"PRAISING HIS JUDGMENT"
Sixth Sunday of Easter
May 6, 2018
Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church
Glenshaw, Pennsylvania
TEXT:
Oh sing to the Lord . . . for He comes to judge the earth. For He will judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with equity.
Psalm 98:1; 9 (ESV)
When we think of all the things for which we should praise our God, His judgment is not usually anywhere near the top of the list. It's not exactly one of the things that we enjoy hearing about or talking about. As far as the Christian message is concerned, the judgment of God is something that we are more likely to admit than to proclaim. We talk about it, of course, just like we talk about hell. We have to because it is taught in the Scriptures. But we only talk about the judgment and about hell to point out how wonderful forgiveness and heaven are. And yet the psalmist invites us to join him in praising the Lord for His judgment. What is he talking about? Surely we aren't supposed to gloat over the fact that the outcome of judgment is better for us than it is for many others.
The Lord's judgment is to be praised, first of all, because His judgment is unlike the judgment of anyone else. We have gotten to be very cynical about judgment in our society. I guess we've just seen too many high-profile cases where the judgment that was handed down was not just at all--cases in which everything became an issue except what was supposed to be the issue. Add to this the countless other cases that we've never even heard about. As a result of all of this, we long for real justice--justice in which the good guys are vindicated and the bad guys are punished--justice where crime is not excused and where compassion is shown toward the innocent. The perfect Judge, who is God, comes as a welcome relief in the midst of what is passed off as justice in this world. As we listen to the psalmist singing the Lord's praises this morning, let's join him in giving thanks to the Lord for the fact that He judges "with righteousness" and that He judges "with equity."
I suppose before we get too excited about the Lord judging "with righteousness," we ought to give some thought to what that might mean for us. The Lord's justice is perfect in every respect. His Law is absolute and universal--a perfect standard requiring that we be perfect even as He is perfect. His judgment is righteous and perfect also in the sense that He knows everything: every sin, every fault, every evil desire and intention that lurks within us. Luther's Small Catechism tells us that before God we must plead guilty of all sins--even those that we aren't aware of (Small Catechism-explanation of the fifth petition of the Lord's Prayer). Why? --because His judgment is infinitely more perfect than our memory. The fact that God's justice is perfect also means that no sin can or will go unpunished. Nobody gets away with anything. In God's court there is no plea bargain, no insanity defense, no tugging at the heartstrings of a gullible jury. Because God is perfectly holy, His justice is perfect and absolute.
Lest we fall into despair and begin to curse God rather than praise Him for His perfect judgment, we need to know that God's perfect, universal, and absolute standard of justice has been met. That's what the Gospel of Jesus Christ is all about. The Lord Jesus--the perfect Son of God--stood in our place under the perfect Law of God. The perfect obedience that the Law demands has been met by Him on our behalf. The perfectly just punishment for sin has been executed. That's why the cross of Christ was and is so important. The cross was a curse for our Substitute so that it might be a blessing for us, since it is for us that He suffered and died. His resounding cry of victory from the cross, "It is finished!" (John 19:30), says it all. God's righteous judgment has been satisfied. And this atonement that the Savior made is a universal atonement. He bore the penalty of all sin of all people for all time. No one is kept out of heaven because his or her sins aren't covered. People are kept out of heaven because they prefer to continue to live under God's judgment, rejecting the perfect merits of Christ in favor of their own righteousness, which Scripture accurately describes as "a polluted garment" (Isaiah 64:6).
According to the psalm before us the Lord not only judges "with righteousness"; He also judges "with equity." In other words, He judges with mercy. The absolute justice with which He judges sinners is matched by His absolute grace. Since the Lord knows us inside and out, He is well aware of the fact that we cannot in any way stand up to His standard of perfect justice. Instead of condemning us according to our works, He forgives and accepts us according to the perfect merits of our Savior. This justification, as the Scriptures call it, applies to all: "There is no distinction," Paul writes to the Romans, "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" (Romans 3:22-24). It is not our faith that actually saves us; it is the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Faith is necessary, to be sure, but not as the basis of our salvation. A rescued person is saved by the actions of his rescuer, not by his willingness to be rescued. Faith is the hand that grasps the salvation that God has accomplished for all sinners in the perfect life and innocent suffering and death of His Son.
In sending His perfect Son into the world, God the Judge has identified with sinners, the accused, in the most intimate way possible, for in the incarnation of His Son, God has become One of us. The writer to the Hebrews encourages us with these words: "We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need" (Hebrews 4:15, 16), and John writes in his First Letter: "If anyone does sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous. He is the Propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world" (1 John 2:1, 2). The damned are not damned because God has no mercy on them; they are damned because they will have no part of His mercy.
So what are we to make of judgment? There's an old saying that "rules are made to be broken." Such thinking is faulty, to be sure, but that's the way the imperfect justice of imperfect humans works. As soon we humans set a hard and fast rule of any kind, we are almost immediately confronted with a situation that challenges it and, more often than not, forces us to amend it. But the perfect justice of God doesn't work that way. We are forgiven not because our sin isn't serious or because we really try hard or because extenuating circumstances led us to sin. We are forgiven and saved only because Jesus, standing in our place offered to God the perfect righteousness that His Law demands and the perfect atonement for human sin. For this reason we can join the psalmist in praising the Lord's judgment--not because of any morbid desire to see others get their due, but because His perfect justice and perfect mercy make it possible for us to see both the seriousness of our sin and the value of His salvation.
Amen.
May the God of peace, who brought again from the dead that great Shepherd of the sheep, our Lord Jesus, by the blood of the