Judgement has been Taken Away: Part 1
Introduction
Some years ago I was strongly directed to pray alone at night directly facing Uluru (Ayers Rock), in many ways the traditional spiritual centre of Australia.[1] As I walked to the Rock I was unusually conscious of two things, that I was being observed by unseen evil spiritual powers in a way I had never experienced before, and that many other Christians had prayed at the site before me.[2] When I arrived within sight of Uluru I still had no idea what I was meant to pray, in fact, I really did not pray, but was led to proclaim something to the spiritual world over and over, “Judgement has been taken away.”
This utterance was a declaration concerning the full and finished work of the cross[3], an objective statement that evil powers had no rights to the nation[4] and that intercession for the salvation ofAustralia should proceed on that basis. I have never forgotten that incident and believe that in recent days the Holy Spirit has been deepening my understanding of the implications of the taking away of judgement.
What is Wrath?
When I think of judgment, I think of the wrath of God, a term and topic widely avoided today[5]. There are two ways to think about wrath, externally or internally[6]. There are many “prophecies” today that focus on the outer dimension[7] e.g. Hurricane Katrina was an expression of God’s anger against the gays in New Orleans, and we have been warned by “prophetic voices” about an impending tsunami that will devastate Western Australia. Whilst I would not wish to totally discount such emphases[8] the most extensive commentary on the wrath of God in the Bible, Romans 1:18- 32, focuses on what wrath means within the subjective experience of people.
The fundamental content of the wrath of God is godlessness[9], as someone said, “The punishment for sin is sin”.[10] According to Paul, the wrath of God “gives people over” to such things as “dishonorable passions”, “men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error”, “unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.”[11]
The apostle climaxes this chapter with a statement that may surprise us, “Though they know God’s decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.” (Rom 1:32)[12]. Fallen people “know” they violate just standards of good and evil, because they still have a conscience[13]. This is not conscience as a pure faculty[14], but conscience framed within
the power of the laws of culture and religion. The judgement of the human conscience is severe and remorseless[15]. The content or experience of wrath is not a consciousness of sin towards God (especially in Christ), but of shame and guilt apart from God.
Allied to this is the terrible power of idolatry. Outside of Christ all humans are subservient to a range of idols; in our culture, especially amongst young people, the pressure to conform is enormous. Who wants to be told “get a life” or you are a “loser”?[16] Our idols cannot deliver us from the depths of shame and guilt because they are guilt laden, that is, deep down we know they are defective according to the dictates of our own conscience’s expectations.[17] How then can we expect them, as moral failures, to deliver us from our shame and guilt! In their hearts men and women know that their idols and ideologies are morally defective, relational failures and lacking true glory[18]. Yet humans remain in the madness of idolatry rather than turn to the loving Father.[19]
Both atheism and religious violence have the same root. Devotees to the ideology of atheism typically reject an image of an unjust God that is the product of their own imagination. Religious fanatics worship a god seemingly less moral than even themselves[20]. The fallen and deceived conscience of all humans creates a relational zone of shame and guilt around itself, both individually and corporately. This zone is an area of God – exclusion. The true and living God[21] is not allowed into this sphere, because the distorted conscience fears that he wills merciless punishment. The only thing that can free people from this dreadful state is the message, “Judgement has been taken away.”[22]
This message alone has the power (Rom 1:16) to create a zone/ field where the guilty experience only grace[23].
What is the Message of “Judgement Taken Away?”
Jesus said of himself, “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:17). In his initial vision casting sermon at Nazarethhe quoted from Isaiah 61:1- 2, but intentionally omitted the line “the day of vengeance of our God”[24]. This is because he came to remove wrath by dealing with the law.
A basic principle of scripture is that law brings a consciousness of sin[25]. Law, including the laws imprinted upon the conscience by family, friends and culture, leave each of us with a sense that we have not been all that we could have been. The result is humanly indelible shame and guilt[26].
Jesus brings an end to any notion of keeping law (human or divine), as mediating our relationship with God. When Romans 10:4 says, “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.” it uses a word that is commonly translated “perfection/goal”[27]. In Jesus’ perfect righteousness we see the truth that is in every law fulfilled[28]. Principally, this involves the work of the cross.
In the death of Jesus every human transgression[29] has been punished so that in Christ no ground for God’s wrath remains. Objectively, sin as- atoned – for is the only form of sin that exists today. Whatever men and women may feel of the wrath of God through law, and the shame and guilt that ravages their inner being, such things are grounded in a deception that God is intrinsically angry with the human race. But the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is never in scripture called an “angry Father”[30].
What human beings need for salvation is not to lead better lives with greater conformity to some law, but revelation of what has happened through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Paul puts this in a very pronounced way at the start of Romans. “The righteousness of God is revealed” in “the gospel” (Rom 1:16- 17) as the power to remove “the wrath of God …revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness” (Rom 1:18). Human beings have only one basic need, a heavenly revelation that their sin has been judged “once and for all” in Christ[31]. Such a revelation creates faith in the goodness and justice of God and acceptance of his salvation.[32]
The Christian experience of “Judgement Taken Away”
According to the New Testament, believers are to be presented by Christ to the Father on the day of judgement as “blameless”[33]. The establishment of this blamelessness by grace is the perfection of the work of love, “By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for 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. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.” (1 John4:17- 18)
What God’s love “casts out” is not the genuine fear a son has of a loving Father, but the slavish fear that fears the penalty of the law. This is a fear of the consequences of sin, rather than a fear of God[34]. A true Christian has “innocent fear”[35].
As the conscience of the Christian is progressively united with the conscience of Christ – which bears no guilt or shame, the believer shares Jesus’ inner knowing of himself as the Father knows him in love. As the Word grows in us, so the field of blamelessness in and around us grows. This is the expansion of the zone without judgement, a sphere which surrounds the throne of God in heaven[36]. Our great need is to hear from the judgement seat of God in such a way that we are deaf to all other voices of judgement[37].
[1] The aborigines who had accompanied us from the WA Goldfields told us that people from their tribe used to walk all the distance to the Rock for religious ceremonies. It is also a matter of common knowledge that the site is frequented by occult groups.
[2] In the latter case, unwise believers that prayed against many things in an aggressive manner that amounted to cursing. Jesus taught, “bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you” (Luke6:28 cf. Rom12:14).
[3] Consider, “The next day he (John the Baptist) saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”” (John1:29); “Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out.” (John 12:31).
[4] “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in it (the cross)” (Col2:15)
[5] The word “wrath” appears 212 times in the English Standard Version, 37 of these are in the New Testament. As this teaching will attempt to demonstrate, the omission of the topic of judgement in the contemporary Western church is a sign that our consciences are not at peace before God.
[6] Roughly corresponding to objective and subjective.
[7] The words of recently deceased Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority, have been repeated on TV and in print attributing the 9/11 disaster to the gays, pro –abortionists etc. drawing God’s judgement onAmerica.
[8]All “natural disasters” are in the most general sense a function of God’s wrath against the sin of the human race cf. Rom 8: 20 -21.
[9] “remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from thecommonwealth ofIsrael and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” (Eph 2:12)
[10] This is true because the worse thing that can happen to a human being is to exist in a state of sin separated from the glory of God (Rom 3:23).
[11] See Romans1:24- 31.
[12] By this Paul means that all humans possess an objective, but not necessarily conscious, knowledge of God’s goodness and that they violate this willfully, “although they knew God, they did not honor him as God” (Rom1:21).
[13] “For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them” (Rom2:14 – 15)
[14] Conscience is not “the voice of God”, but can be “weak” (1 Cor 8:7), “doubting” (Rom14:23), “seared” (1 Tim 4:2); “corrupt” (Tit1:15), “evil” (Heb10:22).
[15] When Paul says, “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.” (1 Cor15:56), he does not simply mean the Old Testament law, but all law apart from grace .
[16] Simple questions like, “How do I look?” or “How did I sound?” betray such enslavement to the impression of others.
[17] The rash of WA sportsmen involved in violence and drugs is a recent example, but few will actually let go of the cherished image of the hero. Cf. “Ephraim is joined to idols; leave him alone.” (Hos 4:17).
[18] This is the premise of Paul’s appeal to the idol – makers inAthens, “Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man”. (Acts17:29).
[19] Objectively, men and women know that the substitutes for the glory of God (Rom 1:18ff.) are inferior to the demands of their own conscience and needs. No idol can love perfectly, only the Father in Jesus does this (1 John4:18).
[20] What I am suggesting, as in terrorist expressions of Islam, is that at some level the terrorist knows that Allah is unjust, but that they seek to repress this knowledge and convince themselves of the rightness of their religion by through extremism. (On this topic I recommend A Journey From Gods to Christ by Daniel Shayesteh.) Such self- righteousness is the final obstacle to grace, as Jesus said to the Pharisees, ““If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains.” (John 9:41).
[21] “For they themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God” (1 Thess 1:9).
[22] By this, I am really referring to the gospel e.g. “by him (Jesus) everyone who believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses.” (Acts13:39); “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Cor5:19).
[23] Jesus moved through life surrounded by such a space, this was irresistibly attractive to the sinners of his time e.g. Matt 9:10;11:19; Luke 15:1.
[24] ““The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”” (Luke4:18 – 19).
[25] E.g. “through the law comes knowledge of sin” (Rom3:20); “ if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin.” (Rom 7:7).
[26] Hence the endless resorting to pleasure, possessions and position to remove the inner sense of emptiness.
[27] Greek = telos
[28] This includes the glimpses of truth in all religious and moral systems for all time.
[29] I am here using “transgression” in the sense of the violation of a known law.
[30] Another way of putting this is to say that inside of God there is no shame i.e. in the intratrinitarian relationships into which Christ brings us e.g. “your life is hidden with Christ in God” Col 3:3.
[31] “He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people, since he did this once for all when he offered up himself.” (Heb 7:27. cf.9:26;10:10)
[32] “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” (Rom10:17). Where a revelation of who God is in Christ occurs, salvation is a reality, or to put it most simply, revelation is reconciliation”.
[33] “he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him in love.” (Eph 1:4); “he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him,” (Col1:22), “so that he may establish your hearts blameless in holiness before our God and Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.” (1 Thess3:13) cf. Eph 1:4;5:27;5:23; Jude 24; Rev 14:5.
[34] “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”” (Rom8:15).
[35] Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God, 14.37
[36] When John has a vision of the heavenly throne room and “around the throne was a rainbow” (Rev 4:3) we are reminded of the ancient covenant sign given to Noah of divine mercy (Gen9:11- 17). The judgement seat of God is truly a “throne of grace” (Heb4:16).
[37] Note how Paul refuses to pass judgment on himself, “ But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself.” (1 Cor 4:3)