Do you find watching the TV News depressing? I certainly do, and it often makes me angry.
* Deliberate political strategy of fear and hate
* Powerful men (never women) who sit in paneled offices and never have to suffer the consequences of their decisions
* Efforts to clamp down on press freedom
* The failure of governments worldwide to take climate change seriously — lest the powerful interests whose profits would be hit stop donating to their parties.
* The destruction of forests such as in the Amazon
* Land clearing that destroys animal habitats and puts species in danger of extinction
* The failure to provide in a compassionate way for people unable to find work.
* People in positions of power using power privilege and wealth to crush little people — such as whistleblowers.
* The annexation of one country by a much more powerful one
* So much lying, so much bowing to powerful interests
* The callous disregard of human life by terrorists
And all the perpetrators think they will get away with it, there will be no consequences for their actions.
One of the themes of the Bible that is hidden from us in plain sight is the theme of judgement. That there will be a great day of reckoning, a day when God, the righteous judge will come to set the world to rights. I recently finished reading through the whole bible — a year’s reading project, and I have been truly amazed at the prevalence of the theme of judgement throughout the Bible. Here’s a few examples.
The psalmist wrote:
‘he judges the world with righteousness;
he judges the peoples with uprightness’.
Judgement was part of the gospel presentation of the apostles.
When Peter was speaking to the centurion Cornelius, his gospel summary included: ‘God raised Jesus on the third day and made him to appear, not to all the people but to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. And he commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead.’
Paul to the Areopagus in Athens.
Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.
Judgement is good news! We are assured that those who are making themselves wealthy and fat by exploiting others will not get away with it. Those who have inflicted great injustices, perhaps even on you, will not get away with it. We can confidently leave revenge to God.
I was discussing this sermon with the minister of the church I attend, and he told me of a famous Yugoslavian theologian, Miroslav Volf, now at Yale, who said that as a young evangelical he used to look down on Old Testament cries for justice against the brutal — both individual and nations — until his people, Croatians, were terribly brutalised during the Croatian war for Independence, where up to 14,000 Croatians were killed. He said only the expectation of the Day that God would repay made it possible to let it go and not repay evil for evil.
Nature itself will rejoice on the day of judgement.
Let the sea roar, and all that fills it;|
the world and those who dwell in it!
Let the rivers clap their hands;
let the hills sing for joy together
before the Lord, for he comes
to judge the earth.
He will judge the world with righteousness,
and the peoples with equity.
The apostle Paul reminds us in a seriously ignored passage in Romans chapter 8 that the whole creation groans, waiting for judgement. Extinct animals, endangered animals, animals treated inhumanely, the victims of fish kills, the creation which is suffering because of climate change.
Isaiah tells us that The trees of he field will clap their hands:
For you shall go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall break forth into singing,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
All of nature itself will be put to rights when God comes to judge his world.
We shall be involved in the judgement — we shall judge the world, and judge angels — presumably cleansed of all bias!
Paul writes:
When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints?
Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases?
And as if to reinforce his point, he adds
‘Do you not know that we are to judge angels’. (1 Cor. 6).
Judgement is good news. We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible, not least in the Psalms, God’s coming judgement is a GOOD thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned over. It causes people to shout for joy, and the trees of the field to clap their hands.
New Testament scholar Tom Wright writes: In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance and oppression, the thought that there will come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak and defenseless are given their due is the best news there can be. Faced with a world in rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God MUST be a God of judgement.