More Bad News: The Case for Judgment
It is appointed for man to die once and after that comes judgment (Hebrews 9:27)
The silent recoiling from the idea we all deserve an eternity apart from God is natural and palpable. Thinking highly of ourselves as opposed to the many others it’s easy to think less of is part of our problem. We are natural bean counters for the failings of our fellow man and natural absolvers of our own. There is a name for this phenomenon, pride.
Pride has become the calling card of a generation who flaunts its decisions to ignore and subordinate God in favor of exalting and prioritizing ourselves in His place. Though we cannot create ourselves or anything of real substance for that matter, we can create our spiritual realities in our hearts and minds where pride will easily reign as king or queen of our lives. Pride is the elevated regard for oneself and one’s desires above and beyond all others, including God.
Pride, like the first amendment, is the first and most powerful of spiritual crimes because it enables all others. Without pride it is impossible to steal because one must put oneself first in order to take what is not ours. Pride enables lust because we allow ourselves to desire what is not ours. Pride is the source of murder because we make ourselves judge, jury and executioner of another. When God explained to the first breaker of His spiritual law the nature of his crime He described it:
Your heart became proud
on account of your beauty,
and you corrupted your wisdom
because of your splendor.
So I threw you to the earth;
I made a spectacle of you before kings. (Ezekial 28:17)
The same is true for each of us as we become prideful. We admire not just our own physical beauty but regard ourselves as more beautiful in every way than the next person. It similarly corrupts our wisdom, which God describes begins with “fear of the Lord”. Pride is the absence of the fear of God. Which is to say, pride blinds us to the truth that God is real and has ultimate authority over our lives. He allows us this vanity, not because He is careless, but because without the ability to chose pride – to choose ourselves as god of our lives – we aren’t truly free.
This is the rub of our situation. God has made us free because without freedom we are incapable of truly knowing Him, ourselves or one another. This is what separates us from all other created beings and why our choices are held in higher esteem with greater consequences than animals. We alone have the ability to effect the world by our individual and collective wills to power, and pride is the assuming of that power with god-like ramifications.
To the first and greatest transgressor He said:
You said in your heart,
“I will ascend to the heavens;
I will raise my throne
above the stars of God;
I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly,
on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon.
I will ascend above the tops of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.” (Isaiah 14:13&14)
Who among us hasn’t’ said the same thing when we know what we are doing is wrong? In our moment of pride we are deceived we are strong enough to play God of our lives only to realize the deceptive wickedness of our hearts as we realize it was a moment of utter weakness. For many, if not most of us, we chose this for ourselves daily. Who among us hasn’t fallen for the easy deception that it’s just a little look, or I’ll just take a little bit, or nobody is going to see and nobody is going to know? How many criminals thought they would get away with it, or better yet, displaced God in the moment as arbiter of their destiny? Every, single, one, or they wouldn’t have committed the crime. How many times have we watched or heard of someone daring the most ridiculous act of lawlessness only to find out they got caught?
Yet so many get away with their crimes, and the same is true of us. We commit “micro-aggressions” toward God day in and day out defying His spiritual laws over our lives and pay no penalty in the moment. The accumulation of these escapes makes it easier to commit the next, and the next, and the next.
Even worse, those of us who think we are good for all the good we do, from volunteering at the local shelter or sitting on a select board or donating money to Ukraine or the humane society. We deceive ourselves into thinking we can make up for our indiscretions by tossing some money to the cashier for the food bank, or waving a stranger through in traffic, or standing up to the patriarchy because we’re good people. We compare our goodness to others, again, as if God will ignore the rest of what we’ve done.
Some of us even pretend we are better than God. We take God to our court and ask “If God is so good why does He let Palestinian babies die?” while defending being pro-choice. Or “If God is so good who is He to tell me who I can have sex with?” subtly conceding if there is a God He designed your body so He must know His purpose for them. Or any number of judgments we pretend to hold over Him.
The truth is, none of us are good and deep down when we look back at the lives we’ve lived by God’s standard we all fail and fail miserably. No one is good by comparison to others our true measure is by the law. Is any judge going to take you seriously if you defend your speeding ticket by saying “at least I didn’t kill anyone your honor”? Hardly – the law is there to treat us fairly on a case by case basis.
However the greatest deception is not that we think we can get away with it in this life, but that we can get away with it in the next. Yet again He reminds us to be God is to be omniscient – to know everything: every path of every star, every blade of every grass, every hair on every head and every crime by every person at the very level of our heart’s desires and impulses. Impressive are the rap sheets of today’s criminals. Thirty-seven felonies, twenty-eight misdemeanors, eleven times sent to prison, and we are stunned to think someone would be that bad and the justice system that care-free to keep letting them out. Yet our spiritual rap sheets are longer and our self-sentencing just as careless. We let ourselves re-offend and abscond from justice day in and day out, and if we’re honest, we know it, and so does God.
Our thirst for justice is real and genuinely centered in righteousness because we are made in His image and likeness. This is why we set up courts and pay for law enforcement and applaud when the guilty pay. However we stroll through life with a low regard for our spiritual crimes and a high regard for our ability to explain them away pretending to hold ourselves to the same standard of justice.
For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. (Matthew 7:2)
Every one of us is racking up small, medium and large spiritual crimes and will one day be hauled into court by the arresting officer, Death. Dying with us will be our ability to offend any longer, however not dying will be our record and we will have to give an account for every thought and deed we committed in all of our wandering under the sun. We know it, we sense it, and we have no way to get out of it.
Or do we?
