rd element regarding the judgment of the believer's life and works (as a servant) in our next installment.  We shall also cover the last four of the 7 notable judgments referred to at the beginning of this paper.

By Frank Wallace; Edited by Tom H Ratcliffe.