The Judgement Seat of Christ

If you have a Bible with you, go ahead and grab it. We’re going to be in 2 Thessalonians 1:5-12 tonight and we are returning to our grand theme of these 2 letters of Paul to the Thessalonians: the second coming of Christ. Half of our lessons between now and the end of the school year will focus on elements of Christ’s return. A few weeks ago as we were talking about this great event, I mentioned that for Christians, the day of Christ’s return will be the greatest day in all of human history. It is the event that all of time is barreling towards. Creation itself is longing for the day when Christ returns and all things are made new. Yet for the unbeliever, this will be a day of doom and judgement. As Christ returns for His people, He is not returning as a lamb to be slaughtered, He is returning as a King to reign, rule, and judge over all creation. For us as Christians, we have nothing to worry about on that day. We can look ahead with joyful expectation. You may remember me telling you in the past that the primary purpose of the book of Revelation is not so that we may speculate about times and dates and events in the future but to remind Christians throughout time that no matter how wicked and chaotic the world may be at any given time, God is still on the throne. God is still in control and God Himself will see to it that all wrongs will be made right. There will be a day where God will see to it that the last teardrop will ever fall and the last heart will ever break. There is a day set on Heaven’s calendar where every wrong shall be righted and only pureness and holiness will remain. I’m looking forward to that day. The older I get, the more I long for that day, the more I long to be with Christ. I look at the world that we are in and I think of what it will be like for my kids as they get older and it makes me want Christ to come back today because there is so much sin in this world, and it will only get worse, that I want perfection now! I think every mature Christian gets to a moment where they don’t want to wait any longer for Christ’s return but they are willing to trust Him in His perfect timing. The Lord will return exactly when He is supposed to and not a second earlier or later. Now we have a lot of ground to cover in these verses tonight and I love these verses so let me tell you where we will be going tonight in our time together. There are 3 things that we will look at tonight and those things are: 1. The reality of and future relief of suffering. 2. Christ’s coming in judgement. 3. Christ glorified in the saints as the purpose of His coming. Let’s pray and then we will dive into 2 Thessalonians 1:5-12

2 Thessalonians 1:5–12 ESV

This is evidence of the righteous judgment of God, that you may be considered worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are also suffering— since indeed God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might, when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed. To this end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Reality and Relief of Suffering

Let’s start by looking at verses 5-7. We see 2 things here, the reality of suffering and the relief that is to come from suffering. You have heard me talk about suffering quite a few times in my years here and I have no problem talking about suffering because we all suffer. If we aren’t already aware of the reality of suffering, all we have to do is live long enough and we will. It is important for us as Christians to not dismiss suffering as if it doesn’t exist but to be able to articulate how suffering is connected to our Christian worldview. On the one hand, you have some Christians who say that once you become a Christian, suffering and affliction will not be an issue if you just have enough faith and that works wonders until it doesn’t. There is a lot of pain that is connected with that mindset and the devil has done a lot of damage through the prosperity Gospel or health and wealth gospel. Imagine the mental hurdles one has to do when someone says, “if you have enough faith, you’ll be healthy, wealthy, wise, and loved” but then the medical diagnosis comes in and it doesn’t look good. They think, “But I had faith? They said if I believed enough, this wouldn’t happen but it still happened.” And from there you go into 2 slipstreams: you either beat yourself up and try to “earn” more faith or merit from the Lord in the hopes that He might relieve you from what you are going through, still there is no guarantee that He will. Or you go the opposite way and you abandon the hope that you had in God to begin with. Faith in order to be saving faith must be a real faith in the right Person. You don’t need a large faith to get through the narrow gate of Heaven, you just need the right faith in the right Savior. Matthew 6:33 tells us what we need to do with our lives. This has been such an important verse for me and my life. “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” If we seek first the Kingdom of God, as we pursue the will of God, all things that are needed and necessary for us shall be given to us. Let’s look at the second hand that I mentioned when it comes to our need to understand suffering and be able to articulate how it connects to a Christian worldview. As Christians, we need to be able to explain to an unbelieving world that suffering does not disprove the existence and love of God but rather I believe amplifies the need of God’s love and proves that God is there. Atheists will look at the chaotic nature of the universe, the reality of suffering and say, “Look! How can a loving God let all this stuff go? Why doesn’t God put a stop to this? Because evil is still happening, God must either not care or not exist.” Now, how do we as Christians respond to that. There are a lot of defenses that you could make and I would gladly talk about this for hours if we had the time but the argument from ethics, from morality, that atheists claim is the best support for their argument, actually kills their argument. An atheist and unbelieving worldview is incredibly heard to justify and argue in favor of because you cannot hold parts of an argument together. Cornelius van til used to tell his students this: let the unbeliever talk and let him keep talking and eventually he's going to hang himself. What he meant by that was if you let an unbeliever talk long enough, there is going to be a point where he sabotages his own argument because he will contradict himself at some point. Let’s look quickly at the atheists argument against morality and suffering and the existence of God. They say that all morality is, is simply society coming together and voicing that one particular action is better than another action because it results in something better. They believe that man simply came together because they recognized that they were more likely to survive by working together but if life itself is meaningless, if this existence is all there is, why should we attempt to work together? Why should we care if what we do benefits other people? The Darwinian model doesn’t support that because survival of the fittest does not apply to the good of others. The question then comes down to this: if there is no God, where does the sense of right and wrong come from? Morality has to spring from something. There needs to be a reason why we all collectively look at the rape, murder, and dismemberment of an 8 year old girl and say that it is wrong. Why would anyone see that as wrong if there was not something to judge right and wrong by? The atheists would say, “Well if you have enough people agree that something is right it will be considered right.” But say that to the Jews that went through the holocaust and see how well that argument holds up. Hitler had quite a few people say that the extinction of the Jewish race was a “right” thing to do but that did not make it right. The fact that suffering exists, the fact that we all have this built in sense of right and wrong, points to the reality that God is there. When we see suffering happen, we all sense that something is off and that is because we are made in the image of God. So, we see that there is a reality when it comes to suffering but we also see in these first few verses that there will be a relief of suffering. Paul says in 2 Thessalonians 1:6-7 “since indeed God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels.” For every Christian, we will experience the full relief of suffering one day. Christ promises to right every wrong. No sin is going to squeak by. No unrighteousness will go by unpunished. Christ is coming to grant relief to every believer. When the Lord comes back, 2 things we know will happen: He will pay back trouble to the troublemakers and He will grant relief to the afflicted. This is another reminder that the universe is not so out of control that God is not still holding all things in His hands. John Stott wrote, “What we see is injustice- the wicked flourishing and the righteous suffering. It seems completely topsy-turvy. We are tempted to protest against God and against the miscarriage of justice. ‘Why doesn’t God do something?’ we complain angrily. And the answer is that He is doing something and will go on doing it. He is allowing His people to suffer, in order to qualify them for His heavenly kingdom. He is allowing the wicked to triumph temporarily, but His just judgement will fall upon them in the end. In this way Paul sees evidence that God’s judgment is right in the very situation in which we might see nothing but injustice.” How then will we experience relief? And what will the judgment of Christ look like on an unbelieving world. We don’t have a ton of time but let’s turn quickly to 2 Thessalonians 1:8-9

2 Thessalonians 1:8–9 ESV

in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might,

Christ’s Coming in Judgement

For an unbelieving world, Jesus is not coming to simply give them a slap on the wrist. Jesus is coming as the true and righteous judge of the universe. No soul will escape His eye. No person will escape judgement. Unbelievers will have nowhere to hide and nowhere to run. Gods righteousness and God’s people will be avenged. We read in Revelation 6:9-11

Revelation 6:9–11 (ESV)

When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne. They cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been.

There is a day where the last martyr will be killed. There is a day coming when the number will be reached and the time will arrive where Christ will descend and with the shout of an arch-angel will call His people home. John receives this vision of the dead in Christ calling out for God’s justice to be fully manifested. There desires are totally in tune with God’s desire. I believe in these words, not only are the saints in Heaven encouraged, but we can be encouraged as well. Daniel Akin wrote, “God’s delay does not mean that He does not know. It does not mean that He does not care. He knows and He cares. So rest. Justice has been determined and justice will be done. We have His righteousness, and we can trust in His judgement.” We can also be encouraged by knowing that no one will receive an unfair trial when Christ returns. We can endure because we know that injustice will be punished. All will stand before Christ one day and we as believers will not face the judgement that unbelievers will face. As we stand before God, we will receive our rewards for our faithfulness. As unbelievers stand before God, they will receive their guilty verdict and Paul does not minimize what they will endure. For all eternity, unbelievers will agonize in hell. They will be in a state of eternal destruction because they did not obey the Gospel of the Lord Jesus. Thomas Watson said, “Thus it is in hell; they would die, but they cannot. The wicked shall be always dying but never dead; the smoke of the furnace ascends for ever and ever. Oh! who can endure thus to be ever upon the rack? This word "ever" breaks the heart. How long will it be to lie in hell for ever and ever?” The lost will spend thousands of years agonizing in hell for their sins and yet even after those thousands of years, they will be no closer to the end than when they first began. Hell is a place of constant torment, where the wrath of God will forever be poured out on those that rejected His Son. The way we talk about hell and the way we talk about judgement shows that we have no idea what we are talking about. If the idea of lost souls agonizing in hell does not push you to reach the lost, I’m not sure what else will. Yet this is the judgement that will come. Will we exchange eternal life for eternal death? If Christ were to come and judge the world today, how would you stand? What would you plead? What would the verdict of your life be? Will you be one that suffers the punishment of eternal destruction or will you be one that will be glorified in the coming of Christ? What about those around you? Can you stand idly by while your friends, while your family, while your loved ones run headlong into hell when you hold the key that could unlock the door to their salvation? God forbid that! Hell is real and judgement is sure. God is perfectly just and He will see to it that all receive a fair trial. Yet we must do all that we can to see to it that we do all that we can to reach the lost and trust God with the results of our labor. Death is certain, Hell is real, and Christ is coming. What are we as the Church of Jesus Christ to do with that information? What are you as a follower of Christ to do with this reality? I can’t decide that for you.

Christ Glorified in the Saints

In the last few minutes that we have, I want us to be reminded of the purpose of Christ’s return. Let’s quickly read 2 Thessalonians 1:10-12

2 Thessalonians 1:10–12 (ESV)

when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed. To this end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

The purpose of God creating the world, the purpose of Christ coming and dying on the cross, the purpose of our salvation, and the purpose of Christ coming again is that God would be glorified. Christ is coming to be glorified by the saints. The angels are looking ahead to the day when Christ will be fully glorified in the gathering of the redeemed. If this is the purpose of all that God is doing, what should we be doing? Shouldn’t every action, every word, every thought exist to glorify Him? If you are a Christian, are you living a life that is honoring and glorifying to God? Are you praying that God would be glorified in you and that you would be worthy of His calling? Are you praying that you work by faith according to His power that is at work in you so that Christ would be glorified? This was Paul’s prayer for the Thessalonians and this should be our prayer for the Church and for our individual lives. John Owen said, “He who prays as he ought, will endeavor to live as he prays.” That which we pray for should drive what we live for. So, what are you going to live for? The purpose of your life and my life is that we would glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Take a moment and reflect on your life right now. Is what you are doing and the way that you are living glorifying the Lord? The day is coming when the Lord will return and will you be able to stand with the saints throughout history and marvel? Will you be able to stand with the elect and will Christ be glorified in you? If you don’t think that you can answer that positively, then this day, I call on you to change that. This day I call you to cast your sins upon the cross of Christ and come to Him with a living and abiding faith. This day I call on you to be born again and if you come to Jesus Christ in faith, He will give you His righteousness and He will be glorified in you and you will be able to stand with the saints throughout history and you will be able to marvel at the appearing of our Lord and Savior and you will avoid the judgement that is to come and the day will come where you will experience an eternal and never-fading relief from all of life’s pain, all of sins problems, and all affliction because you will stand before the King of Kings and Lord of Lords and you will never hurt again. The Lord is coming soon. Are you ready for that day? Let’s go to the Lord in prayer.