Judgment Begins With the Family of God

It may well be true that we are passing before the Judgment Seat of Christ in the present hour.

Well, Sunday, 10/17/2004, has finally come. The message for today was taken from the fourth chapter of First Peter.

The thesis of this chapter is judgment on the family of God. The idea is that God judges His people whether they are alive in the world or deceased and living in the spirit world. Since this may be a new idea to some of us, it might be well to stop at this point and read the fourth chapter.

We have been taught for so long that Christians are not judged that we may find it difficult to accept what the Apostle Peter wrote. The point is, our sins of the past are forgiven when we place our faith in the blood atonement made by the Lord Jesus. But the emphasis now is on our behavior from this point forward.

To claim that God does not care how we live now is to reveal an ignorance of the Christian redemption. The Christian redemption is not primarily one of forgiveness but of moral transformation, of a new creation brought forth from the body and blood of Christ.

Salvation is not a ticket, it is a program of deliverance. We begin in the image of Satan and finish in the image of Christ, who is the image of God. We actually are in a program of education, as are the believers in the spirit world. We all are being brought into various experiences that cause us to react in some manner. If we react in an undesirable manner, the Holy Spirit guides us to repentance. If we then harden our heart, refusing to be corrected, we will receive the bad we have done. If however we are willing to learn how to behave in a righteous manner, we will receive the good we have done.

When you think about it, Divine judgment is not necessarily punishment. Divine judgment is instruction concerning what is acceptable to God and what is not acceptable to God. Divine judgment separates the light from the darkness so that the Light, Christ, is formed in us and the darkness, Satan, is driven from us.

We may have a mythological picture of the spirit world in our mind, containing mansions and streets of gold. The truth is, the next world, as well as this one, is a school—a school in which we receive holiness in our inward nature and righteousness in our outward nature. This is a protracted curriculum which has not been completed until we attain to the stature of the fullness of Christ—every one of us. All shall know the Lord, from the least to the greatest.

If I am correct, we now are passing from the spiritual fulfillment of the Jewish feast of Pentecost to the fulfillment of the Day of Atonement. It is during this new experience that God deals with our personality until we have been reconciled to Him. It well may be the Judgment Seat of Christ.

The point is, we, if we are wise, will take advantage of our daily lessons, thus growing in the image of Christ. This is how we, who are members of the family of God through our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, become witnesses of God.