Judgment is Inevitable
We hope to avoid it. We pray to escape it. The last thing we look forward to is Judgment Day. Alas, everything we know about God, from the Old Testament, New Testament and Church Fathers, tells us that Judgment is something we cannot avoid.
Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James, To those who are called, beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ: May mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you. Beloved, being very eager to write to you of our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. For admission has been secretly gained by some who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly persons who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny the only Master and our Lord Jesus Christ. Now I desire to remind you, though you were once for all fully informed, that the Lord saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe. And the angels that did not keep their own position but left their proper dwelling have been kept by him in eternal chains in the nether gloom until the judgment of the great day; just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise acted immorally and indulged in unnatural lust, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire. Yet in like manner these men in their dreamings defile the flesh, reject authority, and revile the glorious ones. But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, disputed about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a reviling judgment upon him, but said, “The Lord rebuke you.” But these men revile whatever they do not understand, and by those things that they know by instinct as irrational animals, they are destroyed.
Jude 1.1-10
Today’s lesson from Saint Jude reminds us that Judgment is coming, one way or another, so we best be prepared for it. Let’s start off with accepting that our lives and hearts will be judged by God. That’s the scary part. The not-so-scary part is that judgment does not have to mean punishment.
All the examples in the Holy Scriptures of the judgment of God include punishment, not because God likes to punish, but because the people chose not to live according to God’s will. God has many times over told us how He wants us to live. We choose whether to follow His will.
God’s judgment is merely solidifying our choices and our hearts. Since God respects our free will to ignore Him, judgment ‘feels like’ punishment. In truth judgment is just a permanent status of our free will. That’s the easy part.
The not-so-easy part is the truth of God cannot be avoided either. If we choose to ignore Him, then judgment ‘feels like’ punishment since we cannot escape Him in heaven. He still loves us, but we feel his love as pain because we reject Him.
I once asked a pious man who was a judge how he justified judging people if God said we should not judge. He answered, “I don’t judge them. I just determine the facts, and the facts judge them.” In a way, the same is true with God’s judgment.
God determines the facts of our hearts and choices. It is our hearts and choices that judge us. In every judgment story of the Holy Scriptures, God is trying to tell us to change our choices and hearts to follow Him. Then, judgment won’t feel like punishment. When we follow God, judgment is comfort. Either way, judgment is inevitable.
