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I am again looking very intently at the context surrounding this verse and seeing more clearly in the light of truth that is intensifying in this passage how much of our teachings and assumptions are in serious conflict with the reality of what God is like. The clear subject of the context here and all the way through chapter 3 is the Judgment Day of God Almighty. Also found in this context are amplifying descriptions of three parties involved in the judgment: the characteristics of those who are lost, descriptions of how the saved think and where their focus is, and most importantly the characteristics of God and, by implication, characteristics that He is not.
Our opinions and beliefs about the day of judgment and the related topics of heaven and hell lie at the very foundation of everything else that we think, do and perceive about reality and affect all of our relationships both with each other and with God. To think that it is not that important what we believe about this doctrine is to put our own souls in great danger of discovering too late that our mistaken beliefs about God, no matter how popular or supposedly supported by Scripture, have created a fatal liability in our souls that have resisted the light of truth that God so passionately is trying to reveal to us about Himself. What we believe about this subject betrays what we really believe about God and is at the center of what Jesus referred to when He repeatedly encouraged people to “believe in Me”. What we see in the life of Jesus and how He treated people is exactly the same as the character of God the Father without any variation whatsoever. (see John 14:9-11)
As I examined verse 3 and 4 it occurred to me that most of us would have written this very differently than Paul did due to our misconceptions of God. That is revealed by the many things we preach and teach about the day of judgment and the final results of sin. It is easy to see that if most of us had been trying to explain what motives should be in place in the hearts of those looking forward to the day of judgment we would, on the heels of verse 3 launch into a description of all the things we need to be afraid of in order to compel us to come into line with God's will and ways and be saved.
“Do you suppose ... that you will escape the judgment of God?” What kind of feelings are immediately stirred up in your mind initially upon the first hearing of these words? Those initial, reactionary feelings betray the real beliefs in your heart about God and what you think He is really like. And because of the nature and pervasiveness of sin throughout all of the human race, I would venture to say that possibly without exception, save in the hearts of those already being transformed by God's grace, every human heart recoils with fear and dread and feelings of expectation of pain and punishments associated with varying feelings of antagonism and resistance and anger. These are all rooted in THE LIE about God that was originally instigated in heaven by Lucifer and has been perpetrated throughout all of the universe and affects every aspect of our thinking and beliefs about life.
The most startling and revealing part about this passage is the seemingly incoherent emphasis by Paul directly after focusing on the fact that judgment is unavoidable. The basis that he declares will be the very thing we will all be judged on, and by implication the motives we should use in facing the judgment, is not the fearful expectation of retribution but the beauty and kindness and mercy of God. What we think will be revealed about God in the day of judgment determines the kind of repentance that we experience now. It also determines what assumed attributes about God we will use not only in our own experience but also what we employ in our efforts to bring others into preparation for the judgment. If we step back and take a very careful examination at the beliefs and assumptions underlying all of our preaching, teaching and conversation about Judgment Day we will start to see if our motivations are really in line with what will bring about true repentance or they are echoes of the lies of the enemy of God masquerading as religious truth and embedded in our theology. This is true whether of not a person claims to believe in God or is an avowed atheist; we all have theology that we believe about God that is colored by our experiences and perceptions about the supernatural and religion in general.
Paul reveals in this chapter that by clinging to false ideas about God's character we are placing ourselves among the stubborn and the unrepentant who are storing up wrath for themselves against the Day of Judgment. Why is it that we are the ones creating the wrath within ourselves and not God who is getting angrier at our unrepentance? The answer is in verse 11 – because there is no partiality with God.
We have mistakenly assumed that to mean that God cannot be bribed or unduly influenced in His determination of who will be saved and who will be lost. Again, that is based on our faulty assumptions about the nature of the Day of Judgment and many unchallenged beliefs behind it. Verse 5 gives us the correct understanding of what the Day of Judgment is really about, “the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.”
One of our biggest hurdles to overcome in arriving at a correct understanding of truth is the problem of words that have taken on incorrect or misleading meanings due to their long use in false assumptions about God. As I began to point out in a recent post, there are parallel meanings for identical words that lead to very different conclusions and create great confusion when intermingled even though they seem to sound the same. Judgment is one of those words heavy with false assumptions and dark with foreboding for most people. This is due in part to its association with very corrupt judicial systems here on earth that reflects much of the misapprehensions we have about God's judgment.
But the closer we get to the true meaning of the words that God uses by allowing the Bible to interpret itself the more beautiful and exciting and liberating truth becomes for us. And I believe there may not be another topic where this is more true than the undoing our misunderstandings about the day of judgment and its surrounding topics.
Judgment really means to reveal the way things really are including everything hidden such as thoughts, motives intents and feelings in the heart and mind that are impossible for anyone else to uncover. It means also a full revelation of the same counterparts that are in the mind and heart of God. When this becomes our understanding and our false, negative definitions of judgment are completely laid aside so as not to reinfect a proper understanding of this word, then it becomes possible to begin to see God in the proper light of truth and begin to appreciate the words Paul is using in verse 4.
Contrary to millenia of religious dogma and preaching, the only correct and truly effective motivation for repentance is an appreciation of the kindness of God, not fear of punishments, retribution or threats of an angry, offended deity. Those negative motivations come directly from the father of lies and the enemy of God who has done everything possible to destroy all knowledge of the real truth about God.
Sadly I have even listened to teachers and pastors of my own church who claim to believe the truth about God repeat similar lies about God that have so effectively turned away millions from responding to His love if they had only seen the truth about Him. These teachers claim that in the end, God's patience will finally run out and He will do His “strange work” and for a little while He will engage in anger and wrath to punish His “enemies” until they are finished being tortured and are finally annihilated. Then, apparently, He will return to His loving ways for the rest of eternity and the righteous saved will never want to repeat the experiment of sin due to the final display of God's “wrath” in the Day of Judgment.
When I hear this kind of teaching, especially coming from those who claim to know God and preach the truth about Him, I literally feel physically ill and sick to my stomach. This is a subtle mingling of error with truth that sounds so plausible in a way that many accept it as Bible truth, particularly because so many verses are lined up as proof texts to support their teachings. But this is NOT what is discovered in a careful and open-minded examination of the Word of God with a view to uncovering and maintaining the principle of consistency of the character of God. Instead, we are actually charging God with partiality. For to say that in the day of judgment God treats the saved differently than He treats the lost is, in fact, to insist that God is partial to the saved and contridicts in full face what Paul declares is the real truth about God.
God is not partial – period. And if any of our beliefs are found to be in contradiction to that truth then it is our beliefs that need reexamination, and we should not need to force the Word of God to fit our assumptions and preconceived beliefs. The system of truth is perfectly consistent as a whole and for us to come into line with it we must allow God's words to take priority over our beliefs and teachings no matter how many years people have believed them or how many texts can be construed to teach them or how many theologians subscribe to them. As Paul would say, “Indeed, let God be true but every man a liar. As it is written: 'That You may be justified in Your words, And may overcome when You are judged.'” (Romans 3:4 NKJV)
This text further reveals the true nature of the day of judgment. In our self-focused obsession in religion we often come with the assumption that the judgment is all about God determining the guilt or innocence of human beings and meting out rewards and punishments accordingly. But this is far from the real truth about judgment and is reflective of the myriads of lies embedded in so much of our assumed beliefs about God and about life.
The reality of the day of judgment is that it is really the revelation of the honest truth about what God is like and His attitude toward all of His created beings without partiality. The day of judgment is, in fact, the day when the largest jury ever assembled – the whole universe including all humanity and all the angels, both good and bad, determines whether or not God was fair, honest and consistent with what He has always said about Himself. At that time the final determination will be made as to whether God could actually do what He said He could do in transforming sinners into saints without coercion, fear, force or manipulation of any kind. All the charges brought against God by the arch-deceiver and re-presented by millions of deceived minds including our own will be tested and weighed by every intelligent mind in the cosmos as all the evidence in every detail and in every circumstance is laid out by all the witnesses called to testify for or against God. The day of judgment is all about coming to a final determination of the consistency and character of no less than God Himself who, amazingly, has submitted Himself to be put on trial by His own created beings. What incredible humility demonstrated by the Omnipotent Ruler of the Universe, and very different than the control-hungry God so popular in religion today.
The day of Judgment really means the day of revealing as Paul points out here. Jesus declared explicitly that He did not come into the world to condemn the world but to save it. He does not change His motives by the time He comes again the second time and He will not change them on the Day of Judgment. “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8) Condemnation does not proceed from the heart or mind of God but is something created in the heart of those who resist His drawing love and grace and reject the beauty of His character as being a lie. Condemnation is a natural consequence of clinging to the lies of sin in the heart and resisting the light of the truth about God until there is no longer a capacity to accept truth. Condemnation is the result of resistance to God, it accumulates in the soul and becomes the fuel for the fires of hell that all of the lost will experience. It is the way that wrath is stored up for ourselves internally for the Day of Judgment.
So is there a place in the judgment for the examination of the lives of humans? Yes there is, absolutely! But the grand trial, the mother of all trials, is not about putting us on the defense stand but, as far as our participation is concerned, is all about the examination of the witnesses to discover if they are truthful or they are found to be bearing false witness against God. Our lives, our words, our attitudes, our teachings, our prejudices and bigotry, our secret motives and cravings and deceptions – all will be flushed out into the open to be transparent and naked before every other person and being in the whole universe to be examined for its relationship to all the other evidence and especially to what truth we knew at the time in our conscience. All of the testimonies, which are the records of all of our responses in every situation to what we knew about God, are made public, and our integrity or lack of it in every area of our life becomes a public spectacle and common knowledge for all the universe to take into account in the deliberation of the great jury.
In this trial on the Great Day of Judgment, every jury member will also be called to testify as well. There are no exceptions in this trial; the testimony of every created being will be entered into the record and laid out in the open so that there is absolutely no possibility for any lingering doubts as to who God is and the integrity of His character and His Word. This is the day of “revelation of the righteous judgment of God”, the right way in which He has dealt with everyone of us that is forever consistent with His character of love and absence of force. (The day of judgment and its right understanding is also the main burden of chapter 3 in Romans which I have not begun to cover yet.)
This truth about the Day of Judgment dispels the negative fear that surrounds it in the typical presentations we hear. It unmasks the lies of Satan about the character of God represented as being angry, vengeful, arbitrary or even fickle. It allows the blazing light of glorious truth about God's consistent character of everlasting lovingkindness to accomplish its drawing work of bringing repentance to our hearts and filling us with transforming grace. It challenges us to reexamine all of our beliefs and doctrines and release our prejudices and pride in deference to the real truths about God revealed in a proper understanding of His Word and by His Spirit. It takes away our false fears and fills us with real love that is the basis of all true life.
We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love, because He first loved us. (1 John 4:16-19 NAS95)
