Isaiah 1:1, 10-20
Today we are going to look at a very unfashionable aspect of this Christian life, judgement.
As a minister of Christ, I am obliged to be faithful in all I teach, yet to avoid speaking on Judgement is to avid speaking on love and justice.
What is seen as judgement for one will be justice and consolation for someone else. And if God loves all of us equally, then judgment of an injustice is as much part of the character of God as love is.
It is the flip side of the same coin. There is no love without judgement.
I sometimes hear people talk of the “God of the Old Testament”, as if he were a different God to the God found in the New Testament.
As if one was a God of wrath and the other the God of love. Yet the Old Testament is full of passages that show is great and powerful creator God loves us like a doting mother.
Like this one: Isa 49:21, “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast / and have no compassion on the child she has borne? / Though she may forget, I will not forget you! / See I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.”
And from Hosea in last week’s reading, “‘When Israel was a baby, I loved him… I took them up in my arms and healed them…I lifted them to my cheek and bent down to feed them.’
Conversely, in the New Testament and gospels, Jesus, Paul, James, and John all speak very much about judgement. The sheep will be separated from the goats and there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth.
God is unchanging, the same yesterday, today and forever. Everything that God does is love, even when we don’t understand it.
From the foundation of the world, everything has been part of God’s salvation plan that will come to its fulfilment when Jesus returns in full majestic glory; not meek and mild, but as the Lion of Judah.
All of scripture, both Old and New Testaments, speak to this vast plan of redemption that God has for the whole world. If God were not love, he wouldn’t care what happens to us. Death would be just that, death.
Never to breathe or have consciousness again. But because he is love, he showed us the way to have eternal life; a full, breathing, conscious life in a human body, with him for ev.
But what about all those Old Testament prophets, warning of the fire-and-brimstone God who will smite whole nations?
All of the prophets, including John the Baptist, preached a repentance of sins because the Kingdom of God is upon us. But if God is Love, shouldn’t he just love us anyway, no matter what we do?
It is precisely because God is love that this repentance is preached. The sin which we turn from is all that we do that separates us from God in the form of not loving our neighbour, which comes from not loving or knowing God.
Love equals justice. Our sin hurts other people, and it damages us. The judgement of God is the consolation and comfort of the oppressed, the poor and needy, and all those excluded in this life. Those we sin against.
The judgement of God also comforts and consoles us for the sins done against us. Most of us have experienced this comfort and consolation, which we experience as the peace that passes all understanding.
All things have consequences. We will all face the judgement of God. The sheep will be judged in Christ, because we are hidden in Christ, and be with their God forever.
The goats will be judged by every word, thought and deed in their earthly lives and will spend eternity with their God, who is themselves. This is purely New Testament, not Old, it is exactly what Jesus preached.
We, as a society actually love judgement for sin. Often, we call sin “crime,” or “negligence” or some other legal word. But we love justice being done. We have a whole court system that deals with these things. All of us will face the divine eternal court one day.
We, as parents, love judgement. We exercise judgement constantly with our children because we love them.
We don’t let them get away with things that are bad because we love them and want them to understand that some of these things they do are not acceptable; usually because they hurt other people, and always themselves in some way.
Imagine if there was a commandment: “Thou shalt not drink poison.” Someone says, God can’t tell me what to do and drinks the poison. It is not God that kills the person, but the poison. It is our sin that will damn us, not God.
This is the crux of the matter! Sin hurts us. More than anything else, sin hurts us. It deadens us to love so, over time, we become incapable of loving each other or God.
God soon becomes so distant we can’t see him; he lives in a galaxy far, far away, and we soon convince ourselves that he is a judgmental sort of spoil-sport.
This is what sin does, it removes us from God’s presence and truly hurts us! Like any loving parent, God hates to see us hurting ourselves.
This is what God is saying through his prophet Isaiah in today’s reading, “Your worship of me is so fake. You are so focused on loving yourselves and your corrupt material comforts you don’t even think of me. How dare you think I want your phony sacrifices!”
It’s like a bloke robbing a bank and saying, “Lord bless me so I don’t get caught!”
Instead, Isaiah speaks for God who says in vv. 16-17, “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”
This washing we call repentance. When we do, see what happens in the very next verse (v.18)? “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.”
We are forgiven, the judgement for all the hurt we have caused then falls on Jesus, who has paid the price for our sin himself.
But human nature has this inclination to not love; neither each other nor God. But even though we keep on not loving we aren’t just left in our lost place.
God through the prophet Hosea (11:9-10) says “I will not execute my fierce anger for I am the Holy One in your midst and I will not come in wrath. Instead the Lord shall roar like a lion;” (that is Jesus, the lion of Judah), “when he roars, his children shall come trembling from the west and the east, trembling like birds, and return home,” to where God lives.
Which is Christ Jesus in our hearts. The lion’s roar, which is the roar of love, in justice and loving kindness, draws us back to the heart of God, which is the person of Jesus Christ.
Everything God does is love, even when we don’t understand it. All the Old Testament prophets proclaimed the coming of Jesus as the Messiah and Savior of the world.
All of the Old Testament is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. The one who will one day come to judge
us is the same one who first came to be judged for us.
And we trust that this same Jesus - the one who came, the one who comes, and the one who is coming again — is undeniably and unalterably for us and all the world.
We see the loving kindness of the Old Testament God and the New Testament God, who lifts us like babies to his cheek, simply because he loves us. Let me pray …