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Transcript 150B — Judgment Begins at the House of God
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Yes. I want to ask a question about the Judgment Day. Is it true that the church will be judged first?
HC: The question is raised: At Judgment Day will the church be judged first? The Bible does say in I Peter 4, that "Judgment begins with the household of God." And in Jeremiah 25, where God is judging, it speaks about judgment coming upon Judah and Israel, and all of this, and then afterwards upon Babylon also.
And so there are a number of passages that imply that judgment will begin with the church. But I think that we are seeing this already. I think God has in view something a little different than Judgment Day itself. Let's look at what happened in the Old Testament.
Now we have in the Old Testament some very sinful nations. We have a nation like Babylon, which is unrelated to God. It's just a grievously sinful nation. And then we also have at the same time a nation called Israel, or Judah, which is presumably God's people. Now which nation was first destroyed? Which nation was first conquered? It wasn't Babylon. It was Judah. God used Babylon to come against Judah until it was completely destroyed. The temple was levelled, and it ceased to be a nation at all.
Now about fifty or sixty years later the Medes and the Persians came, and they conquered Babylon. And finally, during the days of Alexander the Great, Babylon was utterly destroyed, so it never again became a nation. But you see, of the two nations Judah was destroyed first. Now Judah is a figure of the church, and Babylon is a figure of the kingdom of Satan, or the nations of the world.
Now as we approach the end, we're going to find that God's judgment begins to be poured out against the church. Now we're not talking about Judgment Day itself yet. We're going to see that because of increasing apostasy in the church, finally the Gospel will be silenced. This is spoken of in Revelation 20 as Gog and Magog, the nations from the four corners of the earth, coming against the camp of the saints, or the Beloved City.
It is spoken of in Revelation 11 as the two witnesses that are finally killed, the two witnesses being the representation of the church as it brings the Gospel throughout the New Testament period. The Gospel is silenced.
We read it in Daniel 8, where it speaks about the "continual" being taken away, the "continual" referring undoubtedly to the candlestick that always burned in the temple, representing the light of the Gospel. And it is taken away, for a period of 2300 evenings and mornings.
And this must happen before Judgment Day comes on Babylon, or upon the nations of the world. The church must be judged as an organization. Now the born again believers don't lose their salvation. They aren't killed. Some of them may be, if there is persecution, and there always is some persecution going on in the world. But as an organization it will be silenced. The unsaved in the church, they don't face Judgment Day yet. They will still face that as part of Babylon, at the end of time. But nevertheless, the church as a viable, as a useful organism of God, is neutralized, even as Judah was neutralized, as the temple was destroyed in the days of Judah, back in 587 BC.
And after that Babylon, or the kingdom of Satan, is judged. And that includes all of the unsaved of the world. They come into judgment and are cast into hell. And that's at the end of time.
CALLER: The Christian will judge the world?
HC: Yes. The question is raised: Doesn't it say that the Christians will judge the world? Indeed we will. I don't understand all the implications of this, but in I Corinthians 6:3 it says that we will judge. And in Revelation 2 it also speaks of those who conquer will rule the nations with a rod of iron, which is a figure, again, relating to Judgment Day.
Now we are in our resurrected bodies at that moment. If we have died, we have been resurrected and caught up in the air to be with Christ. If we were living at that time, we have been changed instantaneously into our resurrected bodies and caught up in the air to be with Christ. And Christ has come as the Judge.
Now the first thing He has done is that He has completed our salvation by giving us our resurrected bodies. But now the work of judging begins. And I don't know how this is going to be. This is the end of time. We're on the threshold of eternity. But all the unsaved have been resurrected simultaneous with the resurrection of the believers, and they stand for judgment. And we will be active in the judging process. But how this will be, I'm not really sure.
CALLER: Would it be like a court, do you think?
HC: I have no idea how it will be, because we'll be outside of time then. We'll be in our resurrected bodies. Christ will be in His glory. We know that the unbelievers must give an account of everything they've ever done. Now remember, God is the Creator of mankind; God is the one who is conducting this whole program. And how this will all be done, I have no idea because I can't understand an infinite God. And I certainly cannot understand eternity. We're outside of time then. We're on the threshold of eternity.
CALLER: If I said that Christ will judge the church, and the Christians will judge the unsaved of the world, would you say you really don't know?
HC: I don't think you could say that, or put it quite that way. Christ is the Judge of the world. But you see, already, when we were saved, we are seated with Him in heavenly places, we read in Ephesians 2:6. We're already reigning. Now we're reigning in the sense that it's Christ's task, by going to the cross, to provide salvation for those whom He planned to save from before the foundations of the earth. And as people are being saved, Satan's rule is being reigned over. We plunder the house of Satan as we bring the Gospel. And in that sense we are reigning.
But Christ's work is more than just that Satan's house will be plundered of its victims. He reigns over Satan in that sense, but also in the sense that He is going to judge him and cast him into hell. Now even as we were partakers in the task of bringing the Gospel, and in that sense reigning with Christ, even though it is Christ who actually did the saving, so perhaps in some measure, it will be Christ who is judging, and we will be involved as a vehicle of some kind in the judging process.
CALLER: When we speak about our transfigured bodies, they don't have blood in them? What does it mean, transfigured?
HC: The question relates to: What about our resurrected or our transfigured bodies? Now in I Corinthians 15, in the whole chapter God deals with the question of the resurrection of our bodies. And He comes to this very question in verse 35: "But someone will ask, 'How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do we come?"' And now God says, "You foolish man. What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as He has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body."
In other words, God is saying. Look at a grain of wheat. You put it in the ground. It looks like a dead little thing. And it springs forth as a beautiful plant, that really bears hardly any relationship to that seed which was put in the ground. Now by the same token, we can't speculate at all about the kind of body that will be raised. We only know that we are buried like that grain of wheat, and we are raised with a glorious eternal body that God will give us. And probably it will bear no more resemblance to the body that went into the grave than that plant bears to the seed that was put in the ground.
CALLER: That makes me more curious.
HC: Yes. It makes us more curious, but it also makes us marvel at the grace of God, marvel at the grace of God, that this is for me. This is the future that God has planned for me. We often become very ecstatic when we think of some joy that is going to come to us in our lifetime, some honor that might be conferred upon us, or some vacation, or whatever it may be. We really rejoice in anticipation. But this kind of a thing, in relationship to this earthly scene, is like nothing at all as compared with the marvellous future God has for us in eternity, in the New Heaven and the New Earth.
And it's so close, you see. We're actually one breath away from eternity actually. We don't know when God will take us. And certainly we're drawing very close to the end of time itself. And so really, for the born again believer, the future is totally in front of us.
CALLER: May the Lord bless you, and thank you.
HC: Thank you for calling. Good night.