Trembling with Joy

“Serve the LORD with fear and celebrate his rule with trembling.” — Psalm 2:11

Rosh Hashanah has several other names, one of which is “The Day of Judgment.” On the Jewish New Year, every single person in the world stands before God in judgment. The previous year is taken into review, and decisions are made regarding the year to come.

It was always hard for me to know how to relate to Rosh Hashanah. On one hand, it is a day of joy and celebration. We dress in our finest clothing and share delicious meals with family and friends. On the other hand, we spend half of the time in prayer, contemplating that we are being judged by the Master of the Universe. That’s a pretty scary thought!

The psalmist sums up my ambivalence with words that the Talmud associates with Rosh Hashanah:  “Serve the LORD with fear and celebrate His rule with trembling.” Well . . . which is it? Are we celebrating or are we trembling? It seems awfully difficult to do both at the same time!

The process of moving from one location to another can help us understand the words of the psalm writer. Anyone who has moved houses knows the process is no picnic, and for many who have moved to Israel, where everything is tiny compared to super-sized America, the process also means downsizing in a major way. You have to make decisions about every single thing that you own. Do we really need it? Does it serve a good purpose?

If you do a good job, you end up throwing a lot of stuff out. The process of de-cluttering one’s life and assessing one’s worldly possessions is downright painstaking. But at the same time, it is incredibly liberating. It’s painful, but at the same time it is joyful. There is nothing more cathartic than throwing junk out!

This process can help us better understand the Day of Judgment. On Rosh Hashanah we tremble, knowing that we are being judged. We are forced to take stock of our inner world:  Do I really want to behave this way? Do I really want to be that kind of person? Is this the direction I want my life going in? We take note of all of the junk cluttering our minds and interfering with our souls and we throw it out! We say to God, “I’m getting rid of all that garbage!”

And you know what? It feels pretty good to go through such a thorough cleansing. We feel lighter, clearer, and yes – joyful.

http://www.holylandmoments.org/devotionals/trembling-with-joy

Judgment Part II

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory–Mat 25:31

Can God Be Love and Punish?

I fancy our other profound difficulty is this. How can God be love? How can God care and be a Father and wish us well and have the power to give us the best, and yet forever have creatures in hopeless misery? Again there is no answer, but again does not this present world suggest that it may be possible? Is not God love today? Is not God infinitely kind today? And yet today are there none who have committed the unpardonable sin which can never be forgiven, neither in this life nor the life to come? May there be forgiven, neither in this life nor the life to come? May there not be a fixity of heart, a deadness like that of the nether millstone, owing to our free will working as well as the love of God? There is not one of us in pew or pulpit, who does not long with all the passion of his heart for universal restoration; there is not one who does not crave that ultimately all should be blessed; but the Lord has been our light, the Lord has been the Revealer of the Father, and it is the Lord who says, “Where their worm dieth not and the fire is never quenched.” It is the Lord who says, “These shall go away into everlasting punishment.” I want to speak in the right tone, I don’t want to speak harshly. I am like a man groping in the dark, but with one hand I grip Christ, and I say, Brother, would not it be awful to awaken and find that you were wrong and the Lord was right? “Seek ye the Lord while He may be found, call ye upon Him while He is near: let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return to the Lord, and He will have mercy upon him.”

Christ Himself Will Be the Judge

The next thing which our blessed Saviour tells us is that He Himself is going to be our judge: “When the Son of man shall come in his glory.” Our judge is not God, the Father; our judge is Christ, the Son, and you know that is as stupendous as it is beautiful. Think how stupendous it is. Here is Christ, born in a manger, living for thirty years in a little cottage, going about among humble people, doing little deeds of kindness, and then He says, “I am going to judge mankind.” It is either arrogance raised to the point of madness, or it is the truth, and I do not think that any fair review would ever charge the Lord with arrogance. And if it is the truth, your Carpenter of Nazareth is God, and you have got to bow before Him and say, “My Lord and my God.” All well enough to say, I love the Carpenter of Nazareth; I like to watch Him talking with the children, watching the sparrows, moving through the harvest; but mark you, your only source of knowledge of that Carpenter tells you that He said, “I am going to judge the world.” Then how beautiful it is that you and I are going to be judged by a Man, by One who bore our burdens, by One who knew our frame, by One who understands us perfectly. The other day there came into the vestry a man who again had given way to drink. When I asked him what was the cause of it, he answered something like this: “I was down and out, my business tottering, my home unhappy, and I gave way to drink.” If I had judged him, what would he have said? He would have said, “You do not understand; you never had a business that was tottering; you were never unhappy at home.” But if I could have said to him, “Brother, I have been down and out, I have come through all that you have, and yet God brought me through,” my very presence would have judged him. It is so with the Lord. He was tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin. He was down and out when every disciple forsook Him and fled; and He is going to be our Judge. I could imagine some daring soul on the Day of Judgment, if the judge was God the Father, saying, “Thou who dwellest yonder, far away in the light that never fades, you do not understand.” Nobody ever can say that to Christ; I think just His presence will be the judgment.

Our Judgment Will Depend on the Discharge or Neglect of the Common Charities of Life

One thing more I have got to say, and it is this, that our Lord–apart from the figure altogether–teaches us the principle of the Last Judgment, and the principle is this: it is the discharge or the neglect of the common charities of life. May I say it again? It is the discharge or the neglect of the common humanities of life–visiting the prisoner, cheering the sick, giving bread to the hungry, clothing the naked; and that is but a short and swift summation of what we call the charities of life. Are you not surprised? You thought character was going to be the test in the Last Judgment; you thought the Spirit of Christ was going to be the test–”If any man have not the Spirit of Christ he is none of His.” But what is the spirit of Christ? It is believing and experiencing what He said about the new birth and proving it by doing what He did. It is the Spirit who brought Him to the manger, it is the Spirit who kept Him quiet in Nazareth for thirty years, it is the Spirit who made Him move among men, teaching them, healing them, helping them, doing them good; and if that is your life, you have got the Spirit of Christ. You do not know it ? Of course you don’t; none of the saved knew it, they were all amazingly surprised when the Lord told how He reckoned them (see Mat 25:35-40). And you may have the Spirit of Christ if you go out and be kindly, charitable, helpful; and yet you may never know it till the judgment comes. You say, I am going to be judged by my relationship to Christ. Yes, you are. When the Lord was here, with whom, tell me, did He identify Himself? Was it with Herod? “Go tell that fox.” Was it with the Pharisees? “Woe unto you, Pharisees.” The Lord identified Himself with the poor, with the needy, with the last, with the least, with the lost; and He is the same yesterday and today and forever. And if the Lord is identified with all who are in need, then every time you help a man in need you are brought into relationship with Christ.

We Must Revise Our Lives

It has been very difficult–not difficult to speak the truth, but to speak the truth in the right spirit. I trust I have done it tenderly, and I simply want to ask you to remember that all of us have got to appear before the judgment seat of Christ, and therefore should not we all revise our lives, lest at the end, when far off there is music, for us it should be wailing and gnashing of teeth?

http://devotionals.ochristian.com/george-h-morrison-devotional-sermons-devotional.shtml

Judgment Part I

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory–Mat 25:31

Preaching on the Judgment

One always notices in time of revival that a great deal is preached about the Last Judgment. In our ordinary pulpit ministration it is not so. I think most ministers hesitate to face up to these awful truths, but always, both in past centuries and today, when there is a revival of God‘s Spirit, as a moral motive power you find prominence on the Last Judgment. Over against the inequalities, the injustices, the apparent unrighteousnesses of this world, mankind almost naturally has postulated a judgment to come. I suppose there is not a savage faith without some glimmering of it; and in the religion of old Egypt there was no picture more familiar than that of the Judgment Hall, and somebody standing holding a pair of scales, and in one side of them the human souls.

The Judgment Is Going to Be at the End of Time

One wants, then, to find what our Lord had to say about this deep instinct of the human heart. We find it here. Laying aside the imagery–one can never be quite sure when or not the curtain is the picture–but trying to lay aside the imagery and trying to get at the truth which our Lord wanted to teach, I think we discover this. First of all, our Lord makes it perfectly plain to us that this judgment is going to be at the end of time; when the Son of Man cometh in His glory and His holy angels with Him, then–and whatever be our thoughts of eschatology, and whatever be our views of the millennium, I think it must be clear to all of us that what our Lord meant was that the great judgment is not to be until the story of time is at an end. Now a little reasoning will just show you how necessary that is. For instance, nobody can be perfectly judged in this life, just because life is not static; life is a thing of movement. Our blessed Lord never judged a man by what he might be at the particular moment, but rather by the trend of what he was going to be. You take the parable of the Pharisee and Publican praying in the Temple. At that particular moment the Pharisee really thought he was better than the Publican, he had done far more good, but in the broken heart of the poor penitent the Lord saw such possibilities for tomorrow that He pronounced blessing. John Newton was a slave trader, and if at any hour in his earlier life you had judged him you would have condemned him to the lowest pit. But Newton was converted, became a well-known minister, and won multitudes of souls for Christ. You see, you can never judge him while his life is moving. Again, is it not equally clear to you that you can never judge a man just when he dies, because when a man dies his influence does not die; it may go on from age to age. You take, for instance, a case like Mr. Quarrier. Mr. Quarrier with all the passion of his heart loved these little orphan children, and then he got the Homes built at Bridge-of-Weir, and there he laboured till he died; but the Homes did not die. Year after year, generation after generation, perhaps to the end of time, they are going to go on blessing the orphan children. If you want to sum up the total influence of Mr. Quarrier you cannot judge him till the end of time. You take a man whose influence is bad: a man who writes a bad book, it may be an obscene novel, spawn of the press, it may be a book deliberately designed to overthrow faith. The man writes it and gets his bread by it, and he dies; but the book does not die. Year after year it may go on corrupting, degrading, and lowering, and not till the ripples have broken on the shore of eternity is the whole story of the man’s influence known, and our Lord, who is always so reasonable, says that when the Son of Man comes, when times is done, when your influence has gone to its uttermost limit, then we are going to be judged.

The Judgment Is Going to Be Final

The next thing our Lord tells us here is that the judgment is going to be final. I want you to listen while I read over quietly these words–not of mine, but of Christ: “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment, and the righteous unto life eternal.” If there be anybody here who knows Greek, he will know that the word for “everlasting” is the same word as the word for “eternal,” and therefore if you and I believe that the life we are going to live beyond is one that never ends, you can only interpret the words of Christ as meaning that the punishment is never going to end. I want you to think of that. It is perfectly true that men have tried to get out of it by giving another meaning to that word “eternal.” They have taken it to mean “age-long”: that is, lasting through the next period to this, though beyond that no one knows what happens. There is no hope that way. All through the Bible–St. Paul, St. John, the writer of the Hebrews, the Revelation–the word means “never ending.” So it means in classic Greek, so it means in Plato. It is not I, it is the Lord who says, and says it with a passionate intensity, “Where the worm never dieth, where the fire is never quenched.” It is not I, it is the Lord who says, “These shall go into everlasting punishment, and those into everlasting life,” and how the Lord, with His big heart of love, tender to everybody, even to the beasts, how the Lord could combine that with such an awful prospect, is something we have never fathomed to this hour. If you want to say, “I do not believe in everlasting punishment,” remember you are at perfect liberty to say it. If it is your judgment, then it is yours, but please observe you can never quote the authority of the Lord Christ for that. It is awful to think that His authority is on the other side. You have got to face up to that. I suppose the two difficulties men have felt when they have allowed themselves to brood upon this matter are these. First, we say, we have all said, How could anyone be happy in heaven, how could the saints of heaven sing their song if they knew that there were souls–even one soul–suffering in hopeless misery? To that there is no answer. But is not it possible that a little light may be drawn from what we see in this present world? Are not there people in Glasgow who are perfectly happy, thoroughly enjoying themselves, and all the time within a stone’s throw there are men and women in hopeless misery? You see it can be done, and if you answer, as I have no doubt the keener among you would answer at once, that these are worldly people, these are not the inhabitants of heaven, my experience is, it is generally worldly people who talk like that. The saints rather bow the head and say, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”

http://devotionals.ochristian.com/george-h-morrison-devotional-sermons-devotional.shtml