Righteous Judge
Transcript
G'day guys, my name is Raz, I'm one of the pastors here, and today we're rounding out, we're finishing up our glory series, and today we're going to be taking a look at justice. And in particular, we're going to be talking about Jesus as the mind-blowing judge who's coming back at the end of days, a judgment day, to restore order to everything that's happened ever, which is a pretty big task for one day, but that's what we're doing. We're going to head to Revelation 20, so if you've got a Bible, or grab one of the Bibles in the row there, we're heading to Revelation 20, I think it's like the second last page or something like that. Just turn to the end and then go backwards.
Oh, there you go, it's page 602, that's helpful. 603, I assume, is the last page then. In Revelation 20, this is a picture that the apostle John has seen in a vision, and he's trying to put down in words what God has shown him about the very end of days. And so the language is pretty weird, there's some images that he's never seen before, and he's just kind of, out of a lack of words, just writing things like, it kind of looked like this. And so it's a little hard to understand, but we're going to read from verse 11. So this is Revelation 20, 11 through 15.
It says, Then I saw a great white throne, and him who was seated on it. That's Jesus, big white throne. From his presence, earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened.
Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead who were in it. Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them according to what they had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire.
This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he also was thrown into the lake of fire. Imagine this. It's judgment day. All of humanity is there. That is a gigantic crowd.
He calls it a great sea of people. And they're waiting on their turn to come up and be judged. And Jesus is out there with, like, volumes and stacks upon stacks of books that have written in them everything that you have ever done. And you're going to be judged according to that. And then he's going to lean over to the second book and check your name off on the roll call. I imagine this scene, I mean, that's a scary scene to me.
That many books, intimidating. But I kind of, I see things, I imagine things through a more technological, I mean, I grew up with TV. So I just imagine things with a more technological kind of swing to them. So if I was to re, I mean, this isn't good practice necessarily, but if I was to reimagine this scene and explain what was going to happen, I think I would take a different approach than maybe what he was saying. And the same thing would be accomplished. But this is how I picture it.
So imagine, I'm doing my best to try and appeal to an American audience here. Imagine a gigantic college football scene. You don't have to know anything about college football because I don't. But I've seen the stadiums and they're huge. Imagine a huge, huge, huge college football stadium and all of humanity is in it. This is not the Gamecock Stadium.
This is not the Michigan Stadium that's, like, crazy big. This is not the NASCAR stadium that they transformed for one night. This is, like, the biggest stadium that has ever been seen because all of humanity has to fit in that stadium. And it's not okay for just one jumbotron to be in the middle with the four-sided thing. They're, like, scattered around the place. They need to be everywhere because everyone needs to see what's going on.
And one by one, each individual is called up. And on the big screen, everyone can see them walking out into the middle. And then the highlights reel from their life plays. Now, in John's vision, it gets read out of a book. But in my vision, it's not a biblically inspired vision.
But in the way that I think about it, your life plays out on the jumbotron. And everyone gets to see what you did. And it's not a highlights reel, like, check out all of my greatest achievements. This is, like, the lowlights reel. This is the slow-motion impact highlights reel. And I imagine it like when you are watching football and somebody gets, like, crushed.
And they play it, like, in slow motion from seven different angles. It's like, and then they amp up the volume of the pads clashing. So it's like, crack, every single time. And everyone in the crowd is like, ooh. You know when, like, there's the slow-motion replay of the guy's helmet comes off. And everyone's like, ah.
And, like, if you weren't watching, you hear the ah. And you're like, oh, what did I miss? That kind of thing happens over and over again. But as people are watching your life. Because all the little things that you did that you thought nobody knew about, that you thought got swept under the rug, that happened in secret, they're now being played on a jumbotron in front of everybody. They make fun of stealing candy from a baby.
But you remember that time you stole candy from a baby? That's going to play in the jumbotron. And everyone's going to be like, ooh, dude, what did you do that for? Every time you've done simple things, like roll for a stop sign, and then lied about it, that's going to play on the jumbotron. All the times you did something good, but you only did it because you wanted to receive praise. You only did it because you wanted people to know how great you are.
Somehow they're going to display that on a jumbotron, and people are going to see the selfish notion of your heart in that moment. The time when you lost your mind at your spouse for no reason, or lashed out at your kids, or the time in school when you were bullying that kid, all of it plays out on the jumbotron. Gigantic stadium of people watching. Every moment of your life that you're ashamed of gets played on that jumbotron, and the entire crowd is going, ooh, yeah. And at the end of your highlights reel, you ought to be judged for that. But Jesus looks over into his little black book and checks to see if your name's in there.
And if it is, good. And if it's not, then you get judged for it. That's pretty scary, right? You want to know at that point in time that your name is written in Jesus' little black book, right? Because that's like the only pass out of being judged for all the things that play out on that jumbotron. And here's the thing, though.
This is imaginary. This is hypothetical, but not really. Because this is actually going to happen. And here's the thing, though. But there's hope for that in Christians because while we know our highlights reel is not going to be the greatest, no one really wants to watch that happen, no one really wants to see all of those things that they've done play out on the jumbotron, we know as Christians that our name is going to end up in that second book.
And in that second book, that's where we have hope. And now that probably sounds weird for us to have hope in our name being in a book and not being judged by the highlights reel or the lowlights reel of our life. And I think that's because, I mean, it sounds weird for us to want that or to think that's good because we have a a continuously developing cultural understanding of what justice is. What's fair? Everybody on some level wants their way of seeing life means that they want things to come back to being fair. And everybody, well, not everybody, but there's a lot of different opinions on what is fair.
And that's why we lead to different political affiliations that everyone wants to achieve what's fair, but they disagree on what fair is, whether it's free health care or you've got to pay for your health care or it's competition in health care. Everybody wants what's fair, but we disagree on what fair is. And it's because culturally, we don't really understand justice. I don't think. We certainly don't understand God's justice. Or if we do, we have a culturally, we view it through a cultural lens.
So we're going to take a zoomed out look at justice. We're going to look at the way we think about justice. And then we're going to look at the way that God thinks about justice. And I'm going to be answering, I'm going to be asking a ton of questions, most of which, if you're a Christian, you'll probably be asked at some point, especially with culture getting more and more aggressive against Christianity. Everyone has some way that they're going to try and outsmart you or challenge you or challenge God. These questions are going to pop up quite a lot.
And I think when it comes to justice, it's typically going to be, how can a loving God pass judgment? Or some reiteration of that same notion, some reiteration of that same question. If your God is loving and kind and always talks about forgiveness, how can he send people to hell? That's a question that is going to come up repeatedly. And it snowballs. It gets more and more intense.
If your God is loving, why won't he just forgive people? Why can't he just forgive everybody? The whole topic kind of snowballs. And I think rather than answering each individual question like one by one, I think we'd be better served to zoom out, look at justice as the whole, on a whole, and maybe identify that because we misunderstand justice, we don't really understand the questions that we're asking in the first place. And I think it begins with a common misunderstanding. And that's the relationship between justice and revenge.
What is the relationship between justice and revenge? How are they the same? How are they different? I mean, typically we think justice, good, revenge, bad. But somehow we interchange them or we accidentally misidentify them as each other.
Let me ask you this. You're watching a movie, any action movie, any movie where the good guys and the bad guys literally fight. Any movie where that actually happens. What is it that you want at the end of that movie for it to be like, yes, order is restored, justice is accomplished. You're watching Harry Potter, right? You are seven movies deep into Harry Potter.
You're at the very end and they have the big wizard battle. Do you want the good guys to point their wands at Voldemort and abracadabra ropes that come out and bind him up? And he's just bound up. He's stuck there like that. And then they take him to wizard court and they say, guilty, you're a bad person. Go to Azkaban.
And he goes to Azkaban and spends the rest of his life in Azkaban. Is that how you want Harry Potter to end? No. There's no brave people here. You want the good guys to vanquish the bad guys. You want them completely destroyed, no longer in existence.
That's what you want to happen at the end of that movie. Let's be culturally relevant. Independence Day. At the end of Independence Day, do you want the U.S. Air Force to come up with a gigantic net that brings the mothership down and then one by one those aliens get marched off of that ship, taken into a court of law and then there's like a 10 year trial for each individual person because they know our legal system and they appeal everything and then they end up one by one in jail for the rest of their life. No!
You're cheering for a redneck McRedneck-y man to fly that plane into that spaceship and blow every single one of those dudes out of the sky. That's what you want and we cheer for it. That's how Hollywood programs us to want justice in the stories that we see. That's how we're programmed to cheer and that's just kind of how it is in our culture, right? How we want justice to happen is the bad guy gets completely wiped out, destroyed. When I was growing up my dad and I we used to watch a lot of James Bond movies and the game GoldenEye on Nintendo 64 was kind of like the game of the generation.
Programmed to cheer and that's just kind of how it is in our culture, right? How we want justice to happen is the bad guy gets completely wiped out, destroyed. When I was growing up my dad and I we used to watch a lot of James Bond movies and the game GoldenEye on Nintendo 64 was kind of like the game of the generation. GoldenEye is much more famous for the game than it is for the movie
But in the movie really good movie I watched it when I was like 9 or 10 I think that raises some questions about parenting in my house it's a very violent movie but my dad and I we used to bond over these things and so we're watching GoldenEye and at the very end of GoldenEye actually building up to the end there's two guys there's James Bond and there's Alec Trevelyan they are both together they're partners
They're on Team England that's a thing they were the good guys at one point at least in James Bond thanks man Team England they're on the same team together and at some point everybody thinks Alec is dead but actually Alec has rejected Team England and he's now on Team Russia and he comes back in the movie as the bad guy but they were once friends and now he's the enemy and so at the very end of the movie
In the climax of the movie or whatever there's this huge radar dish thing like a gigantic one absolutely crazy big and it's sending signals up to some Russian satellite thing out in the sky and there's a giant dish like this and a big arm that comes out the middle and the thing where all the rays kind of focus on and shoot out into space and that's so big that people can be inside of it there's computers and almost like
A space station looking thing up inside there and so James Bond has to shut the thing down so that Russia stops getting their signals and whatever and the other guy is trying to stop him and they're inside that little capsule thing like 300 feet dropped down to the radar dish and so they're fighting in there they've got their guns out because that's the kind of movie and they're shooting at each other and then of course
They can't use the guns because that's a lame way for someone to die so they hit the guns out of each other's hands and then they're punching each other and James Bond's losing because it's really intense and everybody thinks James is going to die and then he goes down the little hatch and he's down on a ladder and he's got one hand up and his other hand is flailing like this and there's like a 300 foot drop to his dead and the bad guy the bad guy comes down he puts his foot on and he's like and he falls down
And then he drops down and there's one last little platform right? Everything happens on that last little platform and you see James Bond he's in like that fetal position as he fell down there he's down there he's getting crushed and then the bad guy drops down boof on his feet and you're like this is it this is the end one nudge and James Bond is dead but no Hollywood uppercut
Bad guy slow motion off the platform surely gonna die 300 foot to fall to his death and then James Bond boof grabs him by the ankle what's gonna happen? I'm kinda out of breath and you think for a moment is James gonna let this guy live? and the bad guy looks up at him and he goes for England and James goes no for me and then he drops him and in that moment
The bad guy knows he's lost and the camera goes right up in his face he's like and then there's a top down view and then this bottom down view and then it goes to the wide angle view I'm no doctor but in my understanding of human physiology when you fall 300 feet and land on your spine you die not so camera comes right up close to Alec Trevelyan's face he's got a little bit of blood coming out of his nose
It was a big fall a little bit of blood and then his eyes go bing and he's alive and you're like no this happened earlier in the movie it's gonna happen again and then the camera cuts back up James Bond is up on the little platform the thing starts exploding and he jumps off grabs onto the bottom of a helicopter helicopter takes him off to safety and then and then the giant thing in the middle explodes off the arm
That's holding it up and a giant metal needle camera wide angle top down view bottom down view close up on the guy's face skewered through his body into the ground and at that moment nine year old Raz is like yeah high-fiving dad I wish I was at the cinema I wasn't allowed to be in the cinema but I would have been like high-fiving other people because justice had been served the good the guy who's a bad guy because he used to be a good guy but then he became a bad guy is dead
At least that's what we're kind of expected to cheer for right that's justice in movies that's what we want that's what we want to see happen and I think that we so often talk about justice but what we're actually cheering for is revenge because in that moment if James Bond wanted to bring Alec Trevelyan to justice he would have done the Hollywood thing where you can actually hold a person by their ankle and just bring him back up handcuff him take him back to England take him to the MI6 base
And he lives underground for the rest of his life but we cheer for what actually became personal and vengeful he was full of hate and spite for the guy and so he saw revenge so revenge is emotional where justice is is rational revenge is personal where justice is impersonal revenge is about vindictiveness where justice is about vindication revenge
Is about retaliation where justice is about restoring order so could it be possible then that when we challenge God's justice when we have questions about his justice when we say is that really fair what we're actually doing is questioning whether or not he's seeking revenge are your questions really asking is God just vindictive
Is God just retaliating so what then what then even is justice and how do we achieve it even in our world what does justice actually look like for us in normal everyday life let me ask you some hypothetical questions so you can self-diagnose self-realize some of the tension here in your own brain in your own way
Of thinking when is justice served is justice served when the thing that was done is undone is that when justice is served or is it when the thing that was done is paid back to the same degree that it was done in the first place is that when justice is done think about it like this if we're on the
Playground and I poke you in the eye you get to poke me back in the eye that's fair that's justice that's how playground rules work grow up a little bit you lend me your car and I wreck it how is justice served I owe you a car of equal or greater value right you don't
Get to just go wreck my car I don't have a car I borrowed yours but what happens for example if your child is kidnapped how is justice served is justice served when the child is returned it's just undoing the thing
Is justice served when you go kidnap his child that's repaying it one for one should there be some kind of a punishment and if there is a punishment how great a punishment should it be is it jail time
Is it a big fat fine is it death penalty is it public execution of you and all of your acquaintances so that nobody else makes the same mistake if the doctor is negligent and your child dies how is
Justice served in that situation do you get to go kill the doctor's child is that revenge or is that justice do you just get a big fat check from their insurance the
Practice insurance is that how justice is served or should that doctor go to jail I think we all know intuitively that somehow we can't always
Put our finger on it but somehow the punishment has to fit the crime somehow we have to come up with systems to make that happen but somehow
The punishment has to fit the crime and oftentimes the punishment is over and above just undoing what the crime was we don't expect that a car thief will achieve
Justice when they return all of the cars they return all of the cars and then they go to jail there is a punishment over and above undoing the thing that was done I was watching a presentation recently by a guy called
Michael ramsden he's a british apologist basically means he's a dude who goes around to college campuses and conferences and stuff like that gives speeches presentations on they call it a defense of the faith
It's really just a rational explanation of why christians believe what they believe and he's at this conference and they're about to go on a break and he says during this break we're going to
Have a whiteboard out front and we want everyone to come out and write the hardest questions they can possibly come up with so write your really hard questions on the whiteboard during the break and then at some point
During the break come and vote on the question that you think is the hardest question to answer and in the following session we're going to answer the really really hard questions which is brave to volunteer to do a 40 minute speech on
A topic that the audience gets to choose but he does that they go away on the break they come back from the break and there's a tie for first place two questions that have the same number of votes everyone says these are the two
Hardest questions to answer these are the two questions number one this is the first question how do you expect me to be happy in heaven if God has sent people to hell how do you expect me to be happy in heaven if God has sent people to
Hell the second question how do you expect me to be happy in heaven if the man who sexually abused me as a child is in heaven with me don't miss this the first question is saying how can I be happy if God Judges people and sends them to
Hell the second question is saying how can I be happy if God doesn't judge people and send them to hell you see the tension between the two questions one is saying if God upholds justice and punishes
People I cannot be happy and the other is saying if God doesn't uphold justice and punish people I can't be happy the same issue is addressed in both questions but they're pulling in opposite directions on our human
Morality meter in our own sense of justice we kind of we're unhappy with either option we simultaneously want God to punish evil but we also want him to
Be loving and kind and forgiving and give people a chance I have to admit that I feel this tension as well I think our society lives in this tension all of us have some way of
Comprehending it at least in our brain we feel like it's okay for some people to make it and it's not okay for other people to make it and we draw this line it can
Be anywhere and we say these people they're good enough these people they're not and my line could be here and your line could be there and somebody else's line
Could be all the way over there and we say at this point in time people are good enough and at this point in time I'm just uncomfortable with those guys making it into
Heaven and we all draw our own little lines in the sand and we see the world through that lens these people are good enough those so that we make it and anyone worse than
Us is probably not good enough I'm uncomfortable with them being in heaven with me so we have this criteria that makes us that gives us comfort of are the people good enough and we all have our own
Little lines and every time we do that every time we put a line down and say this is the fair spot for it what we're actually doing is saying God your line isn't as good as mine my line is better I'm
Fairer than you are my idea of what's right and wrong is better than your idea of what's right and wrong we should use my line because I'm more fair than you now God has a line as well he doesn't
Use our criteria luckily if he did use our criteria if he used the criteria of who's good enough and who's bad enough then his line is all the way over here there's one dude sitting by himself over there
God's only son Jesus Christ he's good enough everybody else fails the test if God uses our criteria of who's good enough and who's bad enough luckily
He does not use that he has a line but that's not what his line looks like so what does God's line look like how does he decide who makes the cut how does justice work in God's kingdom on who
Makes it and who doesn't I think there's a good chance you've heard this a thousand times but according to the Bible according to Christianity all of humanity stands guilty before God Romans
3 23 Says all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God Romans 6 23 says the wages of that sin what you earn
By that sin is death all of humanity is guilty the punishment that everyone has earned is death think back to the stadium where each
And every person's low lights reel is played on a jumbotron in front of all of humanity you get to see how evil the inside internal inclination of each person's heart is
Every evil thought every evil desire every lustful glance every flash of anger every ounce of pride every action made out of self ambition
Every cruel intention every under your breath cuss word everything happens on the big screen and each and every time you're sinning against a holy
And pure and righteous God each and every human each and every human is in their core fundamentally internally wicked everyone's the same all of humanity
Stands there right with you and it would be unfair it would be unjust of God who is the holy and perfect judge it
Would be unfair of him to look at that sin to look at that guilt and just say it doesn't matter because that's not
How justice works it would be unfair of him some kind of reparation some kind of payment is absolutely necessary to pay for that guilt to pay
For that punishment that ought to come for your sin if a jury if in our world if a jury comes back and says this man is guilty we have we have decided upon the evidence that this man is guilty and the judge comes back and says yes
I've seen the evidence he's been judged by a panel of his peers this guy's guilty but you know what I'm loving I'm compassionate I'm merciful so I'm just going to let you go please don't kidnap any more
Children or kill them there would be public outcry that is not justice that is not fair that is wrong a reasonable judge cannot just let people off for the things that they're guilty of
So what does God do Romans 5 8 and 9 it says but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us since therefore
We have now been justified by his blood much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God so while we were sinners Christ died for us and he paid the penalty for our sin we were
Justified by his blood we're saved by his life we're guilty we deserve punishment he pays the penalty that's how God's mercy and his justice work together for our good at the cross because justice says
You did this now you deserve this that's how justice works we're not always the best at saying what you deserve but we know that if you did this you deserve this mercy says you did this
You deserve this but I'm going to give you this now typically mercy happens at the expense of justice typically if you poke me in the eye and I choose not to poke you back
In the eye I'm extending mercy to you and justice is not served I was ripped off that's how mercy typically works when you extend mercy to someone you do so at the
Expense of justice so does that mean that God gives up justice in order to give mercy in Christianity no he can't he must uphold justice
To be a perfect judge God looks into every single human heart and at the core of it he sees sin he sees us for who we really
Are and he says this is wrong this is not how it was supposed to be this is not how it was designed you
Are guilty you stand guilty before the king and moved out of compassion he does something about it and he does that at the
Cross that's where the penalty for sin is met that at the cross when Jesus dies on behalf of all of sinners he incurs
The wrath that sin deserves so that punishment is made on behalf of sinners but Jesus pays for it so that sinners don't have
To God doesn't exercise mercy at the expense of justice he exercises his mercy through justice at the cross we should hear that God's justice is
Coming and we should hear that he's going to judge the entire world and it should be terrifying because we should know that by
Our sin we stand guilty and deserve death and destruction but here's the game changer this is Romans 10 9 it says if you
Confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will be saved
If you put your faith in Jesus you will be rescued from the judgment that you deserve if you put your faith in Jesus
His death on the cross will pay your ransom for you when you put your faith in Jesus your name goes into his little
Black book that he checks off at the end of days to see who's in and who's out when God's justice comes there is
Hope even for the guilty if they have faith in Jesus you might not think about it this way but I think we actually
Want God's version of justice because if we were tried in our justice system where good enough makes it and bad enough doesn't then
You would have to pay the penalty for your own sin you want Jesus as your judge because in his system you don't pay
The price for your own guilt if you put your faith in him you aren't held responsible for your own penalty for the woman
Who's afraid of seeing her abuser in heaven if he's there it's because he put his faith in Jesus and God himself paid the debt
That that man deserved Jesus took the punishment if that man is unrepentant if he refuses to admit his guilt if he refuses to
Say sorry if he refuses to put his faith in Jesus then he will stand on judgment day the highlights real from his life
Will play out for everyone to see and then he will stand condemned and be judged for what he's done and in that moment
Justice will have been served but he pays his own penalty Matt's going to come back up and as we land the plane here I want
You to consider what this means for your life so this isn't just knowledge that you store in your head but this is a
Hope that you get to live the rest of your life by because it means that for Christians justice doesn't have to be served now
Justice doesn't have to be served now you we live in a world where injustice happens the guilty go free the innocent get convicted we
Live in a world where injustice happens but that's okay because as Christians we know ultimate justice comes at the end of days if
You wouldn't call yourself a Christian then my urge to you is to consider this it simply isn't enough to say I lived a
Good life I'm a good person I'm on the right side of the line all have sinned all fall short of the glory of
God and justice must be served and you get to choose do I want that justice to be served on me or am I
Willing to let Jesus take it on my behalf for Christians since we know that ultimate justice will be satisfied in Christ's return that
It's better than any human justice that his line is more fair than any line we could come up with where mercy and justice
Can both happen then we get to live in a system where we're satisfied and we're fulfilled by our faith in Christ a system where all of sin is
Paid for either by Jesus on our behalf or by those who don't call him Lord and justice will be satisfied in that the
Hope for Christians is that when you go out there and you stand before Jesus and your life is played out on a jumbotron it doesn't matter how shameful it is it doesn't matter how bad you were
It doesn't matter that the whole world sees it Jesus is going to look over into his little black book and see your name and you're going to be invited in and
Jesus has paid the penalty for you that's the hope that we have in God's justice system let's pray God we thank you that you sent Jesus to take our punishment
For us we thank you that by him our punishment can be paid and that we can be welcomed in pray that we'll put our faith in you and in your justice and that we can be satisfied that
It will come at the end of days and that we don't need it immediately that we don't need to see justice in this world immediately because you are a right judge you are a holy judge and you will judge
All of humanity equally based off of whether they have faith in Jesus not according to what they've done we praise you and we thank you for that in his name amen