GraceNotes - no. Charlie Bing. And the Spirit and the Bride say, "Come! Whoever desires, let him take of the water of life freely. No permission is required if they are distributed unedited at no charge.
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Clear and Simple Goodseed Dr. Sonic Light - Dr. Thomas Constable Bible. Address P. In actuality, the New Testament reveals six distinct judgments which will impact current and future inhabitants of earth. Following are those six judgments:. In summary, when the Bible speaks of judgment, it is important to recognize which one. The judgment of the cross Jesus said in John , "Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.
This he said, signifying what death he should die. As Peter was addressing the Jewish leaders in Acts he said, "Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved. The judgment of Believers when they sin I John says, "My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not.
And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. When a Believer sins, the appropriate course of action is found in I John , "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
What about the hard-headed Believer who continues to sin - no confession - no repentance? This is the kind of judgment made by professional lawmakers, professional law-enforcers, and professional law-interpreters, i. I have little to say about judging what laws to make, or how to enforce them better, but I have something to say about judging what the motive for sanctions and punishments must be, because it is an answer most intellectuals in our society now deny.
The essential motive for punishment should not be rehabilitation or deterrence but justice. Even though charity is the highest motive, and your personal motive for rehabilitation is charity to the criminal whom you want to rehabilitate, and even though your personal motive for deterrence is also charity to possible future victims that you want to protect, while the personal motive for justice, even when it is not confused with vengeance and hatred, is not this personal charity, it is essential that justice be the first motive and the absolute standard.
Otherwise, we will give unjust, undeserved punishments just because we think they will work better to rehabilitate or deter. Judgments of positive-law justice, on the other hand, do not depend on these two uncertainties and thus can be much clearer. And so are judgments about natural-law justice, to everyone but a sophist.
It might find anything else there tomorrow; anything at all. The philosophical principle here is simple: we do not discover and obey truth, we create it with our judgments. Truth is not the subordination of thought to reality but to our will. In the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy in Casey vs.
Still another kind of positive judgment—this is our tenth kind—is made not by individual judges but by a public community as a whole. This used to mean representational democracy, in which important issues were decided by the judgment of concrete individual persons, by popular vote, either directly, by referendum, or indirectly, by electing representatives.
Today it is the unelected media and climate of opinion they create that determines the most important issues. The issues judged by the judiciary are typically much more culturally, morally, and personally important than the largely economic issues determined by Congress or the President.
Judgments about Persons. Another way of classifying judgments is in terms of their personal objects. We can judge God, ourselves, and others. Let these be our eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth kinds of judgments. A creator, as distinct from an interpreter, has no data and no bounds, so that his judgments are never wrong.
Moose are large and geckos are small only because the real world limits our creativity, but elves can be either large, as in Tolkien, or small, as in Shakespeare, whatever we desire. How do we do this to God? Careful, though. Because there are many gods on the market, we must judge among the various candidates, and in that sense judge God. Otherwise we simply arbitrarily decree which god is God.
And the two standards are truth and goodness, rationality and morality. We must judge any logically self-contradictory God and any evil God to be false and unworthy of belief, because we have these two absolute standards in our own souls that are absolute, indubitable, and self-justifying.
We literally cannot believe anything that is so irrational as to be self-contradictory, and therefore literally meaningless, even if we call it God; and we literally cannot accept what is intrinsically unacceptable because it is logically self-contradictory, or love what is really, literally unlovable. God Himself has placed these two prophets in our conscience, and when we use them honestly and in submission to objective truth and goodness rather than our own will, we judge with divine authority.
Forget about it. Our twelfth kind of judgment is judging ourselves. This is subject to a cruel trilemma. If we judge ourselves, we must find ourselves either morally good, or morally wicked, or halfway in between. If we judge ourselves as morally good, we become self-satisfied Pharisees. If we judge ourselves as morally wicked, we become self-loathing worms who cannot love our neighbors as we love ourselves because we cannot love ourselves. And if we judge ourselves as halfway between, as mediocre, as wishy-washy, we are lukewarm Laodiceans who deserve the shocking divine word of judgment in Revelation.
The solution is simple: we should judge our sins but not our selves. If we habitually look at God instead of ourselves, we will not succumb to anyone of the three horns of the trilemma, for in the light of His face we cannot judge ourselves to be worthy, or worthless, or waffling.
Of course that does not forbid us to judge actions, for to do that would undermine all morality. Today there is only one class of people who always deny this distinction, between sins and sinners, actions and persons; who say that their whole personal identity is what they do and therefore if we reject what they do we reject what they are; that to hate their lifestyle is to hate them, the whole, the person, the I.
That is a religious judgment, to identify something with the whole self. All thirteen kinds of judgment so far are made by humans. There is a fourteenth kind of judgment because there exist, in addition to humans, one other known species of created persons: angels. Therefore they are good instruments of divine providence, being closer to the mind of the Author of our human drama than we are.
The Apostle Paul spoke about how excesses had developed at Corinth. For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged. As Christians, God calls us to do something! But at the communion table, these people started to treat the communion service not as a great memorial feast, but as a time of personal indulgence. You know, we can be Christians, saved by the grace of God, but still be a very real disappointment to the Lord and to His people.
That takes spiritual discernment. It takes personal judgment. Judge yourself more severely than your friends would. That way you will be in their favor, rather than the object of their derision. Be a responsible Christian, daily performing those acts of judgment whereby you tell the difference between right and wrong. The Judgment Seat of Christ is an awesome appointment that every Christian has. That was decided the moment you believed in Jesus and took Him as your personal Savior.
Can you imagine, standing in the towering, magnificent presence of the throne of Jesus Christ? What did you do with the opportunities I gave you? Some will have a great report before the Lord. Jesus Christ is the King of the Jews.
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