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In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear Saints of God, we believe that Jesus will come again in glory to judge both the quick and the dead. And we believe this because Jesus, together with his apostles and prophets, have promised it time and again in the Scriptures.
Now what do we make of it? What do we say about it? Or maybe better, how does that strike you? What do you think and feel when you reflect on this truth, that Jesus will come again to judge the living and the dead? There are, I’m afraid, a lot of wrong ways to consider this. That we doubt His coming, that we dread His coming, or rather, do we long for it? Is it the object of our hope? I just want to walk through some of these responses.
The first is doubt. I think the world would chiefly come after us in this way, that when we confess that Jesus will come to judge the quick and the dead, the scoffing world would say, “Yeah, right.” Since the beginning of the world until now, everything has gone the same. Nothing has changed. Why would it change now? Today is an awful lot like yesterday, and yesterday is an awful lot like the day before. Why would tomorrow be any different? This is the argument of the scoffers, and it creeps into us as well. Even you hear Bible teachers talk about it. They say, “Well, you know, the apostles thought that Jesus was going to come back any day.” And so we see that since it’s been almost 2,000 years, that probably it’s not going to happen.
But look, don’t let the scoffers fool you. They also believe in an end of the world. I mean, it might be through an environmental catastrophe, or it might be through the outbreak of a deadly disease that will end humanity, or it might be when at last the sun gives up the ghost and explodes, or we’re hit by a comet or something terrible like that. The scoffers also believe in an end, but they believe that this whole thing, that you and all of humanity and all of planet Earth and all of our history simply ends in a fire, that there’s no one to tell or hear the story.
Every worldview, every way of looking at the world believes that there will be an end, but we say the end is the goal. It’s not destruction, it’s consummation. It’s not everything falling apart, it’s everything just getting restored. St. Paul says it like this, that the creation was held in bondage, not willingly, but for him who submitted it to bondage in hope so that not only will you, but all of creation be restored by the Lord. And this is the hopefulness that we have of the end.
In fact, this whole conversation about the last times, and about the second coming of Jesus, and about the end of the world, and about the Judgment Day is really about hope. Hope, we… and let’s maybe just set it up here. I was going to bring it up later, but we might as well talk about it now. Hope is the story that we tell about the future. And everybody has a hope. Everybody has a story that they tell themselves about what’s going to happen later today, tomorrow, the rest of their lives. All of us are kind of writing and rewriting that story, but here’s the difference. Here is the… one of the most marvelous differences of our Christian faith is that we believe that this story never ends.
St. Paul says it like this, writing to the Galatians, he says about the Gentiles that they are without God in the world and without hope. And that means that even though they think they might have a tomorrow and a day after tomorrow, at some point it ends for them. At some point, the unbeliever thinks it’s all over. There’s a back page, and you’ll get to that last page, and there’s nothing more to read. But not for you, not for the Christian. Life is eternal life. You are immortal. You will pass through death to life, and life eternal. In fact, we confess that every person will be raised on the last day and live forever, either in bliss or in terror, but we have this hope that our life will go on, that we will stand before the Lord in all eternity, that Jesus will come back and He will make things right.
So we, with faith, look at the last day, but just because we confess the last day is coming doesn’t mean we think about it rightly. So here are a couple of other ways to get it wrong, and that is that I think we are tempted to dread the last day, or to maybe not long for the last day. I was at the conservatory, assisted living or senior living place this last week. We have a service there once a month, and I was talking to all the folks gathered at the conservatory, and I asked them, I said, “Do you remember when you were growing up and you would hear the talk in church about the second coming of Jesus, and you would think, well, no, I’m not ready for that quite yet because there’s a whole bunch of things that I still want to do. I want to graduate from high school, and I want to go to college, I want to get a job, and I want to move out, I want to get married, I want to have children and grandchildren, and I want to go to the beach in Mexico,” and all… you have a long list. And so, it’s like I’m excited for Jesus to come back, but I hope it’s a couple of years away so I can check off some of the things on my list.
And they all said, “We remember those days, Pastor.” And I said, “Do you think that now?” And they said, “No. We’re ready.” Now I do not think this is necessary, so it could be age that fixes this, but I want to address this biblically. I think this is pretty important. One of the problems is that we think that eternal life will have something missing that our life now has. Now in a way that’s true, because in life eternal there is no suffering. There is no sickness. There’s no tears. There’s no sorrow. There’s no grave. There’s no sin. There’s no death. There’s no devil. So there are things missing, but the things that are missing are everything that you want to be missing.
But life eternal is real life. It’s not imaginary life. In fact, it’s realer than our own real life now. I think sometimes we imagine eternal life and we say, “Well, I think I’m just going to get bored in eternal life, because it’s the same thing over and over.” This, dear saints, is simply impossible. The richness of the resurrection and the richness of life eternal is beyond our asking or even imagining, but we should at least know this. We should take the… we should know that our eternal life is a physical life. Remember Jesus to the disciples? “Could I have a piece of fish? Look, I’m not a ghost. I have flesh and blood.” Your eternal life is in your body, the same body that you’ve got right now, perfected, freed from every disease and sin, but that body glorified to stand before the presence of God. You will have that body in the resurrection. And so finally, this kind of agony of life on this earth of temptation, of weakness, of boredom, all will be gone. This should increase our longing for that day.
But still there’s some dread for the last day, and I think there’s maybe three reasons. Number one, the way the Bible describes it is pretty frightful. I mean, did you hear how Jesus described the last day in our Gospel reading? He said, “In those days after the tribulation, the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, the stars will be falling out of the heavens into the seas, the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” The last day is described by all accounts as a terrifying day. But this is why the Scriptures come to us over and over and tell us that we, on that day, while everything else is being shaken, we will not be shaken. This is the import of that beautiful psalm that so many of us know, Psalm 46, where it says, “Be still and know that I am God.” The context of that stillness is the last day, when the mountains are shaking and falling into the depths of the sea, and when the nations are rising against nations, and when the whole earth is melting.
On that day, when everything is falling apart, you will be held safe and still in the hands of God. Now you say, “Pastor, I don’t believe you.” I think when I see the mountains start to fall into the ocean, I’m going to at least be afraid. My knees are going to shake. I’m going to tremble. But this is the promise from the Scriptures that you who have the Holy Spirit are already equipped for that day. You will not be afraid. When that day comes by the Holy Spirit, you will stand up straight and you will lift up your head to heaven. Like Jesus says, “When you see these things happening, look up because your redemption is drawing near.” So you don’t have anything to be afraid of. Wars, rumors of wars, nation rising against nation, all this other stuff, all the things that are falling, and falling from the sky on the last day, you don’t have anything to be afraid of. The Lord has promised that He will keep you safe.
But here, OK, I can make it to that day, but then what comes next? This is what really frightens me. Because we know that what happens when the Lord comes back is that He comes to judge the living and the dead, the quick and the dead, those who are alive and those who have died already, and no one will escape His judgment. And I think this is frightful for us for two reasons. Number one, we fear the judgment of those we love that do not know Christ, that have not been baptized, or that have forsaken the gifts of baptism. We are afraid for their sake for the judgment day, and we are afraid for our sake of the judgment day.
Let’s take up our loved ones first. Jude mentions it in the Epistle lesson that the Lord is using His Word and His Spirit to snatch people from the fire, and Peter mentions it in 2 Peter, that this is the reason why the Lord has not come back yet. Those people that you love, that do not yet know Christ, Jesus also loves. Jesus also died for them. Jesus suffered for their sins in their place. And the Holy Spirit is working to call them by the Gospel and enlighten them with His gifts.
Peter says it like this, “Don’t mistake slowness, as some are in the habit of doing. God is not slow about fulfilling His promises, but long-suffering, not desiring that any should perish, but that all should come to everlasting life.” See? So the reason why we’re still waiting for Jesus is because Jesus is still waiting for those people that you are praying for. So be confident.
But what about our own judgment? What about the time when it comes for each one of us to stand before the glory of God and to face His judgment for what we’ve done in the body, whether good or evil? What about that day when the light will shine on all the things that have been done in darkness, when the thoughts are revealed of all people? We know, you know that you are a sinner, that you’ve broken God’s law, that you’ve failed to love, that you have served yourself, that you have lived a life of rebellion and anger and lost in greed and laziness and bitterness and discontent and godlessness. You know, and you know yourself too. You know that if there weren’t things holding you back, you would have been ten times worse. You know, I know that we are guilty, and for that reason, that day is frightful. Hebrews says it like this, “It is truly a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” But dear saints, this is why Jesus died. All of your sin was placed on Him, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
All of your guilt, all of your shame, all of your breaking of God’s law, all of the terrible things that you’ve done and that you’ve thought, and that you’ve said, all of the good and beautiful things that you have failed to do, all of the commandments that are broken, all of it was on Christ in His suffering and His death. And so the judgment against you has happened already. And Jesus says it like this, “It is finished.” He has taken your place before God’s wrath so that all of your sins are forgiven. And this is not just… look at every single one of them. The sin that you’re thinking about now, the sin that you’re going to remember later this afternoon and say, “Oh, well, what about that one?” That one too. Every single sin has been carried away by Jesus, so that there is no more anger from God. This is how Paul says it, talking about our life today and the judgment to come: “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” That means that there is no condemnation for you, so that the last day when you appear before God, there is nothing to be afraid of. “Well done, good and faithful servant” is what’s on the way. Can you imagine it? So we long for that day and we look for that day with hope.
Now this, and we’ll kind of wrap up here, but I’ve got a couple of things to say about it because this is what Jesus wants us to do when he tells us about four times in the Gospel lesson, to stay awake. I love preaching the stay awake sermon because that’s the one Sunday I can get on you guys.
But staying awake does not mean, this is not Jesus telling us to never go to sleep at night. That would be sort of crazy. What does Jesus mean by staying awake? Here’s the problem. To be ready for the last day is to know what we don’t know. My dad always used to tell me this when I was growing up. There’s things that we know we know, and there’s things that we don’t know we know, and there’s things that we know we don’t know, and there’s things we don’t know we don’t know.” And I told him, I didn’t know that.
Jesus… Jesus wants us to know that we don’t know when the last day is coming. He wants us to be aware of our ignorance. He says, “Nobody knows the day or the hour, not even the angels, not even the Son, only the Father.” In other words, Jesus wants you to know that you don’t know when He’s coming back, and knowing that is what it means to be awake. So that we’re ready to meet the Lord in the air, or we’re ready to serve our neighbor. We’re ready to live in heaven, and we’re ready to live on earth. We’re ready to face the judgment day, and we’re ready to face our family. You see? That’s what it means to be ready, to know that we don’t know.
It could be by the end of the day, or it could be by the end of the week, or it could be by the end of the millennium. We don’t know, and so we live in that readiness, in that hopefulness, and for that longing for that day. So I say to you, so I say to all, says Jesus, stay awake.
Stay awake in your prayers. Keep praying for those who do not know Christ, that the Lord would bring them to faith. Stay awake in your suffering; don’t let the devil attack your hope. Stay awake in your faith, trusting in the Lord’s promise. Stay awake in your worship, hearing the Lord’s words and rejoicing. And stay awake knowing this, that the one who is coming back is the one who came already for you to live and die for you. This is our confidence, and this is our hope. May God grant it for Christ’s sake. Amen.
And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
