Yep, this is a long one. But I hope you will read it in stages, if not all in one sitting, and seriously consider the Biblical evidence undergirding my argument.
Thanks for your patience. I pray that my readers will be challenged and edified, to use an old fashioned word. And share this with your church leaders, if need be.
Now, let’s think about Cheap Grace, Judgment, and the Glory of God.
This past Tuesday provided an opportunity for me to reflect on the all-too-common tendency within the American church for teachers to avoid any mention of divine judgment with the same determination exhibited by a maniacal, bug-eyed cat as it panics at the sight of a soapy bathtub.
Yet, for anyone who pays attention to Scripture, it should be clear that acknowledging the looming inevitability of God’s condemnation of the sin in our lives – yes, a final judgment for every follower of Jesus Christ as well as for the rest of humanity – is the only way forward for anyone hoping to grasp the magnitude and meaning of Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross.
If there is no threat of judgment, then why must Jesus die? That is the heart of the issue.
Without a straightforward explanation of why God judges universal human rebellion, a rebelliousness which everyone must own up to eventually, whether in this life or the next, it is impossible to understand the blood-curdling “injustice” of the Father’s holy judgment executed against an innocent, sinless Galilean at Calvary.
Far too many church-goers are suckled at the teats of cheap grace, even as they speak admiringly of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s heroism and pass around lightly worn, rarely read copies of his masterwork, The Cost of Discipleship. But the fact is, a cheap misappropriation of God’s grace – if God’s grace is ever truly appropriated at all – is the only brand of faith available when its significance is divorced from the holiness of God and the imperative of judgment.
The reason for the Western church’s love affair with cheap grace is simple.
The Impostor of Therapeutic Religion
American Christianity has become a mercilessly cheerful, feel-good brand of therapeutic religion. The average church service is meticulously orchestrated and stage managed as a place where no one should ever be made to feel uncomfortable, for any reason at all. The projection of a unilateral, universal standard of approval – not of appropriate acceptance, mind you, but of blanket approval – is a therapeutic demand of the many professional pastor/therapists teaching from our pulpits.
Philip Rieff explained America’s new religious reality years ago in his prescient book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud. Exploring the rising dominance of psychotherapy in Western society, Rieff observes the West’s thorough-going rejection of such ancient religious values as self-denial, sacrificial obedience, acts of penance, and the confession of true guilt born of personal sin. As a result:
“Western man [sic] could be free at last from an authority [i.e., the historic Christian church and the biblical gospel of Christ] depending upon (the individual’s) sense of sin. Even now, sin is all but incomprehensible to [Western society] inasmuch as the moral demand system [that is, Western culture] no longer generates powerful inclinations toward obedience or faith, nor feelings of guilt when those inclinations are over-ridden by others for which sin is the ancient name” (209-210).
Tragically, in a vain attempt to maintain its “relevance” and attract new members, the Christian church drinks deeply from the same therapeutic fountains and then goes skinny dipping with the same therapeutic sharks that are drugging and devouring the rest of Western society. Rather than behave as the gatekeepers they are called to be, too many church leaders make themselves indistinguishable from the practical atheists (whether religious or not) who trace their therapeutic, or “pastoral,” credentials back to Freud.
As I observe the consistently glib presentation of the Lord’s Supper in our Protestant churches – and no, I am not referring to an absence of “liturgy,” however one defines it, but to the remarkably unserious way in which the sacrament is typically wedged into a tight service schedule and then presented in a manner that barely touches upon the terrible redemptive drama of sin, judgment, and grace found at its heart – I am reminded of Rieff’s summary of another churchman’s defense of therapeutic Christianity:
“Any religious exercise is justified only by being something men do for themselves, that is, for the enrichment of their own experience…What then should churchmen do? Become, avowedly, therapists, administrating a therapeutic institution – under the justificatory mandate that Jesus himself was the first therapeutic” (215).
Rieff concludes, “Both East and West are now committed, culturally as well as economically, to the gospel of self-fulfillment.”
Before leaving this issue, I recently attended a communion service in a mid-western Reformed church. As the pastor offered the two elements to his congregants, no mention was made of the broken body or the shed blood of Jesus. Instead, the bread and the wine were described as the beneficial products, the fruit, of God’s good creation, given to us by the Creator to sustain our lives.
I seriously considered walking out rather than listen to such pretentious, blasphemous, therapeutic drivel.
Naturally, many will object to being tarred with the therapeutic brush. But I will return to the opening of this article and submit as exhibit A in my defense of Rieff’s argument the simple fact that precious few congregations are ever made to confront these two essential, Biblical truths: 1) that divine judgment lies at the heart of the New Testament gospel (for without divine judgment there is no gospel), and 2) that the ultimate purpose for every believer’s redemption is not the forgiveness of his or her sins but the magnification of God’s glory.
In other words, the New Testament gospel of Jesus Christ is, in fact, the most anti-Western, anti-cultural, anti-therapeutic (in the contemporary sense of the word) message in the world. And it always has been.
No, Christians Are Not Delivered from Divine Judgment
First, every Christian must rid him/herself of the pervasive misconception that faith in Jesus’ sacrificial work on the cross will deliver us from eventual judgement. It won’t.
Jesus himself warns the disciples, and anyone else listening, that public shame and embarrassment, that is, future judgment, awaits us all when God eventually reveals our secret, hidden acts of wickedness for all to see and to hear:
For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open. Therefore, consider carefully how you listen. Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what they think they have will be taken from them. (Luke 8:17-18)
Consider carefully, indeed. I don’t know how else to read Jesus’ words except to understand that all of my sin, beginning with my many secret sins, will be publicly exposed on Judgment Day. Everyone will know the full measure of my guilt.
No sinful act, malicious thought, or evil intention will remain hidden when God’s righteous eternity finally swallows up our fallen temporality. For our holy God intends one day to lay it all bare for public viewing. And He has an important reason for doing this, which I will explore below.
The apostle Paul also anticipates “the day when God will judge men’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares” (Romans 2:16). Notice that the assurance of future judgment is an integral feature of Paul’s gospel! (For example, see Acts 17:30-31; 28:25-27; Rom 2:1-12). Paul also repeats Jesus’ warning about supposedly “secret” sins never remaining secret before God. Furthermore, the context of Paul’s statement offers no room for distinctions between believers vs. unbelievers. No. The Father’s impending judgment will apply to everyone, equally. No exceptions. And anyone who imagines they are explaining the gospel of Christ while failing to explain the inevitable judgment of God is not sharing Paul’s gospel. Period. Full stop.
Paul also compares that Day of Judgment to a house fire that will burn through everyone’s home, revealing the truth about everyone’s life. Every secret is revealed:
…their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work. If what has been built survives, the builder will receive a reward. If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames. (1 Corinthians 3:13-15)
I will have more to say about this passage before I conclude.
And finally, we have 2 Corinthians 5:10:
For we must ALL appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good OR BAD.
The Books Will Be Opened
A common theme in ancient Jewish literature depicts the Last Judgment as the final balancing of God’s heavenly account books. “The books” are opened. God has been keeping an exhaustive record, throughout all of human history, preserving a heavenly balance sheet of every righteous and unrighteous act or thought performed or harbored by every human being who has ever lived.
No one is exempt.
Recall the New Testament’s lengthiest description of Judgment Day in the book of Revelation 20:11-15:
Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what they had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.
We must honestly confront the words in this text.
Each and every person, without exception, will be judged by God according to “what they had done.” Of course, everyone’s account will fall short. When judged according to “what we have done,” no one’s life proves satisfactory or acceptable to the Holy One.
This reckoning with the heavenly books proves once and for all that everyone falls short of God’s righteous expectations. No one is righteous, no not one. Everyone deserves eternal punishment in the lake of fire, including those who have cast their lot with the crucified, resurrected Savior, Jesus Christ.
Even the faithful who receive some measure of reward for their episodic obedience to Jesus – remember Paul’s words about the rewards for obedience surviving the fire of judgment in 1 Corinthians 3:13-15 – still deserve to be separated from God. For no human accomplishments, not even the most righteous acts of the saintliest of saints, can outweigh the overwhelming, immoral landslide of selfish, wicked decisions made by fallen people. And that includes you and me.
But there is a ray of hope.
For there is another book on display – the Book of Life. The pages of this book are not filled with lists of human actions but only with lists of names. And these names are written not with ink but with the shed blood of the crucified, resurrected Lamb of God.
This contrast between the multiple books issuing unremitting, universal judgment vs. the one book securing eternal redemption for everyone whose name is written in the blood of the Lamb is an extraordinarily powerful image. We must interpret this image clearly. Observe that even the redeemed, whose names are inscribed by Christ’s own steady, nail-pierced hand into the Lamb’s book of life, have been judged as deserving eternal damnation by the biographies of wickedness recorded in the previously opened books of works.
But the appearance of the Book of Life explains the difference between judgment and condemnation, for while everyone is judged to be a failure, not everyone is condemned to eternal punishment.
It does not matter how many rewards a Christian eventually receives from the Father. A towering mountain of glittering rewards would never be meritorious enough to rescue a guilty sinner, however saintly, from the lake of fire. No one will ever stand before Christ and say, “I deserve to be here with you because of the many good things I did in your name. Look here, don’t these rewards – from you, by the way! – prove it?” But, then, that is surely one of the damnable thoughts already judged when the multiple books of works were first opened!
I suspect that this very thought is harbored by many of us church-goers because we are all sinners and this is the way sinners think, even if only intermittently. After all, isn’t it a modern, therapeutic mandate to believe in ourselves, to love ourselves, to pump ourselves up by imagining that we can achieve anything when we put our mind to it? Isn’t self-actualization the result of forgiveness?
Insights Brought Only by God’s Judgment
Our heavenly Father, however, appears to be fully intent upon using His Day of Final Judgment to drive home the divine perspective on Christ’s crucifixion, and to make it apparent before the angels, demons, and all humanity.
I cannot point to any one Biblical text that draws together these various streams of theology and puts them all together coherently. But I do believe that my following conclusions are the necessary results of various lines of teaching scattered throughout the Old and New Testaments:
This heavenly moment of moral unmasking and divine accounting will, for the very first time, open the eyes of all humanity to see the Truth of Christ’s sacrifice as the Father had always intended.
For the first time, I will see, feel, and own for myself the full weight, ugliness, destructive power, and wretched blasphemy of the parasitic, destructive thing called SIN as it infects God’s creation and my personal life
For the first time, I will thoroughly understand how horribly deserving I am of God’s condemnation and unending punishment for my sinfulness. I will finally see how deeply offensive, even repulsive, my wickedness has always been to the Holy One enthroned in heaven.
I will finally understand the magnitude of God’s unending grace and mercy as He patiently withheld his judgment from me throughout a frequently rebellious lifetime that so richly deserved His daily condemnation. I will finally begin to appreciate the magnitude of God’s love, care, and patience.
I will finally know something of the full measure of guilt, shame, and condemnation that Christ took onto his own shoulders as he hung from that cross at Calvary. I will begin to see the horror that must have erupted within Jesus’ own being as the perfect, sinless Son of God not only experienced the penalty of his Father’s judgment on human sin but also appropriated the guilt and shame of wicked, human rebellion as his very own, causing the Father to turned his back on His one and only Son.
I will finally understand how and why the crucified, resurrected Jesus is the only mediator between myself and the Father, and how absolutely naïve, ignorant, rebellious, and repugnant is every alternative proposal for a “meaningful religious experience.”
I will finally grasp the incomparable sacrifice made by our heavenly Father when He devised this plan to execute his perfect, eternal Son in order to expiate, to propitiate, the raging, rebellious, blasphemies emanating from the noxious disobedience of every sinner who has ever lived.
The long-suffering patience, care, concern, mercy, devotion, commitment, fidelity, love, and grace of God the Father will finally become apparent to all, blinding the legions of fallen humanity with the brilliance God’s true glory. And all of humanity, including me, will finally give this Savior God the full measure of praise, adoration, and glory that He has always deserved, but never received…until now.
Even condemned unbelievers will glorify God for his righteousness and the fairness of his judgments as they are taken away into the lake of fire. And the demons in hell will welcome them as they all praise the goodness and justice of God together.
God Saves Us to Glorify Himself
Now we are finally at a place where we can appreciate the second biblical truth I promised above as a prerequisite for uprooting the Western malaise of popular, therapeutic religion.
The ultimate purpose of the Father’s gift of salvation in Christ is not the forgiveness of our sins but God’s glorification of Himself. Human redemption is first and foremost about the majesty of the Redeemer, not the good fortune of the redeemed.
Yes, guilty sinners find cleansing and reconciliation through God’s gift of grace available in Jesus. The forgiveness of sin is obviously an important priority in the plan of salvation. But ultimately even this gracious benefit of salvation finally works to recruit us into the army of saved sinners who will spend eternity exalting the glory of their Savior God.
The Old Testament, specifically the book of Exodus, begins this important theme as Israel’s Holy, Redeemer God, Yahweh, rescues His chosen people from their Egyptian slavery. Even as Yahweh promises to rescue Israel, He warns that He will harden Pharaoh’s heart, ensuring that Pharaoh will fight against Israel’s release. In other words, God deliberately creates obstacles to obstruct the accomplishment of His own redemptive plan!
Why would God do such a thing?
The answer: In order to make room for God’s glorification of Himself.
Pharaoh’s hardheartedness gives Yahweh the opportunity to perform His ten mighty acts, beginning with the Nile River turning to blood and finishing with the deaths of the first born on Passover night. Yahweh explains Himself by saying: I will harden Pharaoh’s heart…so that I gain glory for myself over Pharaoh and all his army; and the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD (Exod. 14:4); I will gain glory through Pharaoh (Exod. 14:17); The Egyptians will know that I am the LORD when I gain glory through Pharaoh (Exod. 14:18).
Yes, God dearly wants to rescue his suffering people. But beyond that, redemption’s ultimate goal is the fulfilment of God’s holy desire to “gain glory for Himself.”
No prophet explores this theme more thoroughly than Ezekiel.
Ezekiel proclaimed God’s message to the scattered people of southern Israel, known as Judah, explaining to them why they had been destroyed by the Babylonians and why God was going to restore their fortunes by returning them to their homeland. God’s explanations are not what we would expect:
I had concern for my holy name (says the LORD), which the people of Israel profaned among the nations where they had gone. Therefore, say to the Israelites, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: It is not for your sake, people of Israel, that I am going to do these things, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations where you have gone. I will show the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, the name you have profaned among them. Then the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Sovereign Lord, when I am proved holy through you before their eyes. (Ezek. 36:21-23)
Similar explanations recur throughout the book. I urge you to read the prophet Ezekiel and look for them sometime.
God punished Judah for its rebellion and sent the people into Babylonian exile in order to protect the “holiness of His name.” Now, God says that He will soon rescue Judah from their captivity, but their coming deliverance is not something He is doing for them as much as it is something that God is doing for Himself.
“I am not saving you for your sake, people of Israel, but for the sake of my holy name,” says the LORD.
In other words, our Savior God keeps his promises, first and foremost, so everyone can know that God always keeps his promises. And, oh yes, by the way, we get the added benefit of knowing that we can trust in God’s faithfulness as a result, BUT that is a secondary benefit of God’s faithfulness. The primary benefit is God’s final exaltation, his glorification by all of creation as The Supreme, Holy Promise Keeper.
Personal Salvation is Intended to Glorify God
Ezekiel’s theological evaluation of Israel’s deliverance from Babylonian exile is no less true for the gift of God’s one and only Son and the final revelation of God’s holiness and justice at the Final Judgment. Our heavenly Father sacrificed his one and only Son, Jesus Christ, in order to glorify himself as the one and only merciful, gracious, redeemer God who willingly suffered on behalf of his people.
The fact that all those who have faith in Jesus will receive the forgiveness of their sins is gravy, folks. Pure, gracious gravy dripping over the edges of God’s spacious banqueting table. But the main meal is God’s exaltation.
We are not the centerpiece of God’s story. God is. And ALL of God’s works, but especially Jesus’ suffering on the cross, eventually point back to the Father and find their fulfilment in him as they glorify HIM.
But, of course, none of this is particularly therapeutic.
In fact, many find it deeply offensive. Doesn’t this perspective paint God as the supreme ego-maniac, a heavenly narcissist sitting on his preposterously ostentatious throne demanding that everyone kiss his ring? What type of God stages history in such a way as to make everything point back to him as some kind of heavenly hotshot?
Alternatively, we have the people, including Christians, who make jokes about how boring heaven will be if we are expected to sing never-ending praises to God for all eternity. How mind-numbingly inconceivable that would be!
In fact, such unimaginative, banal, and ultimately ego-centric protests – for they really are protests against God’s nature, not questions in search of clarification – reveal several things:
that we have no concept of what it means for God to be God;
that we have no concept of what it means for God to be Holy;
that we have no concept of what it means for us to be guilty sinners;
that we have no concept of what it meant for Jesus to suffer and die as our substitute on the cross;
that we have no concept of what it means to be a sinner saved by God’s gift of grace.
For only on the day of Final Judgment will all these pressing, existential, spiritual concerns be made clear. And only then will we all sing with full-throated adoration that it is only right, and true, and just, that the ultimate goal of our salvation has never been the forgiveness of our sins, but has always been the magnification of the glory, honor, worship, and praise of the eternal, holy Savior God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who devoted themselves to the redemption, not only of humanity, but of the entire creation.
In that moment, we will praise God for issuing his judgment over our fallen lives because it was only through his revelation of judgment that the scales fell from our eyes, allowing us to see the Truth of who we are in the presence of the Holy One.
Only then will we be equipped enthusiastically to join with the angels in singing:
“‘Holy, holy, holy
is the Lord God Almighty,’
who was, and is, and is to come.”
“You are worthy, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
and by your will they were created
and have their being.”
“Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain,
to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength
and honor and glory and praise!”
“To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb
be praise and honor and glory and power,
for ever and ever!”
