Day of Judgment, Day of Joy

This past week CNN reported that Conservative Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson told citizens of a Pennsylvania town that they had rejected God by voting their school board out of office for supporting "intelligent design" and warned them Thursday not to be surprised if disaster struck.
A few quotes from the article, entitled, “Robertson warns Pennsylvania voters of God's wrath,” seemed appropriate to the message today.
“Robertson, a former Republican presidential candidate and founder of the influential Christian Broadcasting Network and Christian Coalition, has made similar apocalyptic warnings and provocative statements before.
Last summer, he hit the headlines by calling for the assassination of leftist Venezuelan Present Hugo Chavez, one of President George W. Bush's most vocal international critics.
"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city," Robertson said on his daily television show broadcast from Virginia, "The 700 Club."
"And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there," he said.
. . . In 1998, Robertson warned the city of Orlando, Florida that it risked hurricanes, earthquakes and terrorist bombs after it allowed homosexual organizations to put up rainbow flags in support of sexual diversity.”
Now, regardless of any of our personal opinions regarding Pat Robertson, school boards, or elections, these quotes prove quite interesting. Simply put, what Pat Robertson is doing is declaring that a day of judgment is awaiting the sinner. Now of course I understand that Pat isn’t offering a prediction for the end of the world, but it’s the comparisons between Pat Robertson’s predictions of judgment and the centuries upon centuries of end-times predictions that I find interesting. Pat Robertson has a habit of predicting that God’s judgment will come down upon sinners. And in similar fashion, people have been saying for years that the end of the world is near. People have been saying for years that God’s judgment is coming . . . and yet has it?
For instance, in 1988 NASA scientist Edgar Whisenaut published a book 88 Reasons why the Rapture will Occur in 1988. The book sold over 4 million copies . . . but I don’t recall the end of the world coming that year.
How about another? The Watchtower Society—that the Jehovah’s Witnesses—has predicted the coming of Jesus Christ no less than eight times. According to various calculations, the Watchtower predicted that Christ would return in 1914, 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975 and 1994. It seems as though they were wrong, too.
Remember all the hoopla surrounding Y2K? Well, at the turn of the first millennium—which I guess we’d call Y1K—many Christians were predicting that Judgment Day would occur. When it didn’t, a man named Gerard of Poehlde decided in 1147 that the millennium had actually started in 306 CE during Constantine's reign, and so Judgment Day was actually scheduled for 1306 A.D.
Now, with all these bad predictions, you might get the impression that Christ’s coming, that Judgment Day, isn’t going to happen at all, and there are people who would agree with you on that. But that’s not a new issue; St. Peter warned the believers of his day in his second letter, saying in 2 Peter 3:3-4 “First of all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. 4 They will say, ‘Where is this 'coming' he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.’” You see, even in the first century there were people looking at the idea of Christ’s return, of Judgment Day, and cracking jokes about it.
But is there a Day of Judgment? A day when Christ will return to the Earth in His full power and glory and judge the deeds of men and women? The Bible says so. We see a little hint of it in today’s Old Testament reading, when Jeremiah says that the Lord’s judgment will be like a lion roaring from above, that the noise will be heard around the globe, and “the LORD will bring charges against the nations; he will bring judgment on all mankind and put the wicked to the sword.”
What will happen on that day? What will that day be like for the people of the world? Imagine—for a minute—that you are an unbeliever. That day—the Day of the Lord—will bring your worst fear to life. The fear that you have spent all your life denying the existence of God, of denying that Jesus Christ is both Lord and God; that fear will be realized. As the Lord Jesus Christ descends with a shout, leading a great army of angels, and seats Himself on His eternal throne . . . there will be no more time to receive His grace, no more time for faith. The very One you had spent your life denying and rejecting now sits before you in all His radiant glory . . . and your eternity will be sealed.
That day will bring judgment to the world. The Bible describes the coming judgment as something to be feared. In Matthew 24:30 Jesus says that His coming will cause all the nations of the earth to mourn. Jeremiah describes how the storm of the Lord will burst out in wrath, it will be a whirlwind swirling down on the heads of the wicked, and that the Lord’s anger will not be held back until He accomplishes His judgment.
On the Day of Judgment all who have spent their earthly lives in rejection of God and His Son will be given the very thing that they had been asking for: eternal condemnation. Revelation 21:8 says, “But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars-- their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”
In the coming judgment there is only one price to pay for sin: death. There is only word that God will utter: guilty. No favor is given for good intentions, nothing for attending church, nothing for being a good person. There will be no escape. There will be no repentance. There will be no mercy. There will only be God’s wrath . . . His eternal, unrelenting, righteous and mighty wrath; the wrath that an unbelieving world has invited upon itself . . . and there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
What should our attitude be towards the Day of Judgment? Shall we sit tight, smugly confident in knowing that those sinners are going to get what they deserve? That Day . . . that Day will be terrible for those who do not know Christ. Who are those people? Your loved ones? Your neighbor? The waitress at the diner? The checker at the grocery store? You?
Our attitude towards judgment day should be like that of the prophet Jeremiah, who said in Jeremiah 8:21 - 9:1, “21 Since my people are crushed, I am crushed; I mourn, and horror grips me. 22 Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is there no healing for the wound of my people? 9:1Oh, that my head were a spring of water and my eyes a fountain of tears! I would weep day and night for the slain of my people.”
Listen up, people of God. You have a job to do. Let me put this simply: if you would keep your loved ones from the terrors of the end of the world, you must tell them about Judgment Day. But don’t frighten them with stories of the judgment that is to come: tell them what the Scriptures say of the judgment that has already been. Tell them of the first judgment day, the one that occurred nearly 2000 years ago . . . tell them of the cross.
There is a day coming when God will bring charges against the nations and judge the sin of the world; that is true. But there also has already been a day when that has happened . . . but on that day only One person would pay the price for sin. That person was Christ, and He was judged not for His sin, but for ours.

Answer this for me: Had Jesus Christ ever done anything worthy of judgment? __________ No, He hadn’t. He had no sin, He had no reason to fear God’s wrath. Yet Isaiah speaks of Christ, saying in Isaiah 53:9-10, “He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the LORD's will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the LORD makes his life a guilt offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand.”
In the past judgment there was only one price to pay for sin: the death of Christ. There was only one word that God needed to utter: guilty. There was no escape from the cross, Christ received no mercy. Christ literally endured Hell on the cross, He suffered the full brunt of God’s wrath.
You understand, then, what that means? If Christ has already suffered God’s judgment on our behalf, there is no need to fear the coming judgment! Do you understand what a great gift that is? God Himself has created for us an escape hatch, a way out, He has made it possible to escape the wrath that is to come, because He has already poured out His wrath on Jesus Christ. And if you know it and believe it, and if you tell your loved ones and they know it and believe it, then none of you will have anything to fear from Judgment Day. You see, there is only one way to escape your coming judgment, and that is to embrace your judgment that Christ has already endured.
The Day of Judgment will be both great and terrible. Those who have refused Christ will receive God’s righteous anger for their sin, and they will be eternally condemned. It will be the first day in a living death of eternal torment. But for those who have received Christ, for those who have believed upon Jesus Christ and received the gift of eternal life . . . that final day won’t be terrible and condemning, but great and liberating. The Day of Judgment will be a Day of Joy.
There will be joy . . . and oh, what joy it will be! As believers in Jesus Christ we have been adopted as children of God, and even on this earth we enjoy the privilege of being called His own. But on that day, as believers we will receive our full inheritance.
Peter, consumed and overflowing with joy, puts words to the joy he has in his heart, saying in 1 Peter 1:3-5, “3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade-- kept in heaven for you, 5 who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.”
On that day we will leave behind forever all of the limitations that this world imposes upon us. The Apostle John testifies in Revelation 21:4 that God will wipe every tear from our eyes. “There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away,” and the new order will have come.
There are two options for that final Day; Judgment or Joy. Both hinge upon what we do with Jesus Christ.