Basic HTML Version
709
it is present. So far as God is the author of it, it is as constant and perpetual as his action in
human life. To postpone the judgment to a future public hour is to misconceive of justice, as if
it were dormant or suspended, wholly bound up with outward conditions. On the contrary the
sphere of justice must be sought not first without but within, in the inner life, in the world of
consciousness.”[Realities of Christian Theology, pp. 362 f.] Dispensationalists believe whole-
heartedly in the future judgment, but speak of judgments in the plural. According to them there
will be one judgment at the parousia, another at the revelation of Christ, and still another at the
end of the world.
B. THE NATURE OF THE FINAL JUDGMENT.
The final judgment of which the Bible speaks may not be regarded as a spiritual, invisible and
endless process, which is identical with God’s providence in history. This is not equivalent to a
denial of the fact that there is a providential judgment of God in the vicissitudes of individuals
and nations, though it may not always be recognized as such. The Bible clearly teaches us that
God even in the present life visits evil with punishment and rewards the good with blessings,
and these punishments and rewards are in some cases positive, but in other instances appear
as the natural providential results of the evil committed or of the good done, Deut. 9:5; Ps.
9:16; 37:28; 59:13; Prov. 11:5; 14:11; Isa. 32:16,17; Lam. 5:7. The human conscience also
testifies to this fact. But it is also manifest from Scripture that the judgments of God in the
present are not final. The evil sometimes continues without due punishment, and the good is
not always rewarded with the promised blessings in this life. The wicked in the days of Malachi
were emboldened to cry out, “Where is the God of judgment?” Mal. 2:17. The complaint was
heard in those days: “It is vain to serve God; and what profit is it that we have kept His charge,
and that we have walked mournfully before Jehovah of Hosts? And now we call the proud
happy; yea, they that work wickedness are built up; yea, they tempt God and escape,” Mal.
3:14,15. Job and his friends were wrestling with the problem of the sufferings of the righteous,
and so was Asaph in the 73rd Psalm. The Bible teaches us to look forward to a final judgment as
the decisive answer of God to all such questions, as the solution of all such problems, and as
the removal of all the apparent discrepancies of the present, Matt. 25:31-46; John 5:27-29; Acts
25:24; Rom. 2:5-11; Heb. 9:27; 10:27; II Pet. 3:7; Rev. 20:11-15. These passages do not refer to a
process, but to a very definite event at the end of time. It is represented as accompanied by
other historical events, such as the coming of Jesus Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and the
renewal of heaven and earth.
C. ERRONEOUS VIEWS RESPECTING THE JUDGMENT.
1. THE JUDGMENT PURELY METAPHORICAL.
According to Schleiermacher and many other
German scholars the Biblical descriptions of the last judgment are to be understood as