"The realization of the judgement, that is, a real belief in this article of the Creed, is a great grace from God; for it leads to a sense of the awfulness of sin, and, therefore, to watchfulness against temptation and to a consciousness of responsibility for the gift of life with its duties and opportunities."
                           Alfred Mortimer, The Creeds 

Chapter Eight:

“From there He shall come to judge the living and the dead.”

“Inde venturus est iudicare vivos et mortuos.”

         "We judge of others by what we can see in them:  and, what is more perilous still, we are tempted to judge of ourselves by what others can see in us.  But in the perfect light of Christ's Presence everything will be made clear in its essential nature, the opportunity which we threw away, and knew that we threw away, with its uncalculated potency of blessing, the temptation we courted in the waywardness of selfish strength, the stream of consequences which has flowed from our example, the harvest which others have gathered from our sowing."
                                             Bishop Westcott, The Christian Faith

         "When tomorrow has become yesterday, and all the future has become history; when the last account has been settled, the last battle fought, and the last victory won; when God's fair earth has been turned into charred cinders, if that is to be its fate; when the clock of time has finally run down, however it is to happen -- there at the end will be the Son of Man coming in the clouds of glory to judge the world.  The unsettled account at the end of it all will be His account with the world.  At the last humanity must answer, the living and the dead, for what they have done with what He gave them."
                                             Edgar Carlson, The Classic Christian Faith

         "We have never loved with such intensity as when the very next night could bring the end of all things."
                                             Helmut Thielicke, I Believe 

                 
         To this point, the creed has set our attention primarily upon what Christ has done, and is doing, for our redemption and for the universal renewal of which that redemption is a part.  Now, however, we consider that portion of the divine task lying still before Him, his return from Heaven to judge the world.  In this expectation and hope, the faith of the creed becomes historically all-inclusive.  That is, to our previous affirmations concerning what has happened in the past and is happening in the present, we add our conviction about what is yet to happen in the future.  The future, like the past and the present, belongs to God.  Thus, the climax of the creed's references to Jesus Christ is also the climax of the world.  His future is ours.  In the hands of that historical Figure rests our destiny. 
         The world has not seen the last of Jesus Christ.  It thought otherwise when it crucified Him and buried Him.  It thinks so even now.  But as it was before, the world is wrong.  Christ shall return from Heaven to judge the living and the dead.  Christians in every age have believed it.  Christ Himself taught it.  It seemed to be always on his lips.  The same can be said of his disciples.  Paul regarded it as one of the essential elements of the gospel.  Even the angels themselves told the apostles to expect Christ's return (Acts 1: 11).  The Second Coming was by no means a marginal doctrine for the earliest Christians.  We find something more than 300 references to it in the New Testament alone.   No wonder then that the earliest Christians lived daily in ardent expectation of Christ's reappearance.  That expectation produced a watchfulness on their part, a watchfulness that helped them keep the concerns and pressures of life in proper perspective.  It taught them to be ready.  It taught them not only to plan as carefully as possible for the future, but to be prepared to meet God at any moment.
         As were so many articles of the creed, this one seems to have been introduced in opposition to Gnostic thinkers such as Marcion, who denied that either the Father or the Son would judge the world.  By indicating that Christ Himself will judge both the living and the dead and that He will come from the right hand of the Father in order to do so, the creed could hardly be more explicit in its rejection of Marcionitism.
         But in its very popularity and usefulness lies one of eschatology's chief dangers.  C. S. Lewis once said that people make two mistakes regarding the Devil:  Either they blame him for everything or they ignore him altogether.  The same sort of thing can be said, I am convinced, about the Second Coming, a doctrine some Christians consider the centerpiece of their faith and which others completely disregard.  The difficulty, it seems to me, is to acquire the balanced view, one that gives this portion of Christian belief the right amount and the right sort of attention.
         That balanced view must begin with a clear admission that on matters related to the Second Coming we operate with imperfect and incomplete knowledge, especially regarding its date.  Precisely when Christ's return shall occur, of course, no one knows.  It's as if there were a message left on the table, and it says the owner will return, though it does not say when.  Until it happens, the day, the hour, the year, even the century, of the parousia remain a mystery.  Christ Himself discouraged speculation on the point.  In fact, He admitted that even He did not know the time of his return.  That fact was known only by God the Father.  It surely must be cheeky, perhaps even blasphemous, for any of us to claim to know something that escaped even the Son of God.  That humbling fact, however, has not convinced some Christians to maintain any noticeable degree of eschatological modesty or to exercise appropriate self-restraint in the face of their ignorance.  They embarrass themselves and their religion by their temerity and their perversely ingenious calculations, which have proven wrong in every instance.  Christians since the beginning have considered their age the last and themselves the final generation.  Never were they correct.  All too frequently, the tenacity, indeed the unbridled enthusiasm, with which some Christians, even the earliest, grasped this doctrine gave rise to various sorts of extravagant and excessive behavior.  Over their esoteric eschatological calculations and forecasts they divided families, churches and denominations.   They sold prosperous businesses and beautiful homes in order to flee into the countryside to await on solitary hilltops the coming of a Lord who never arrived and who repeatedly warned them off such foolish and misguided conduct.  Still they do not desist; even now they proceed unabashed, oblivious to the wisdom and temperance of the creed, which tells us only that Christ is coming, not recklessly speculating or arrogantly declaring when this shall be.  Of the day and the hour, no man knows (Matt. 24: 26).  About such things, therefore, the creed remains circumspectly silent.  More Christians ought to follow its lead.  The most important thing in eschatology, after all, is Who is coming and what He intends to do when He does, not his schedule.
         That we cannot calculate or predict the time of Christ's return is a great grace.  To pinpoint its approach would serve only to undermine our eagerness to be ready for his coming at every moment.  Given our penchant for waywardness, were we to know that his return was still days, years, decades, even centuries away, we would indulge ourselves with a more reckless abandon than we now do.  Given our moral weaknesses, given our hunger for sin, we cannot afford the luxury of knowing with certainty that his return is still remote, if indeed it is.
         Our inability to calculate the date of Christ's return, however, must not lead us to forget its significance, much less to ignore it altogether, as some have done.  Christ's return is our hope for deliverance and a spur toward purity.  Whoever has this hope, John says, purifies himself (1 John 3: 3).  Any belief in the return of Christ, therefore, that does not alter a Christian's behavior for the better can only be hypocritical and counterproductive.  Too many of us remain resolutely obtuse to our approaching destiny and to the Lord who brings it, even though, for all we know, He approaches the door at this very moment, ready to knock.  "We go to work in the morning and sit in front of our TV sets in the evening.  But in history's other rooms the table is already being set for the royal wedding feast, and the trumpets of final judgement are slowly being raised" (Thielicke, I Believe 207).  We foolishly ignore Jesus, even though the future is distinctively "Jesus-shaped" (Jennings, Loyalty to God 159).
         The New Testament not only repeatedly affirms the return of Christ, it identifies for us many of its purposes, among them gathering together the people of God in order to take them to Himself as his bride; restoring and regenerating all things in order to subject them to his righteous will; and judging both the living and the dead in order to make manifest everywhere and for all time the justice of God.  Of these, the creed fixes upon this final purpose, perhaps because in it nearly all others are included or implied.  Christ's return will be the universal revelation of the authority He exercises now at the right hand of the Father.  It will make evident and tangible our life in God and our citizenship in his holy kingdom.  Thus, the creed makes us realize that the Lord of Love and Mercy, the Lord of the crucifixion and resurrection, is also the Lord of Justice, the Lord who returns to judge the living and the dead.
         Throughout history, persons of all sorts have raised up a cry for judgement, for the settling of accounts.  Well they should.  If that judgement never comes, life is intolerable, for then Hitler and Mother Teresa, the abortionist and the abolitionist, the sinner and the saint, the horrific and the holy, have identical ends.  In that case, we have no reason for pity, self-restraint, virtue, sacrifice or faith; we have every reason for every evil.  In that light, we thank God for judgement, for the Great Assize; it is a strong deterrent to sin and a potent incentive for goodness.  We realize that the creed's assertion of the coming judgement is by no means a superfluous or impractical statement, "for it reminds us that life is fundamentally a serious business."  Given our moral weaknesses, this "is a fear we cannot afford to be without; a fear from which we cannot wish to be free" (Malden, Christian Belief 41-42).  Christ's return to judge the living and the dead is a powerful motive for patience and courage in the time of trial and for steadfast obedience in the hour of temptation. 
         He who came at first to save the world shall return at last to judge it.  Thus, though his first coming was in humility, his second shall be in power, honor and majesty.  His first coming -- his virgin birth, his death, burial, resurrection and ascension -- are the historical basis for our expectations regarding his return.  He who has shown Himself the Lord of the past has promised to return as the Lord of the future, indeed of eternity.  Because He has conquered sin and even death itself, we believe his promise.  Faith hopes because it remembers.
         Commentators on the creed often pause to note that judgement in Scripture is not primarily a matter of condemnation or of punishment, but of "the restoration of order and the setting right of a situation that has gone wrong" (Larned, Creed and Personal Identity 82).  Of course, they are right.  "To judge" is not synonymous with "to condemn," though in some cases and ways the former does include the latter.  The true nature of biblical judgement is an important point and must not be lost.  Christ shall divide the sheep from the goats, no doubt; but He shall do so as part of his work of "reconciling the world to Himself" (2 Cor. 5: 19), of ridding the universe of evil in such a way that there can remain no ultimately triumphant pocket of resistance to the redemptive will of God. 
         That the creed includes the element of judgement clearly indicates that Christianity is an ethical religion and that we live in a universe that is moral at the root, a universe wherein all wrongs shall be righted and in which justice shall triumph.  The fact of divine judgement clearly implies that the moral order is no illusion, no mere wish.  The creed speaks here not of something so vague or vacuous as merely poetic justice, or of something so soft and undemanding as sentimentality or indulgence.  The creed speaks here of a genuine and inexorable divine intolerance of evil in all its partial and plenary forms.  That divine intolerance is precisely why we regard the Second Coming with both hope and fear -- hope because it promises our deliverance and justification when we are oppressed, falsely accused, or slandered for His sake, and fear because all evils, including those done not merely to us but by us, shall be judged.  We both hope for and fear the day when all names revert to their rightful owners.  In his judgement of us, Jesus Christ will lay bare the roots of our lives; He will bring our secrets out of hiding.  All sins not covered by his blood, and all that remains unconfessed and unrepented, will be revealed.  On that final day, all our illusions shall be cast away.
         To confess Jesus Christ as judge of the living and the dead is to confess that we are answerable beings, responsible for our actions to the God who made us and redeemed us.  This confession is the creed's way of indicating that every one of us is subject to the all-judging eye of Christ.  When we confess Christ as judge of the world, by implication we also confess that we are answerable for our sins and accountable to Him for them.  By these words the creed further implies that the ideals and standards of righteousness taught and practiced by Christ are the ideals and standards by which the world shall be, and ought to be, judged.  Those standards, needless to say, are not high; they are perfect:  He who would keep his life safe must lose it; we must be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect; and we must give an account for every idle word.  Because our evil lies not merely in what we have done, but also in what we have thought, intended or wished, we must be pure even to the deepest recesses of our hearts.  If we desire mercy, we must show mercy.  We shall be judged according to our faith, our compassion, our example, our character, our loves, and our loyalty to God.  Ignorance of the law will be no excuse because the criteria of judgement have been articulated with stunning clarity by the Judge Himself, both in Scripture and in our hearts.  What He has said is shocking; it crushes any delusions we might have harbored about the efficacy, even the very existence, of our own righteousness.
         The prime, or fundamental, sin is unbelief.  As long as you choose it, you cannot be saved.  Unbelief has no remedy, only an opposite -- faith.  That opposite is the fruit of God's grace and the door to eternal life and to the manifold blessings it entails.  "He who trusts in Him does not come up for judgement," says the apostle John, but "He who does not trust has already received sentence, because he has not believed" (John 3: 18 Weymouth).
         But having believed, one has not met all requirements, only the first.  The believer has life, to be sure, but of what sort or degree of blessedness?  To answer that question one must judge the believer's obedience.  The coming judgement, in other words, reveals both our salvation and our reward, both God's gift and our gain.  In the first instance, Christ died for us on the cross; in the second we die for Him by committing ourselves to his will and his Word.  He died to give us eternal life; we die to our own sinful desires in order to give life and application to his righteous reign.  Having come to saving faith, we set aside the momentary pleasures or earthly advantages that would have been ours had we chosen such things rather than the rigors and vigils that our love for God inevitably lays upon us in the midst of a fallen world, rigors that require us to redeem the time rather than to waste it.  But these sacrifices, these investments, though real, yield a far greater blessing in eternity than they ever cost us in history.  The earthly cost of discipleship, the Scriptures say, is not worthy to be compared to its resultant heavenly benefit (Rom. 8: 18).  We may be sure that if we have given ourselves by faith to Christ, if we have lived our lives for God and invested our hearts and energies for Him, He shall not shortchange us.  Whatever we give we get, but with this important difference:  The grace of God makes certain that we get either what we deserve or better, never worse.  We shall be the recipients of justice or mercy, but never evil.
         For this coming judgement our own consciences are a helpful though imperfect preparation, because they teach us how better to evaluate the deeds we have done or not done.   Insofar as they anticipate the verdict of Christ, and insofar as they are prompted by the Holy Spirit, whose task is to show to the world its sin, our consciences teach us that Christ has not relegated all judgement to the end of the world.  We can, and must, put ourselves under the divine scrutiny each day so that we can see ourselves as God sees us, ridding ourselves now of the evil that shall be our shame later.  Every day, perhaps even every hour and minute, we ought to submit ourselves willingly to spiritual examination.  Difficult and painful though it is, we are better advised to put our sins under the blood of Christ today rather than to let them fall beneath the judgement of Christ when He returns.  The pains such examinations bring are the therapeutic pains of love.  Our onerous bouts of repentance are curative, or can be.  In them, Christ strikes out at our sins, not at us.  We must do our best, therefore, to practice frequent, careful self-examination, seeking to root out while we may the evil that is, and only can be, our undoing.  For this purpose, the Ten Commandments are an indispensable aid for conscience and for growth.  So also is the discipline each church is expected to exercise over its members, teaching them right from wrong, love from unlove, and correcting them and restoring them when they fail.
         Of course, as even a moment's reflection makes plain, God does not judge us so that He can find out how well or how poorly we are doing, something He knows quite well already.  The judgement of God, both that which we endure now and that which we shall endure on that final day, will reveal to us how well or how badly we have done under the grace of God.  It will dispel all the deceptions we entertained about ourselves and our neighbors, for then the truth shall be known and all secrets brought to light.  For some persons, thought of that revelation is a supreme comfort because they know that at last they shall be delivered.  For others, however, that thought is the supreme horror.  All pretense washed away, their souls shall be seen as they truly are.  Not image but reality is the order of that day.  As Ronald Knox, with customary simplicity and perspicacity, once wrote,

 
         "God won't have to find out what you have done and what the          state of your soul is; he will know, and he will communicate that knowledge to you.  You will be flooded all at once by a full realization of the kind of person you are, and whether you are due for heaven . . . God won't find out anything he didn't know before.  He will simply make it clear to mankind what it is has   been happening all along; which souls were true to him and which weren't, and why" (Knox, The Creed in Slow Motion 140).   

         Of this we can be confident:  We shall not be misjudged.  The One who stands over us knows us fully.  He makes no mistakes.  He is committed to us by the unbreakable bonds of divine love.  We are judged by One Who is both God and Man, by One Who is both all-knowing and sympathetic to our condition.  We are judged by a Lord Who everlastingly maintains his humanity.  He knows the secrets of the human heart (1 Cor. 4: 5), and He knows them even now from the inside.  He understands our infirmities; He has felt for Himself the strength of temptation and weakness of human nature.  He knows firsthand the pains and constrictions of life in a fallen world.  He alone of the Persons of the Trinity became man and remains man.  We are judged by the only One who ever achieved perfect obedience to the law, by the only One who can ascertain precisely the reward or punishment due a creature born without its consent into a fallen world and bearing the unsought burden of a fallen nature.  Thus, to confess Jesus Christ as judge of the living and the dead is to acknowledge the justice of his judgement against us, whether corporately or singly.  As Bishop Westcott pointed out, Christ's judgement is both universal and individual.  That is, it reveals both that creation has a purpose and is marching toward a goal, on the one hand, and that we ourselves are answerable for all the things we do or fail to do, on the other.  The coming judgement is both national (Matt. 25: 31-33) and individual (2 Cor. 5: 10).  It is the final working out of God's plan and purpose.  It is the denouement of history, the Director's own review of the drama of redemption and of the part each of us played in it during our brief time upon the stage. 
         Together the doctrine of the second coming and that of the world's judgement by Christ indicate that history is no random unfolding of meaningless events.  No; history is going somewhere; history has a purpose and a goal toward which it providentially moves.  That goal is Christ and his rule over the universal kingdom of God.  All God's purposes for his creation shall then be accomplished.  Our world has a purpose, and that purpose shall be fulfilled.  The kingdoms of the world shall one day become the kingdom of God (Rev. 11: 15).  That day begins with the return of Christ from Heaven to judge the living and the dead.  God's will shall be done and his kingdom shall come.  Of that Kingdom there shall be no end.

   "The acknowledgment that Jesus is Lord of the world carries with it the acknowledgment that He has set an end before it, and that the world must be judged by Him, as it has accomplished that end or fallen short of it; if He has prescribed to each age its work, each age must be judged as to its performance of that work; and so it must be with each nation and each individual."
                           H. C. Beeching, The Apostles' Creed

date modified:
5 July 2006