What a stark and straightforward statement is the text. Isaiah attributes a great deal to the last event of a life – death. Not until death will the books close (and they will be closed). At that point there is a settlement on the various passages of Scripture that address sin issues. After death final evaluation takes place. At that event full understanding will also occur. We need reminders that judgment is the declaration of a judge or jury, for innocence or guilt. It is not resolved with, maybe guilty, maybe not. It is clearly favorable or unfavorable to the defendant. Much that occurs at the judgment seat will be pleasant indeed. The offering of Christ declares and provides exoneration for multitudes. Judgment is really evaluation when the truth of life performance will be totaled. We may feel better with a word like evaluation than judgment.
All this is tough slogging for democratically minded people who feel that each individual has a right to his own ideas and conducts, as long as he does not infringe on the rights of others. Keeping that rather simple and humanely fair pattern, one is hard put to persuade self, much less anyone else, that a sincere person may not be acceptable in some way to God, no matter how modest that way, in any afterlife. We forget that the universe was not made for private opinion.
The impression from the above passage is: 1) – that matters will run their natural course, but the whole of the story can’t be completed until death when accounting, in final summation, is made on the facts in review; 2) – that the earth story is ended for a person at death. (Whatever follows is new, but in some way related to what has gone before. This relationship to our actual conduct accounts for the Bible’s few or many stripes of judgment to gain final ends.); and, 3) – that persons need to be reminded there is personal accounting to be made. Scriptural impression is that we may deal with the negatives of our lives during life to find relief from sin that signaled creation’s death. Sin is a condition. Sins are wrong thoughts/conducts. When the condition has been noted at a final evaluation and accounted for in Christ, we return with Adam and Eve to the perfect original creation. Evil will not be denied for the exonerated, but forgiven. It will be shorn of attractions and guilt in the final judgment of God. Evil will die. No one can defend it.
The good in his children is remembered by God without effort or loss, and marked as worthy of his attention. We need not accent the virtue of our experience. Virtue was meant to be the norm of human thought, conduct and condition from the beginning. Righteousness was supposed to be normal – and so it will be. Justification is not only a legal term, but a major theological one. In justification a qualified person is treated as though he had never sinned. In Christian life, sanctification moves the believer along, in the right direction, which ends after death in purification. One should be active to understand, and ask for God’s living sanctification, so that he or she may move along with righteous dispatch toward imputed justification. When the judge acknowledges that there is no record remaining of any accusation against this person, that justification results in purification. That too is judgment – evaluation and redemption. Christians look forward to that positive reality. They will become what God meant for them to be. Purification is a creation of God. We are grateful for this faith knowledge of Christ’s forgiveness for faith persons. There are times in our lives when we feel that is all we need to know. If we stopped there we would not experience the interest of our inheritance. Informed Christians believe that God is not finished with believers in nature’s process. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020