The Judgment Day an Object of Intense Desire

“Arise, O God, and judge Thou the earth: for Thou shalt take all heathen to Thine inheritance.”—Psalm lxxxii. 8 (Prayer-book Version).

In the Collect for this day we give thanks that Christ has come in great humility; we pray for grace that we may be prepared to meet Him when He comes in glorious majesty to judge the quick and the dead. One of these Advents we are wont to represent as full of blessings, the other as full of terror. We bid men hope, because Christ was born of the Virgin and died on Calvary; we bid them tremble, because He will be revealed sitting on the throne of His glory, with all nations gathered before Him.

It was not thus that the Psalmists and Prophets of old spoke. They desired, earnestly desired, that God would arise to judge the earth. They desired it, not for their own sakes, because they counted upon some exemption from the tribulations that were awaiting others; but for the earth’s sake. They looked for this judgment as its deliverance from its miseries and its bondage. They desired this judgment, not chiefly because they thought that it would bring victory and blessing to Israel, though they had that expectation; they believed that God would then take the heathen to His inheritance, that this judgement would be the full establishment of His kingdom.

These differences are great and startling; there is another which causes scarcely less wonder to those who reflect upon it. We are wont to divide the Advent of Mercy from the Advent for Judgment by an immense tract of ages. There has been, we say, a long day of Grace since Christ was revealed as the Saviour in Palestine; when that day ends, then He will be revealed as taking Vengeance upon those who have rejected Him there and everywhere. On the other hand, when we read the Prophets, we are perplexed by finding these Advents brought together as if they were parts of the same transaction, as if one could scarcely be separated from the other. The instances are so numerous, that to gather them together would be to go over the whole field of Jewish Prophecy. I will mention two, because they both occur in him who is emphatically the Advent Prophet, and because they are both quoted in the Gospels. The first is in the opening of the 42d chapter of Isaiah. It is adduced by St. Matthew in his 12th chapter, when he is recording some of our Lord’s acts of healing. “When Jesus knew it” (that the Pharisees were holding a council against Him), “He withdrew Himself from thence: and great multitudes followed Him, and He healed them all; and charged them that they should not make Him known: that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by Esaias the Prophet, saying, Behold my Servant, Whom I have chosen; my Beloved, in Whom my soul is well pleased:… He shall not strive, nor cry; neither shall any man hear His voice in the streets. A bruised reed shall He not break, and smoking flax shall He not quench, till He send forth judgment unto victory. And in His name shall the Gentiles trust.” This passage and the use of it are surely remarkable. The signs of a King coming in great humility are brought together by the Prophet. The Evangelist feels that our Lord’s command, that the sick whom He had cured should not make Him known,—when the natural desire of a great Teacher would be to make known the acts which were the witnesses of His power,—is the fulfilment of the description which had been given by the old seer. And yet one part of that description, which St. Matthew will not sever from the rest—he could not sever it without destroying the sense—is this, “He shall send forth judgment unto victory.”

The other illustration of what I have said is in the opening of the 61st chapter of Isaiah. There you find the words which our Lord, as St. Luke tells us, read in the synagogue of Nazareth when he had returned, after his temptation, to Galilee. “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; He hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year” (the Jubilee) “of the Lord.” What could be a more full account of a deliverer? As such Jesus accepts it. “This day,” He says to the people of His own city, “is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears.” But those who heard Him knew what followed. “To preach the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God.” They knew, also, that these words are interposed between those which they had heard from Christ’s lips and others equally consolatory. “To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.”

If these were exceptional sentences, the force of which was doubtful, we might perhaps find some way of escaping from the difficulty. But they are type sentences,—helps to the understanding of others, evidently fixed upon in the New Testament for that reason. In fact, this apparent union of opposite subjects, of times far separated, is not less characteristic of Evangelists and of Apostles than of the elder men. Very seldom indeed do they speak of Christ as having come, without bidding His followers look for Him and wait for Him as about to come. “Yet a very little while,” says the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews (ἔτι γὰρ μικρὸν ὅσον ὅσον), “and He that shall come will come, and will not tarry.” That Epistle was written for a most practical purpose; to warn men who thought that Christ might have come to save their institutions, that these must give place to something more comprehensive and satisfactory. It was no time for playing with words in a double sense. The Christians of Palestine were to be prepared for an actual crisis that was at hand. And this was the language which an inspired Teacher chose as most suitable for that preparation. How is this habit of speech to be accounted for? What made it so natural to the Apostles? With what notions of ours does it jar? I think a little consideration may tell us.

I. The Church does not distinguish the Advent of our Lord from His Incarnation. She regards His coming upon this earth as His coming into our nature. This is the explanation of the Collect. Christ comes in great humility; that is to say, He stoops into a condition which was not His own proper, original condition. As St. Paul expresses it: “He being in the form of God, took upon Him the form of a servant.” Another thought was combined in the minds of the Apostles with this—without which it is imperfect. They believed that man was made in the image of God; they believed that He Who is the perfect Image of God must set forth—can alone set forth true and perfect manhood. They believed that the Holy God could not, according to the fictions of Hindooism, become incarnate in a mere animal; that for the Son to become a Man, was to fulfil His Own purpose in creating the world. But the condescension to the conditions of fallen man was in no wise lessened by the belief that men were chosen by Christ to be God’s children. The Epistle to the Hebrews reconciles the two ideas. “Forasmuch,” it says, “as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same.” Flesh and blood—the incidents of mortality—did not belong to Him: He assumed them: He came to show forth in them the perfect Mind of God, the perfect Mind of Man, His child and servant.

What follows? This Advent of Christ was the Advent of the true King, and Head, and Judge of Men; it could be nothing else if it was the Advent of the Son of God, of Him after whose likeness men were created. And those to whom He came, and who did not receive Him, felt that it was so. They felt themselves confronted by a terrible heart-searcher; by One Who saw what was in them; by One Who could and Who did bring what was in them to light. He was like them, He spoke to them, reasoned with them, ate and drank with them. He did not the less make them tremble. He did not the less give them a sense of God being near to them. You say He was meek and gentle; a bruised reed did He not break, smoking flax did He not quench. Even so. And is there nothing terrible to me in a meekness and gentleness which sets my want of meekness and gentleness in full relief? If I do break the bruised reed, if I do quench the smoking flax, is not One Who never does, an awful object to me? Am I intended to be like Him? What does His coming in my nature mean, if I am not? But if I am to be like Him, He is judging me for not being like Him.

That was the natural feeling of Scribes and Pharisees; that was the secret of their hatred. But did He not say, “I am not come to judge the world, but to save it”? Certainly He said so, and He proved His words to be true. He passed sentence on no man, no Scribe, Pharisee, Publican, Adulteress. He came to unite all to Himself; to reveal Himself as the Light of the World; to say to every one, “Follow me, and thou shalt not walk in darkness.” This was the promise of Salvation to every man who desired to be a man. He could be raised out of a selfish life; he could enter upon a true human life. This was the promise of a Salvation for mankind. The Head of the race was come; the members of the race were not intended any longer to be atoms warring against each other. The Seed of Abraham, the Son of David, was proving the sacredness of every Greek and Barbarian, every freeman and every bondsman. But if it was a promise, it must be fulfilled. Christ appearing in great humility, neither completed the Salvation nor the Judgment. His Resurrection and Ascension were to carry on what the Incarnation had begun. The message of full Redemption, of an Advent to Judgment, must rest upon them.

II. We find that it did. Christ, said the Apostles, has died for our sins—has risen again for our justification. This was the message which St. Peter bore to his own countrymen. “God,” he said, “having raised up His Son Jesus, sent Him to bless you, in turning away every one of you from his iniquities.” The gift of the Spirit was a witness that He was exalted “by the right hand of God, to be both Lord and Christ.” But that same Spirit was to prepare them for a great and terrible day of the Lord. So spake the Apostle of the Circumcision. He was taught, though that was his calling, that the nature of his message forbade the limitation of it. That which concerned the union of God with man was false, if it was not universal. God was judging the earth, and claiming the heathen for His inheritance.

St. Paul had a deeper and clearer insight into this truth. He was the witness of a Justification for every man, of a Justification for mankind. Christ was sent for the remission of sins that were past to Gentiles as well as Jews. The Gentiles were fellow-heirs, members of the body of Christ. And therefore St. Paul was the great preacher of Judgment. The revelation of God’s righteousness for the justification of men was, he said, itself the “revelation of God’s wrath against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold down the truth in unrighteousness.” The Jewish hypocrites had not been mistaken. One had come Who was without guile, and Who therefore condemned their guile. One had come Who could raise them out of their guile; Who could give them a clean, honest heart; therefore He had pronounced those who continued shut up in their falsehood, accursed. And this truth, so preached to men, so, in an imperfect degree, brought home to their consciences by Him Who was appearing in great humility, must assuredly be brought home in its full power to them by Him Who was clothed in the glory of His Father. He had left the visible world, He had gone up on high, so the Apostles said,—not because He was separated from men, but to assert His kingdom over them all, to claim for each his proper life, his true inheritance as a child of God. The Father had exalted Him, and in Him had exalted the race with which He had identified Himself. The desire of men for immortality, for fellowship with God; this desire, which had taken strange forms, which had led to monstrous experiments, but which had never been extinguished in any nation or in any man; which had been strongest in the noblest nations, in the wisest men,—distorted, held down, turned to evil in both by pride, ambition, tyranny; this desire, when it seemed most exhausted, most hopeless, Christ had vindicated and accomplished, not for the elect nation, but for all the nations; not for sages and saints, but for serfs and outcasts.

And therefore the judgment of men and of nations was at hand. This Son of Man, Who had appeared in great humility, would be revealed in His own proper glory to the kindreds of the earth, and to each one of those kindreds. Before Him would be gathered all nations. Every eye would see Him. He would be revealed from Heaven. This language may be called figurative: I apprehend, that if the fact of an incarnation is once admitted—if we attach any distinct sense to that fact—the language is strict and scientific. If the condition of man be that which the coming of a Christ in our nature declares it to be, there must be exactly this trial, exactly this judgment of nations, to see where they are standing,—of every individual man, to see where he is standing. The nation which had rejected the Son of Man, which had striven to hold together without Him, was rent asunder with a great crash. Fragments of a building which had been rising for two thousand years were whirled to the ends of the earth. In the crash and downfall the illuminated eye saw the sentence upon the nations. God had come to judge the earth. He was taking the heathen to His inheritance. An old age was passing away; a new age was beginning. And what concerned mankind, must concern every man. Any given man might or might not have heard the Apostolical announcement of the Son of Man. But he must stand before the Son of Man. He must, by the very law and condition of his existence, be brought forth into that Light which had been his light; which had enabled him to perceive or know anything upon earth; which had been making him aware of his own acts and thoughts; which had been showing him to himself. He may have found ways of shrinking from that light, of quenching it. Now such arts will be impossible. He must be seen as he is; for he is not now amidst mists and shadows, but in the full brightness of the noonday sun.

III. You will see, then, I think, how impossible it was that this Advent of our Lord to judgment should not be included in the Gospel which the Apostles preached to men; how utterly inconsistent with itself that Gospel would have been if it had contained no announcement of such an Advent. Was Christ actually such a Being as they said He was, and was He to remain always hidden? Was not the revelation of Him to man implied in His existence and in man’s existence? Must not such a revelation be infinitely desirable, if Christ’s coming in the flesh of man was to be desired? And must it not have seemed to the Apostles the highest duty to set forth this revelation and this Judgment, not as a distant possibility, but as a certainty, the certainty upon which men might safely act, whatever else in their future was problematical and an insufficient ground for action?

But now substitute for this idea of an Advent, the mere notion of a birth taking place at a certain period in Bethlehem; of that being the birth of the Founder of our Religion; of that being the birth from which we date our time, as the Mohammedans date theirs from the flight of the prophet to Medina; and see how inevitably all the conclusions which seemed so natural to the Apostles, become utterly unnatural and incredible to us. We may give what glorious titles to our Lord we please; but in that case He is but a Man exalted above men, not the Root and Head of Humanity. There is no “great humility” in His appearances on earth, or His doings on earth. On the contrary, He seems to begin from the lowest ground, and to rise by degrees to a higher one. And then, though we say that we believe that He shall come to be our Judge, it is merely as we might say, we believe any one else shall come to be our judge. The Judgment we expect is not of a Person Who is near to us, Who has to do with our lives at every moment, to Whom our thoughts are open and naked at every moment; but of one who is standing aloof from us, who, till that day, is leaving us very much to take our own course, to settle for ourselves, without persuasion or remonstrance on his part, what we shall do and what we shall be. How can the thought of such a being, appearing all at once to decide upon the eternal destinies of us and of all human beings, be other than a thought from which we shrink; for their sakes, if we count ourselves as better than they; for ourselves, if we have taken any right measure of our own delinquencies? What hinders the expectation from being appalling, but the feebleness and vagueness of it; the shortness and rareness of the moments in which we present it to our minds? No warnings of divines can prevent us from falling back upon the old question, “Where is the promise of His coming,”—upon the old argument, “Since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the foundation of the world.” Nay, can Churchmen themselves be prevented from saying in their hearts, “Surely the Lord delayeth His coming,” and consequently from beating the men-servants and the maid-servants, as if He had left a household which He had deserted, to their mercy?

IV. But the question can be answered: the argument is untenable. It has been more confuted for Churchmen than for other men. All things have not continued as they were, since the fathers fell asleep. There have been changes and revolutions; the mere vestures of truth have been worn out; untruths have been laid bare; the world has been subject to continual trials and judgments; only that which could not be shaken has remained. In vain Christ’s ministers have affirmed that all His powers have been delegated to them, and that they were at liberty to use them for cursing instead of blessing. He has fulfilled His own word to His Church, “Lo, I am with you always.” He has appeared to avenge their daring assumptions; to maintain the cause of the helpless whom they were oppressing; to show how little He needed them for the vindication of His truth. Because He was sitting on the throne, judging right, the Eastern Churches, already withered by controversies, effete for any moral purpose, causing His name to be blasphemed through their divisions and corruptions, quailed and sank before the Mussulman hosts, possessed by a mighty conviction, actual believers in a God. Because He was sitting on the throne, judging right, the Churches of the West, still grounded in the faith of His divinity and manhood, could resist that shock, and grow into a united Christendom. Because He was sitting on the throne, judging right, the traditions of ages, the might of Emperors and Popes, were not powerful enough to withstand the words which issued from the cell of a poor German monk. Because He has been sitting on the throne, judging right, the dogmas of sects have been as powerless as the dogmas of the hierarchy, to establish any permanent and abiding influence over mankind,—both being utterly feeble, except so far as they testified to some aspect of His character, to some part of His dominion. Here are testimonies and assurances that the covering which has been over the face of all nations, which has concealed from them their true King and Deliverer, shall at last be taken away; that all things shall be gathered together in Christ. And powerless as all fancy pictures of this final Advent to Judgment have been, to hinder any crime or encourage any virtue, the simple proclamation of it as a truth has not been powerless. For God has been testifying in the conscience of each human being, that the hour is at hand when he must be tried and judged; when he will be asked by the Son of Man whether he has owned or despised Him in the least of his brethren.

We shall not be able to thrust the thought of a Judgment Day into a corner, as we have done; to reduce it into a school dogma or a child’s picture. It will come with the sternest reality; in the council chamber, in the exchange, it will meet us; it will glare upon us through Indian mutinies, through commercial panics. We shall feel that One Who we thought was in the distant Heaven, is concerned with our deeds and schemes upon earth. Oh! shall not we learn also that it is good for us to be judged; most miserable for us to escape judgment? Shall we not believe that that which doth make manifest, is Light; that Light is always an armour which we may put on; that darkness is always an enemy with which we must fight? Shall we not understand that Christ came in great humility to deliver us from our own darkness, that we might be brought into His marvellous light? Shall we not think, that to enter into the full possession and enjoyment of that light, is to rise to the life immortal which he has won for us, and which dwells perfectly in Him? Shall we not look forward, as Apostles and Saints of old, to His full revelation, believing that He will then indeed take the Nations to His inheritance; that the earth will be filled with His glory? Shall we need to introduce confused notions of space and time, to bewilder our belief that when He is seen as He is, all the quick and the dead,—all, in every age, who have been sharing His light—whether they have known His name or have never heard it—whether they have walked in His Light or in their own darkness,—must be brought into Judgment? Shall we not rejoice in the expectation of that Judgment, because we are sure it will be without error and corruption; because it will scatter all that is vile and hateful, and that maketh a lie; because it will be the Judgment of Him Who gave Himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time?