CHAPTER VI.

JUDGMENT A PRESENT AND PERPETUAL REAL

ITY IN BOTH WORLDS.

"It is he which was ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and dead.” —. -Acts x. 42.

THE connection in which the ideas of resurrection and judgment stand in the New Testament requires us to study the general subject of the divine judgment for the sake of relieving the subject of the resurrection of some misconceptions attached to it by misconceptions on the subject of judgment. It is popularly supposed that there must be a delay of resurrection until the time has arrived for the yet distant judgment to take place. But what if the judgment is not distant? What if it is now going on? What if it is to go on only as it now goes?

The thoughtful reader of the Bible cannot fail to be impressed by the frequent recurrence of that solemn word of righteousness JUDGMENT. The New Testament

unfolds a view of future judgment which is not apparent in the Old. But that revelation of the present judgment which is so prominent in the Old is obscured in the New through a traditional misunderstanding, which has settled on many passages, one instance of which was exhibited in Note A, at the end of the preceding chap

ter.

The certainty of judgment beyond the grave is testified by reiterated declarations. of Christ and his Apostles. What the Master said of the "resurrection of judgment" the disciples repeat in saying, "after death, judgment." "The dead, small and great," are seen in vision standing before the judgment throne. There every man must appear 1 to "receive the things done in the body, whether good or bad."

1

Such testimonies, coupled with misunderstandings which we are soon to notice, have created a way of thinking on this subject, which relegates judgment to the other side of the grave, and fails to recognize it duly as it is proceeding here, according to

1 "For all of us must needs be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ." (2 Cor. v. 10.) (Literally.)

our Lord's emphatic declaration, "now is the judgment of this world." (John xii. 31.) Judgment goes before death as well as after. "After death, judgment," not "the judgment; our translators slipped in that little word. (Heb. ix. 27.) No man by dying gets away from judgment. Nor does any man have to wait for it till after death.

I. But what is judgment? It is :

(1.) Experience of the good or evil results of the course we take, with the divine law or against it.

It is also:

(2.) A revelation in each man's consciousness of those results as the fruit of his obedience or disobedience to the divine law.

It is plain that the first of these may exist without the second. The results of action cannot fail to follow, or begin to follow, immediately after action. The man who perpetrates a crime, however successfully, suffers an immediate result in the hardening and depraving of his moral nature, and this result is, essentially, his judgment, whether it be immediately revealed to him as such, or not.

It is also plain that the second element in judgment may be delayed long after the first. The transgressor may successfully blind himself to his condition, as hardened, depraved, and worsening. In other words, he is simply unconscious of the work of judgment that is actually going on within him, in the degradation and growing ruin of his nature. When the time comes for this to flash upon him, and consume him with shame and agony, the judgment of which he then becomes conscious is simply a revelation,1 or discovery, of the judgment that has been working in him since his evil course began. The discovery did not make the judgment. It only brought it to light in the man's own consciousness.

II. But where is judgment? Wherever law is, there is judgment. Judgment, as distinct from the consciousness of judgment, is simply the experience of the consequences of acting according to or against the divine law. As soon as a transgressor begins to break the thorn hedge with which the law has marked and secured the right way, so soon the retributive thorns begin to tear. The great catastrophe which

1 See chapter ix. toward the close.

shakes a continent when human slavery comes to a bloody end is only the conspicuous climax of a long series of judgment evils, which had been slowly blighting a land and barbarizing a people. The unconsciousness of those who were hugging the curse to their bosoms, and blindly glorying in its stupefying illusions, was deemed by those who watched the growth of the cancer as one of the very grimmest in all the train of judgment-consequences.

Judgment, then, is as eternal and as constantly operative as is law. It is, in fact, the operation of law, in blessing the obedient and bringing wrath upon the disobedient. From the beginning to the end of action under law, judgment follows every being through the universe of God wherever law extends.

Thinking in this way upon the subject of judgment, we shall avoid the mistakes that ensue upon our likening the divine judgment to a human court, which opens at a certain place and time, hears, tries, sentences, and, having gone through the docket, adjourns. The divine judgment never waits to open, and never stands adjourned, not even as a "last judgment," so