Eternal Judgements

In the New Testament letter of Jude, there is a warning to people in the church. Let's go to Jude, the book in the Bible right before Revelation, one of the shortest letters in all the scripture.

I'm going to read a couple verses here to lead up to the point that's being made. Jude wrote one of the most correcting letters in the entire New Testament. There's places where Paul gets very corrective, James and Peter do at times, but Jude is right up there with the most corrective statements to the church, both to the world and to the church. And verse 5 he says, but I want to remind you, though you once knew this, in other words, his writing to the church and saying, you've forgotten something. Your lifestyles are showing that you've forgotten something. That the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe. So the warning to the church is, don't make the same mistake that the ancient Israelites did. And then he even expands this out. And the angels who did not keep their proper domain that left their own abode, he is reserved for in everlasting chains under darkness, for the judgment of the great day. As Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities around them in a similar manner to these, have been given themselves over to sexual immorality and gone after strange flesh, have set forth as an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire. Now in Greek, the word vengeance there could just as easily be translated as punishment. So they received a punishment, a punishment from God, a punishment of eternal fire. So there are those who look at this and say, well, what that means is they were all sent to hell where they are suffering today. And yet there's a statement made by Jesus that makes us have to doubt this. Okay, what does this mean? So let's go to Matthew 11. Matthew 11. Verse 20, Jesus begins to rebuke the cities in which most of his mighty works have been done because they did not repent. So here Jesus goes into certain towns. There's all these great miracles, preaches all these great messages, and hardly anybody responds. Doesn't matter how many people he heals and these miracles that everybody knew was a miracle. I mean, much of the healings he did were public and there were people who had been sick for a long time, even raising people from the dead. And so he's going to those towns and he's saying, there's a problem here. Okay. He says, woe to you, Cherizen, woe to you, Bassidia, for if the mighty works which were done in you have been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But they say to you, it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment than you. Now that leads us to question, okay. Tyre and Sidon didn't exist. That ancient Tyre and Sidon didn't exist anymore. But he's saying, in the day of judgment, you will be judged as they will be judged, and it will be easier on them than it is for you. And then in verse 23, and you Capernaum, Capernaum, who are exalted to heaven, will be brought down to Hades. Hades is the Greek word.

It's the same word that's used, or not same word, but same meaning as the word that's used in Hebrew, which is sheol. So you have sheol in Hades. Now Hades had a lot of meanings in the Greek world. It was the place of the dead with a whole lot of definitions of what that was like. The Bible gives a very specific Christian definition to it. There's certain Greek words that end up with a Christian definition. Agape is one of them. If you study the Greek word agape, you'll find it had a lot of different uses. And in fact, some dictionaries will say when it comes to agape, Greek dictionaries, here is the regular use of the word, and here's the Christian use of the word. And it's the same way with Hades. Hades has a general sense, the place of the dead, which had all different myths and ideas about it. And then there's a Christian view of use of that word, and it's tied in to the Hebrew word. So this is important as we go through this. He says, brought you down to Hades. For if the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. But they say to you, this shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment than for you. Well, wait a minute. Didn't Sodom receive a judgment from God? Yes. Did he not kill everybody in Sodom except for Lot's family? Yes. Was it an everlasting fire? Yes. But they still haven't faced their final judgment. And that's what I want to talk about today. I mean, how can the people of Sodom receive this judgment from God, but it's not their final judgment? There still is a final judgment for them. And when we go through this subject, we have to be careful not to apply sort of a 21st century, postmodern, post-Christian view that people have of the Bible. That God would never punish somebody. That God never judges people, which makes much of what is said in the Bible untrue. Or God does punish people, and God does judge people. I've even heard people say, you know, I've read the Bible, and if that's the... I don't believe in any God that would do the things that God did, because my God is all about love. Well, God is love.

But also, God believes in justice, and he believes that evil cannot co-exist with good forever. It's not possible. And that's His will as the creator of goodness. So when we look at this, we have to look at what God says. Now, when we go through this, this is actually a lot of different doctrines put together. And of course, there's no time to go through all these different doctrines. But when we go through this, we're going to be looking at final judgments, what's called eternal judgments, mentioned in the New Testament. We're going to be looking at concepts of hell, concepts of the immortal soul. I mean, there's all these different issues, and we're going to be just taking some bits and pieces of these different doctrines and creating this. You know, usually what I do is I take a doctrine, and I go through that doctrine. But what we're doing here is taking some bits and pieces of doctrines that hopefully we all know, and now we can put that together to come to some conclusions. So I'll be cherry picking some scriptures to make some points, all from different doctrines to create this concept. What is the eternal judgments? Because even in the Protestant world, they question, even in the Catholic world, what are the eternal judgments? They have different explanations for what that means. So the first point, and you've heard me say this before, is we always have to be careful to understand the difference between temporary judgment in the Bible and eternal judgment. There are two different things. Temporary judgment happens to us all the time. Natural consequences. Our sins create natural consequences. They're judgments from God. If we do certain things, bad things happen to us. It's not God saying, oh, I'm judging you, I'm harming you, I'm punishing you. It's just when He says, this is evil, this is bad, what He means is if you do this, you will have bad consequences. So every time you and I do something wrong, we have bad consequences. That's just the natural result of what we do and our decisions, what we think. So if you cheat and you steal, you could lose your job. You could go to jail, commit adultery, you may lose your marriage. If you get drunk, you may end up being pulled over by a policeman, or you may end up wrecking your car into a tree. I mean, all these things are the natural results and these are all temporary. There is no eternal judgment in the event that's happening. It's the result of what's happening. But those sins still receive a judgment from God, a spiritual judgment. God carries out temporary judgments for sin also.

You and I at times will actually receive a punishment from God because of our sins, not because He wants to hurt us, but because He doesn't want us to destroy ourselves. We are so blinded to the natural consequences of what we do. I mean, there's many times people say, oh, if I would have only known this, I would have never made this mistake 10 years ago because of the consequences of it. Well, God knows the consequences.

So yes, God many times will punish us to keep us from the worst consequence. Stop this before you end up really destroying your life or really hurting your life. So yes, there's temporary judgments that God makes us on us all the time. Eventually, though, and this is a key to understanding salvation. So here's another doctrine that's involved in this. Eventually, all sin leads to death. You and I will suffer some kind of physical death.

All human beings suffer a physical death, except those who are alive when Jesus comes back and they're changed immediately. Except for that group, everybody else will—and even that's a death—but everybody else will suffer a death and then spend a time in the grave and be resurrected in the future. That is a direct result and that's a direct judgment because of our sins. You and I cannot live forever as a physical human being because we're sinners. And that goes back to, of course, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. He died for us because we may suffer this physical death, but if there is no forgiveness from God, the judgment of God is that every human being suffers eternal death unless the blood of Jesus Christ is applied to them.

This is hard today to get people to understand this, and it's amazing how many people reject Christianity—any form of Christianity—because of this concept. No. God loves everybody. God would never judge anybody to death. And the truth is, every one of us—every one of us before God—in fact, Paul said, every one of us before God is an enemy—we act as enemies to God. And the only way that we can receive this salvation is through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ—an acceptance of that. So that is a basis that we have to look at in these terms of eternal judgments. Because this isn't a matter of, well, okay, God calls good people, and He just sends bad people to the light of fire.

No. In the eyes of God, there are no truly righteous people, except the ones that He works with, and they accept Christ, and He then lives in them through His Spirit. That's the only way there can be righteousness. That doesn't mean other people don't do good things. There's lots of people who are good, but inside, their human nature is so corrupted. Oh, yes, they do good things, and they might be a nice person. But before God, they deserve death.

That just seems so cruel in the modern, you know, modern sensitivities, that what it does is it makes people reject God. Well, I know this person down the street, and they're a Hindu. They're the nicest person I ever met, and they take care of the poor, and they're caring, and they're giving, and no, they don't deserve death. In God's mind, we all do. You say, wow, that's a harsh God.

No, that's a perfect God. And of course, salvation is the perfect love of God that says, but I have a way to save you if you will just accept the salvation. Otherwise, you don't deserve eternal life. So that's a premise we start with here, that every human being in the eyes of God, even though he loves every human being, is worthy of death. And you know, sometimes we forget that except at the Passover. At the Passover, we come face to face with, wow, without this, I have no, I have no solution to my life. I have no solution to my problems, and I surely can't resurrect myself.

I can't make myself live forever. So at the Passover, we're brought back to that, but we need to remember that all the time. So when we talk about God's eternal judgments, it begins with God's judgment on humanity, which says all of you are deserving of death because it's not just you've committed some sins. You are internally sinners. It's who you are inside, inside ourselves. So with that premise, we have the judgments of God. So the question is, of course, and this is what most Christians believe, so when a person dies, they immediately go to heaven or hell.

Although the explanations of that in the Christian world are very different because, well, why is there a resurrection if you're already in heaven? Or like, one theologian, a very famous theologian, I read one time said, well, you know, it doesn't seem like the people in heaven are very happy because in Revelation, it says that they're under the altar, crying out to God. You know, they don't seem happy. Well, his decision was because they're waiting to come back to get their bodies, you know, because you get a body at the resurrection.

So everybody's a ghost up in heaven and they're unhappy to eat a ghost. You know, just an attempt to explain the inconsistencies. So what is the state of the dead? Both righteous and unrighteous. Okay. Because we have this time of judgment. Sodom was judged, but they still have to be judged.

What does that mean? Well, let's look at Acts chapter 2. So now we're into the moral soul, we're into receiving God's Spirit. We're a whole lot of different things here about salvation. But let's just look at one passage that can give us sort of an overview of this. This is a sermon being given by Peter. It's not long after the Holy Spirit has been poured out here on people and on Pentecost. And so he now, with all these people, have received God's Spirit. All the crowd has come up to watch what's happening because something special has happened. And he gives this sermon. And we're going to break into the middle of it here. Let's go to verse 22. So verse 22 of Acts chapter 2, men of Israel hear these words, Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs, which God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves also know. So the Holy Spirit has been poured out. They're watching this happen. And he gets up and says, this all has to do with Jesus, who all of you know, because everybody there had heard of him. Many people had actually listened to him. Others had seen all kinds of miracles he had done. It says in verse 23, him being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God, you have taken by lawless hands, have crucified and put to death. It's interesting. He just has to say the Romans did it. He said the Jewish people were involved in that because the Jewish leaders are the ones who turned him over. Not every Jew was involved in that, but as a nation, they were.

Whom God raised up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that he should be held by it. Now, there were lots of people there who had seen Jesus resurrected. There were lots of people were talking about it. So this is something that's going through the crowd. It's electrifying all the people in Judea. Did you know so and so said that they saw Jesus alive? He's been resurrected. So they're talking about this versus people scoffing at it. There's people excited about it. There's all these different things happening. What Peter now does is go to an Old Testament prophecy that could be applied to the Messiah to make his point. So, verse 25, for David says concerning him, so he quotes here from Psalm 16, I foresaw the Lord always before my face, for he is at my right hand that I may not be shaken. Therefore, my heart rejoiced and my tongue was glad, moreover my flesh also will rest in hope. For you shall not leave my soul in Hades. Now, Hades is the word that would have been used here because they were speaking Greek, but he's quoting from a passage in which she always used the Hebrew. Once again, showing that when you go through the Old and New Testaments, Hades is used in the same ways as Sheol, not in the Platonic sense, not in the sense of some of the religious beliefs of the Greeks or the Romans. It was always used in the sense of the Hebrew word. For you will not leave my soul in Hades, nor will you allow your Holy One to see corruption. You have made known to me the ways of life, and you will make me full of joy in your presence. So here he's talking about the Holy One of Israel, which is applicable to the Messiah, and how God was not going to let him stay in Hades or in the grave.

So how does Peter now use these verses to convince these people about who Jesus is? Men and brethren, verse 29, let me speak freely to you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his tomb is with us to this day.

This use of psalms makes no sense if David is in heaven.

He says the proof that this isn't about David, because David is still in Hades. He's still in the grave. He has not been removed from the grave. Because if he is in heaven, what he says next doesn't make sense. The proof that Jesus is the Messiah is that he's resurrected. The proof that David was giving a prophecy is that David hasn't been resurrected. Now we could we could spend hours up here going through, do we have an immortal soul? But in the context of what we're doing here, this makes the point very succinctly. He says, therefore, being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his body, according to the flesh, he would raise up the Christ that sit on his throne. This prophecy has to be about the Christ, not about David. He, for seeing this, spoke concerning the resurrection of the Christ, that his soul would be not left in Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. This Jesus, God, is raised up, of which we are all witnesses. Now how important is this argument? Peter's argument, the proof that Jesus is the Messiah, is that he's still not in Hades. But David is. So the psalm isn't about David. So, once again, I don't want to spend three hours up here going through the heaven and mortal soul, but this is very poignant in what he says. It's an important point, because Peter says this is the proof of who Jesus is. When we look at Sheol in the Old Testament, we find a place of the dead, and you'll see it described. They have no thoughts, the dead. They have no emotions. They have no relationships. There is nothingness. It's absolutely nothingness. It's interesting. One of the Greek concepts of Hades was that the people were actually there, and they were all very unhappy. Nobody was happy, even the righteous. Because that's where everybody went, unless you believed in the Elysian fields and stuff, some of the Roman ideas about heaven. But everybody went to Hades, and nobody was really happy there. And in fact, they would be there so long, they become so unhappy, they would become shadows. You just see a shadow moving along the wall, and that used to be a person. I mean, Hades was a meaningless place in Greek mythology. Here, tied in with the Hebrew Bible, it's very simple. You die, and you go there, and you are unconscious. The dead are unconscious. So they have received a judgment. It's not an eternal judgment. When we die, we've received a judgment. We will die. But that's not eternal judgment. It's a temporary judgment from God. This helps us understand what we've just read in Jude and in Matthew about Sodom and Gomorrah. Sodom and Gomorrah had a temporary judgment from God. He killed those people.

God can only put up with evil so long. That's one of the reasons Christ comes back when He does. The world is going to become so evil that God says, it's enough. They're now going to destroy themselves, and I will stop it. And there's time through history where God has stopped evil at a certain point. Usually He doesn't have to. It evil destroys itself, and a new form of evil comes along, right? That's just all history is, is evil with different forms of evil being formed. It all self-destructs. But He makes a point. It was with Noah's flood. There reached a point. He said, I will stop this. I will stop this. Or there will be nobody left to even save. And so He did.

And so now we understand that was a temporary judgment. The people of Sodom have not yet been given eternal judgment, but it will happen in the future. So Jesus Christ, there's proof here. Everybody's asleep. In fact, all through the Bible, Old and New Testament, death is called sleep, an unconscious state. And only Jesus has been resurrected from the dead, which was prophesied. That's why He came to go through death for us and to be resurrected. Let's go to 1 Timothy 6.

1 Timothy 6. This is one of those sort of proof verses we use, proof text to make a point.

1 Timothy 6 verse 12.

So this idea that God would never kill people is not true. Does that make God a monster? No, it makes us evil. We have to understand who we are without God, who humanity is without God. It doesn't erase the fact that He loves every human being. He wants the best for every human being. He has eternal expectations of every human being, but He won't make us fulfill those expectations. He won't make us become what He wants us to be. We have to willingly follow this. We have to willingly do it. In verse 12 here in 1 Timothy, Paul's summing up what he was telling Timothy about life and about being a minister. He says, Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold of eternal life to which you were also called, and have confessed the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. Grab hold of eternal life. He didn't say, you know, and there's nothing. The immortal soul, that phrase is not used in the Bible at all, any place. I urge you in the sight of God who gives life to all things. Now before Christ Jesus, who witnessed the good confession before Pontius Pilate, that you keep this commandment without spot, blameless, and to our Lord Jesus Christ appearing. So he says, God, who gives life to all things, and of course God sent Jesus Christ. So the next, this verse 15 is picking up in the structure of this sentence, which is very long. That's why there's lots of commas in English, okay? There's no punctuation in the Greek here. It's just a long sentence. He says, Which he, speaking of God, will manifest in his own time, he who is the blessed and only potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see, to whom be honor and everlasting power. Amen. Now there's other places to talk about Jesus Christ having eternal life as the Son of God. So the point he's making here, God and Christ, that's the only eternal life that's out there.

Human beings aren't born with eternal life. We're not born within a mortal soul. And so Jesus came and said, God has given me the power to make the final judgments. Let's go to John. And this is another thing people say, well, the God of the Old Testament is, that's just a mean, that's not truly God. If you study the life of Jesus, you know what love really is. And you know that the Old Testament is a totally misunderstanding of God. I read that all the time in theological writings, modern theological writings, not the old ones. And it's always this, well, Jesus showed us that no, God never did kill people in the Old Testament. Of course, we have in the New Testament, God kills Ananias and Sapphira. Well, of course, that's not true either, you see. You can only Jesus, and that's why there are certain theologians now say, you either are a follower of Jesus or a follower of Paul, and you have to choose which one you're really following.

Follower of Jesus doesn't believe in all this judgment in these things. John 5, 24. Most assuredly, Jesus says, I say to you, he who hears my word and believes in him who has sent me has everlasting life and shall not come to judgment, but has passed from death into life. He says those who are now truly living life with him following him, and we would know through the course of the New Testament, Christ actually lives in us through the Holy Spirit. So he says, those who come to me repent before the Father, and Jesus says, I bring them to the Father, I present them to the Father, and you receive His Spirit. He said, then you have, you can have immortality. You can have everlasting life. Most assuredly, I say to you, the hour is coming and now is when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. Well, they're already alive, right? They're in heaven. No. The point is they will live because He returns, and when He speaks, they will come out of the ground. Life will come back into His followers, and there will be a resurrection. This is what we call the first resurrection that's explained in 1 Corinthians 15 and explained in Revelation 20. This is for those who have been called throughout the time of Satan's rule on earth, and we are receiving, by the way, judgment now. If we have God fulfill that judgment in us, He changes us, He works with us, He makes us His children, what will happen is we will be resurrected at the first resurrection. That's our hope. That's our promise. That's the promise given to us, that we will be there at the first resurrection if we let God fulfill His work in us.

He says, verse 26, for as the Father is life in Himself, He also has granted the Son to have life in Himself. This is very important. He says, God is transferred. He's given me something here that He wants everybody to understand. And He has given Him authority to execute judgment also because He is the Son of man. All final judgments on human beings will be made by Jesus Christ. Now, He also says, I hear the Father, what the Father says I do. But the important thing is here, because He died for humanity, every human being's eternal judgment will be made by Jesus Christ, and that person will be before Jesus Christ because of the price He paid.

He's only been carrying out what the Father wants. That's the way the two of them have worked together for eternity. But the important thing here is He's the one who says it. So, to say, well, Jesus would never judge anybody, Jesus says the exact opposite.

He said, because what I'm going through, because I'm the only hope you have for salvation, because justice, if justice is served, you all die. He said, so everyone will come before Him. And God says, it's like God saying, no, you don't come before me. You come before Him, because He's the one who died for you. Do not marvel at this, verse 28, for the hours coming which all who are in the graves will hear His voice. Now we know when this happens. Once again, we're back to that resurrection and comes forth those who have done good to the resurrection of life and those who have done evil to the resurrection of condemnation. Oh, okay, there's two resurrections. We have to sort through what that means. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul clearly shows that the resurrection that he's talking about here happens when Christ returns and the dead in Christ rise. 1 Corinthians 15 says, and we don't have physical bodies anymore. We have bodies, but they're spirit bodies, and we rise and meet Him in the air, and we receive immortality. Immortality becomes who we are. You know, Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 gives the most detailed explanation of that first resurrection in the entire scripture. And he just gives these remarkable details that are fascinating because he's talking or he's writing to a Greek world, and the Greek world did not believe in resurrection of the dead. You died, you went to Hades, and that's where you were. The rest of eternity, you're down there, right? Once again, unless you were certain different, there were different religious groups within the Roman world and the Greek world, in which, yes, some people got to go to special places. But, you know, most people just went to Hades. And so he's coming along and saying, no, no, no, you're missing the point here. You're dead, and you're resurrected. Hades is just where your body goes. You have no consciousness.

And God brings you back to life. He resurrects you.

And that 1 Corinthians 15 in Corinth would have been the most shocking thing they'd ever heard. It wouldn't have been in the Jewish world, but in that Greek world, they would have just been shocked by that. That's why even when he spoke to the Areopagus in Athens, he talks about the resurrection of Jesus. And some of the philosophers said that he's not. Others said, no, he's got a point. I'd like to listen to him again, because it all comes down to what happens to you after you die. And the Christian message was a whole lot more happier than the average Greek message.

So that's why Paul says he looked forward to this. Let's go to 2 Timothy 4. I know I'm running through a lot of proof text here, but I'm assuming that you all know what fills in between these. 2 Timothy 4. I've just been thinking about basic doctrines and how we need to go back and revisit some of the basic, those principled, principled doctrines that we believe. And eternal judgments is one of them. In fact, in Hebrews 6, it's listed as the six foundational doctrines of the church.

So this is a foundational doctrine. It is a motivational doctrine. It is a hope for us. 2 Timothy 4 verse 6. Paul realized he was getting older. He had spent his whole life, well, half his life. He spent half his life trying to be a good Jew, and the other half just trying to follow Christ. And he's wearing out. I mean, you think about all the traveling he did, and he didn't, you know, it's not like, oh, he had to fly, you know, he didn't get to fly first class. No, he went on ships across the Mediterranean that sunk by donkey. He walked, maybe a wagon once in a while. He was beat up, robbed, you know, put in jail. I mean, he just worn out here. And he says, for I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure is at hand. He said, I am not going to live a whole lot longer here. I'm wearing out. For I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith. And finally, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give to me on that day, and not only me only, but also to all who has loved his appearing. Now notice the focal point. I'm going to receive this crown of righteousness. I'm going to receive eternity. When? When the judge comes on that day, and he's resurrected at his appearing. See, it's so easy to see what the New Testament writers believed. He didn't say, and when I die, and the next moment, I'm before Jesus in heaven. That's no concept here.

He's looking forward to that final judgment. And he was looking at his life at this point and said, death is what human beings suffer because we have been born in Satan's world. He's not saying, I don't deserve to die.

He knows God has saved him from death. And though he was going to go through a physical death, he would go to Hades, and he would wake up. That's one thing about death, just talking to people so many times that were dying, and talk with my own dad. And seeing this calmness, and these words that are always something like this, I'm going to go to sleep, and the next moment, as far as my experience, I wake up. In fact, my dad told me, I think I've told you this before, hey, I'm getting the good end of this deal. You're the one that's stuck in this mess. And we both just laughed. Here he is dying, and we're just laughing. I said, thanks, dad. I feel so encouraged now. And we're just laughing and laughing. And I knew exactly what he meant. Like Paul, he had reached the point, I understand physical death is going to happen to me, because that's what it is to live in Satan's world. But I've been saved from it. And I will face my judgment, which will be the resurrection. You know, all judgment isn't negative. You know, when we think of judgment as all, you're going to be punished. God's judgment on Paul is, he let me work at him. I changed him. When he's resurrected, he'll be a brand new person. And he won't carry it in his sin anymore. He won't carry into eternity the problems of being human. He'll carry into eternity what it is to be a child of God in the literal sense. And that's the judgment on Paul. I'm going to skip some things here. Let's go to, so what about the other judgment? Okay. The positive judgment, the negative judgment. Let's go to Revelation 20. And once again, to really go through this in detail, we'd have to look at all the places to talk about the lake of fire. Verses 1 through 6 talks about Christ's return and what is called the first resurrection. Well, if there's a first resurrection, there has to be a second resurrection. So the first resurrection is the resurrections of the saints. It is what Paul was talking about in 1 Corinthians 15 and other places where he talks about that, where Jesus talks about it. You know, this is the hope of the Christian. This is the purpose of life, to follow God now, to take the gifts He gives us, the blessings He gives us, to live in the messed up world that we live in so that we become His children. And at that point, we're literally His children. We'll be changed, we'll be born into a new life in which we won't have all these problems. We won't have the physical problems. We won't have the sin problems.

Even though we may be sometimes having temporary judgments from God, and then you might be saying, no, no, no, you messed up. Yeah, you're going to pay a price for this. How cruel! As a parent, you do that. Sorry, kid, I can't save you from this one. Right? You didn't do your homework. You failed the test. No, I'm not going to go to the teacher and say, give him another chance.

Whatever, you know, judgment the teacher gives you, I'll help you make it work, but it's not going to be fun, right? I'll help you, but I'm not going to save you from that consequence. We all have to do that as parents. That's what God does with us. And sometimes God says, yeah, there's a punishment involved here. Temporary judgment. Temporary judgment because he's looking at this bigger picture and saying, I got to get you here, or at this judgment, you get to meet me.

We get to go see God as he is. We get to go see Jesus Christ. We get to go there. We get to interact with God, the greatness of God, and we will bow before him and realize, wow, my understanding of God was so small. You and I, our understanding of God is just real tiny. It's just really small, and we won't get that until we're changed. And then it'll be, oh boy, this is so much more, so greater than I could even imagine. It's one of the reasons God's so patient with us. Yeah, you can't even, in fact, it even says that you can't even imagine what God has prepared for those who love him. Well, we can't even make it up. And I have a good imagination.

I can't even make it up. That's what God wants for us. That's what God is doing. But there's this second resurrection, what we call the great white throne judgment. And by the way, everything we're covering today is going to be covered in one way or another at the Feast of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, the Feast of Tabernacles, and the last great day. That's one reason I wanted to give this. I want you all to start thinking about that. Because this is all what those holy days show to us about what God wants us to do now and about the future. They're all prophetic. There's a prophetic meaning in all those holy days. That we're supposed to be part of those prophecies. Yes, God says, I want you there when Christ comes back to be changed. I want you to be part of that prophecy. So we have the great white throne judgment, verse 11. I saw a great white throne, and him who sat on it, from whose face the earth and heavens flood away, and there was no found no place for them. And I saw the dead, smaller great standing before God, and the books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were adjudged according to their works by the things were written in the books. And the sea gave up its dead, and those who were in it. And death in Hades delivered up the dead who were in them. And they were judged, each one according to his works. Now, the whole last great day, or the eighth day, is a discussion of what that actually means. And there's a lot of scriptures we put together to show that there are scriptures that doesn't seem to imply that this is just moments. I mean, how can it be more tolerable for Sodom in the lake of fire than it is tolerable for the people of Capernaum? And yet that's what Jesus told them. If they're all going into the lake of fire at the same time, as their final judgment, the statement doesn't make sense. Unless there is a requirement for eternal judgment. And the requirement for the eternal judgment is to be able to know and given a choice to repent. Everyone gets a choice to repent. And much of humanity has never had that choice.

But you know what is scary? And God knows these judgments. We don't. But when people say, oh yeah, I know, I know God's called me, and you know, I really want to live this way of life. But to tell you the truth, I think it'd be good. I'd just like to go out in the world and experience everything and live that way, and then He'll just bring me up in the second resurrection.

That's a very dangerous thought. A very dangerous thought. And once again, I can't judge those things. He does. But when you think about the second resurrection is so that every human being can get their chance. It's not like, oh, I'll give you a second chance. Oh no, yeah, you denied me three times. I'll give you three chances. I'll give you a hundred chances. Now God gives us lots of chances in that we sin. That's not what I mean. I mean to absolutely reject Him and say, no, I'm gonna do what I want, and I'll come up in the second resurrection. That's a scary thought.

Because God has called us now. It's because He wants us now. He wants us now. He wants you now.

And actually it says it's a greater blessing to be in the first resurrection. It's a greater blessing to be in the first resurrection. And so we have this time period in which there must be a choice made. How long is that time period? We speculate on it. I'm not going to speculate on it, but it has to be a point where people understand. So if you lived your whole life in Mongolia in a thousand BC, you've never heard of Christ or God or the Bible or anything else, and you're resurrected from the dead, you have to be given an opportunity to understand and choose. To understand and choose. Do you realize this is probably the only doctrine we have that there isn't some Protestant church that doesn't believe. I mean, anything we come up with. I mean, there's Protestants that believe in the Trinity. There's Protestants that believe in the Sabbath. There's you know, there's all different things. But this one is very rare. Very rare. There's very few. Very rare. There's very few. The idea that everybody isn't receiving eternal judgment today. Eternal judgment happens in the future. And we take Ezekiel, which you'll get on the last great day, in which there are people, and he specifically talked about Israel there, but they're resurrected, and now they have a chance as physical human beings to repent to receive God's Holy Spirit. It's there. It says that. Well, if that's happening to them, it's happening to everybody.

So this is very unique in viewpoint, but it doesn't equal eternal salvation. We'll talk about that in a minute too as we wrap it up here, because eternal salvation is not what the Bible teaches. Because here in verse 15 it says, And anyone not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire. There are human beings with free will who are to become so incorrigibly wicked that God is going to snuff out their lives. They don't go to hell where they're tortured forever.

They are resurrected, and they are destroyed in the lake of fire. Let's go to Matthew 10.

Matthew 10 verse 28. So now we'd have a whole other doctrine we'd have to go through about hell and the lake of fire.

You know, Malachi says that when the Messiah comes in Malachi chapter 4, that the the wicked will be just ashes under the feet of the righteous. We do know, if we went back to Revelation, that the whole face of the earth is destroyed with fire. Every human being that ever lived that will not submit to Christ and to the Father is burned up. That is the final eternal judgment. The people of Sodom will be brought up in the second resurrection, and they will face Christ, and there will be some choice made. I don't know what their choices will be. I don't know. Some of them choose Christ. Some of them go to the lake of fire. I don't know. Because there's people who go into the lake of fire. Well, there'll be people today who are resurrected and say, oh yeah, I heard that, but you know, I'm sorry. No, no, no, no, no, no. This is cruel. You know, this is not right. And they refuse Christ. Well, they go in the lake of fire. Yes.

I hate to think of anybody making those choices, but the Bible clearly says they will.

Now, you and I can't say anybody's going to the lake of fire now because we don't know what's inside their heads and hearts, and we don't know what's going to be inside their heads and hearts in the resurrection, right? How do you judge people that haven't been judged by God yet? See, we can, I can judge Adolf Hitler as one of the most evil men that ever lived, and he should have died, and he did. That judgment is in here, and I support, that's a godly judgment.

It's inconceivable in my little brain that he could ever repent. But you know what? God says, just don't worry about that. I will worry about him. What if he does? What if he does?

He said, my little brain says, nah, that can't happen.

And I keep thinking of God, I think there's times when the angels are looking at something and saying, this can't work out, and God just says, watch this. But God will not take away anybody's free will, and there will be people cast into the lake of fire.

Jesus says this in Matthew 10 in verse 28. He uses the word gehenna. Gehenna is used very little outside of the right of the Gospels. Jesus used the word gehenna. James uses it once. And the reason why is gehenna would have had no meaning outside of Judea.

Hades would have been, okay, Hades is where the dead go. Well, Paul says that when they go there, they don't know anything. They don't know. Oh, well, that's a little different explanation. Okay, but they understand it. Gehenna was a place, and it was a garbage dump outside of Jerusalem that burned all the time. It was stinky. It had maggots in it. I mean, the descriptions of it's terrible. It's a giant garbage dump. And Jesus used this over and over again as, this is where God sends the wicked in the final judgment. He sends them into a garbage dump. Once again, that would have made no sense in Athens or Corinth or Ephesus. It wouldn't have made any sense.

But it sure did to the people he was talking to. So that's why he says in verse 28, do not fear those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul, the very life force of who you are. Soul is a very interesting word, psyche in Greek. It's very interesting in Hebrew, too. It means the life that's in you. In human beings, it can mean our intelligence, too. But animals have souls. They have life in them. God gave them life, and God can take that life away. So your very life, the very force, the very energy that makes you who you are, that makes you alive, do not fear those who kill the body, but cannot kill the life. But rather fear him, is able to destroy both soul and body in the garbage dump.

Fear the one who can not only destroy your body, but everything you are disappears in the garbage dump, the lake of fire.

Yes, God is going. There is an eternal judgment on some people. I hope I know nobody that ends up there, right?

You hope, and then you think of the people who have committed heinous crimes and terrible things. You think, well, what do they deserve? They deserve eternal death. If God hadn't come into my life, what do I deserve? According to Christ, eternal death. Now that doesn't say all evil is equal, by the way. It's not. It's not equal. The results, though, of corrupt and human nature is we deserve death. That's what it says. That's what it means. God has come into our lives to save us. God's going to let every human being have that chance. Every human being gets that chance. And those who choose will be changed into his children. And those who don't will go to an eternal judgment in the like of fire. When the entire face of the earth is destroyed, just destroyed, and God reconstructs heaven and earth. He creates something all brand new, brand new. We think this world's amazing. You know, his answer is, just wait. Just look at what I can do. This one's been messed up by Satan and the rest of you. You know, but I can change all that. You won't believe what I'm going to do.

And he wants to make it for us. Now, the one last point I want to make is, but isn't there universal salvation? Everybody gets saved. No. The reality is there's human beings who will not. They will not submit to God.

2 Peter 3. We'll just finish with this. 2 Peter 3.

And let's start in verse 7. 3 But the heavens and the earth, which are now preserved by the same word, are reserved for fire until the day of judgment and perdition of the ungodly men.

4 But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is a thousand years, and a thousand years is one day. 5 The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some cannot count slackness, but is long suffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. So, verse 9 is used to say, everybody comes to repentance.

But that's not what it's saying. He's long suffering, not willing. It's not His desire. It's not His desire. But notice what He said in verse 7. But the heavens and earth, which are now preserved by the same word, the word of God, are reserved for fire until the day of judgment and perdition, or punishment, of ungodly men. If you read the context, it's saying the exact opposite. The world we know is held together by God, and it will be destroyed and renewed when? When the fire of the day of judgment and the punishment of ungodly men. So, the point being made is, there comes a time when the earth is destroyed and all vestiges of sin will go with it. Human being, ungodly people will die, and the whole earth will be renewed, and God's going to create a new heaven and a new earth. And, we'll talk about this on the last great day, New Jerusalem comes down, and God comes here to live among His children.

And there is no longer anybody that is rebellious, sins against God, filled with all the human problems we have. And I know it's easy for us to say, I'll never make it. Without God's help, we won't.

This is God's plan, is that you and I, who have been influenced by Satan, do make it. In fact, He wants all people to make it to where He wants them to be as His children. That's His desire. He just won't make us go there. He just won't make us go there.

It's hard for me to accept that the majority of humanity is not going to be there, but not all will. So, we're back to Jude, where he said, remember this. Remember what God's doing in your life. Remember why He's called you. Remember where He's going to take you. Remember the prophecies. And remember when God comes to earth, because He wants you to be there. That is the eternal judgment He wants for you. And this is one of the most basic of all the, all the doctrines that we need to understand in the Bible.