Sermon quotes on judgment
Randy Alcorn
In the day that we stand before our Master and Maker, it will not matter how many people on earth knew our name, how many called us great, and how many considered us fools. It will not matter whether schools and hospitals were named after us, whether our estate was large or small, whether our funeral drew ten thousand or no one. It will not matter what the newspapers or history books said or didn’t say. What will matter is one thing and one thing only – what the Master thinks of us.
Secret Church, 2013.
Jonathan Edwards
How great an honor will it be to a person to have God at the day of judgment owning a person, declaring before all men, angels and devils that that person is before His all-seeing eyes and that he stands innocent and perfect in His sight, clothed with perfect righteousness and entitled to everlasting glory and blessedness. How honorable will this render them in the eyes of all that vast assembly that will be together at the day of judgment. That will be an infinitely greater honor than any man or any angel declaring that they judge him upright and sincere and that eternal life belongs to him. What can be a greater honor than this — to be owned by the great King and Lord of all things?
The Glory and Honor of God.
Franz Kafka (For Contrast)
Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name; in reality it is a constant court in perpetual session
C.S. Lewis
And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin.
The Great Divorce
Czeslaw Milosz
And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders are not going to be judged…[but] all religions recognize that our deeds are imperishable.
The Discreet Charm of Nihilism,” New York Review of Books, November 19, 1998.
Eugene H.. Peterson
Defilement is what sin does to us; damnation is what sin introduces as our eternal end. Except for God’s intervention. We have needs, and God addresses our needs. Even our sin, the most destructive reality of life—and the most foreign to God’s character—is met and overwhelmed by his coming to us.
Fleming Rutledge
Only the person who is completely safe can understand that judgment is good news.
“Why Did Jesus Choose The Cross?”
W.R. Smith
The ideas of right and wrong among the Hebrews are forensic ideas; that is, the Hebrew always thinks of the right and the wrong as if they were to be settled before a judge. Righteousness is to the Hebrew not so much a moral quality as a legal status. The word ‘righteous’ (sΩaddiîq) means simply ‘in the right’, and the word ‘wicked’ (ras¥a{) means ‘in the wrong’. ‘I have [Vol 6: Rom, p. 84] sinned this time’, says Pharaoh, ‘Jehovah is in the right (A.V. righteous), and I and my people are in the wrong (A.V. wicked)’, Exod. 9:27. Jehovah is always in the right, for He is not only sovereign but self-consistent. He is the fountain of righteousness … the consistent will of Jehovah is the law of Israel.
The Prophets of Israel (1882), pp. 71f.
Sophocles
And if my present deeds are foolish in thy sight, it may be that a foolish judge arraigns my folly.
The Tragedies
R.C. Sproul
The power of the gospel is the word of God . . . nobody needs a gospel if there’s no judgment, or law, if God is not a God of judgment. If there is no such thing as hell, what good is the gospel?
J. R. R. Tolkien
There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don’t know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done.
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2014, p.93.
Eugene Peterson
God’s arrows are judgments aimed at provoking repentance.
Taken from A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society by Eugene Peterson Copyright (c) 1980, 2000 by Eugene Peterson. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
John Calviin
If Christ had died only a bodily death, it would have been ineffectual. No — it was expedient at the same time for him to undergo the severity of God’s vengeance, to appease his wrath and satisfy his just judgment. For this reason, he must also grapple hand to hand with the armies of hell and the dread of everlasting death.
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