Truth
4 Ways Final Judgment Can Influence Our Lives Now
“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left.”
Those aren’t Augustine’s words. Or Luther’s. Or Wesley’s. Spurgeon’s or Piper’s.
Those are the words of our Lord Jesus Christ. Words found in our sacred Scriptures.
That means that the doctrine of the Final Judgment is a doctrine we should teach and learn.
But not simply for head knowledge. Rather, we are looking for heart transformation. In this life.
The doctrine of the Final Judgment can do that. In fact, it can influence our lives in four specific ways. Here they are:
1. Satisfies Our Craving for Justice
We live in a world where justice is half-baked at best. Dictators murder millions. Babies are punched to death. And even if these criminals do go to court, it’s hard to fathom what actual justice looks like. We still feel a deep sense of loss over these tragedies.
However, the doctrine of the final judgment gives us a sense that because God is supreme and sovereign and keeps accurate records of all deeds and renders fair judgment, his universe is ultimately just and every crime–no matter it’s atrociousness–will be vindicated and our sense of justice pacified.
2. Enables Us to Forgive Others
I don’t care who you are–you will be wronged to some degree in this life. And it won’t just happen once. But repeatedly. And quite possibly by the same person. And you may be able to brush off those small insults, but at some point you will be wronged to such an intensity that you find it difficult to forgive. Bitterness will build. Hatred will creep in. And revenge crouches–ready to strike.
What the doctrine of the last judgment does is allow you to see that those who hurt you will ultimately be sentenced and punished–and that eternal punishment [hell] should break our hearts for that person so that in the end we follow Jesus’ example who said “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
3. Offers an Incentive to Live a Godly Life
On the one hand, a view of final judgment [where our eternal destinies are decided] motivates us to remain faithful, obedient and godly. It leads us to “store up treasures in heaven.” This is the comfort that an awareness of the final judgment brings to believers.
On the other hand, the doctrine provides some moral restraint for non-believers. When we live in a culture that acknowledges a sense of God as creator and Judge, a fear of God pervades–even for the unbeliever. But when that fear of God is absent, we give ourselves up to greater and greater evil. The doctrine of final judgment is thus a warning to unbelievers to flee sin and submit to God.
4. Provides a Great Motive to Evangelize
When we understand that our decisions in this life will determine our eternal destiny, we are eager to echo Ezekiel’s appeal to the house of Israel and tell the lost, “Turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel?” [Read some of my best advice for sharing your faith.]
Listen: This is a tough doctrine to articulate [and even personally absorb] because the prevailing culture–inside and outside of the church–is pretty much humanistic: We only care about what occurs in this world.
Yet as Christians, this is where we put our trust in the historical figure Jesus Christ–who lived, died and rose again–and the words that he preached and look for how to apply his sermons so we can live better in this life–AND the next.
With that in mind, what other ways does the doctrine of the Final Judgment influence our lives in the here and now? Can you think of any? Did I miss anything? What would you add? I look forward to your thoughts.
Truth [A Quick and Dirty Guide]
What is truth? And does anybody have a lock on it?
The preacher? The scientist? The scholar? The engineer? The psychologist? The shaman?
Furthermore, can you trust them?
Not easy questions to answer.
There are so many competing claims and different approaches.
Can we REALLY know the truth? I think we can. And to help me answer that question, a while back I asked my friend Rob Powell to help.
He agreed and knocked out three posts on truth: Absolutism, Pluralism and Scientism. [See below.]
I then pulled together seven more posts dealing with the question “what is truth?”
Perhaps you’ve seen them before. If so, skim through each for a little refresher course on truth.
If you haven’t seen these posts before, walk through them slowly and then let me know what you think.
In the end, we might disagree. My hope is that I at least get you to think. And I promise to do the same for you. Enjoy the list!
Absolutism [What You Need to Know--and Why] Is truth absolute? Or is it relative and merely based on personal preferences? There has to be a right answer, right? There is.
Pluralism [What You Need to Know--and Why] On the surface pluralism seems like a reasonable explanation for the diversity of faiths we see. Look below the surface and it’s not.
Scientism [When You Shouldn't Trust a Scientist] Science is awesome. It provides us with great party tricks and is the most predictable way to study the world. But what is it? And can it ever go wrong?
The Blind Men and a Queer Animal In an ancient parable, dozens of hermits and scholars are making conflicting claims about reality. Who was right? D. None of the above.
How to Deal with Religious Conflict What beliefs create peaceful behavior and deal with the discord of religion? Here’s the answer.
Is the Gospel What the World Desperately Needs? Only Christian salvation can lead to a humble, enemy-embracing love that the world desperately needs. Sound counter intuitive? Let me explain why it’s not.
The Blissfully Plastic Moral Base of Humanism What does the meaningless, value-absent creed of humanism have to offer? It might surprise you.
Hard Questions: How to Make Sense of the World Answer these seven questions and you’ll discover what’s at the bottom of all your thoughts about God, yourself and the world.
What Camus and Frankl Can Teach You about the Meaning of Life Is it possible to find meaning in life without God? Albert Camus and Victor Frankl think so.
Is Jesus the Only Way to God? [Guest post at Sorting Beans] Great question. It’s one I’ve often struggled with and felt very awkward at times defending. Here’s what I’ve found.
How to Answer “That’s Just Your Interpretation”
“There are no facts–just interpretations.” Friedrich Nietzsche
A bit of eccentric logic.
Especially since Nietzsche is presenting it as a fact…
The very thing he himself admits doesn’t exist.
What are we to do with that?
More importantly, what are we to do when people say, “Well, that’s just your interpretation?” when we present them with moral or biblical truths?
Let me show you an easy way to answer that challenge.
Two Problems with “Interpretation”
In the most basic sense, to deny objectivity is to assume something is objectively true.
In other words, the statement “That’s just your interpretation” defeats itself.
But let’s just accept the argument that morals or biblical truths are a matter of personal preference.
If that’s the case, then only two things can come out of such a stance:
1. Why believe ANYTHING if it’s just perspective? [We can never prove anything since "interpretation" becomes a circular argument.]
2. Or nothing makes sense if a person asserts everything is a matter of perspective–except theirs. [Leads to contradiction.]
As you can see, you’re not left with much of anything to cling to. And if you hold that position your world and worldview will eventually cave in on itself as absolutes make themselves unbelievably real to you.
Because in the end, whether we are talking about politics, history, theology, relationships, biology or literature–absolutes do exist.
Some Beliefs DO Come Closer to Truth
Now, we may never quite get things right.
And no doubt it’s difficult to get down to the nitty gritty–especially when we’re talking about morals or emotions or theology.
But that doesn’t mean it’s an impossible task. Or objective truth doesn’t exist. In fact, as we’ll see in a minute, some sources come closer to the truth than others.
Take the Wall Street Journal for instance.
For the most part everyone will agree that you can trust it. The National Enquirer, on the other hand, is something most people disregard as hyperbole, exaggeration and bald-faced lies.
No normal person would quote the National Enquirer to prove their point. Quite a different story with the Wall Street Journal.
And the same is true for religious truths.
“Interpretation” Is Usually a Smokescreen
Now, it’s NOT intolerant or bigoted to suggest otherwise. It’s fair game to say, okay, here’s where you are wrong–and here’s why.
In truth, appealing to “interpretation” is often a smokescreen for pursuing one’s own agenda.
Or autonomy.
Fortunately, there’s an easy way to see through this smokescreen. Paul Copan suggests you ask these questions:
1. Do you mean that you just don’t like my interpretation…or that you have good reasons for disagreeing with it?
2. Can a perspective ever be correct?
3. And are some things not a matter of perspective [like chess or abortion]?
Listen: The very fact that we can recognize that some perspectives are better than others indicates that not everything is a matter of interpretation.
After all, if everything is just a matter of interpretation, how can we tell the difference between plausible and silly ideas?
Truth is, we can’t. Give me your thoughts. Brutal and all.
Pluralism [What You Need to Know--and Why]
**Guest post by Rob Powell. Part of a series on truth.**
In continuing our discussion about truth and absolutism let’s move to how that idea intersects with the wide diversity of faiths represented in our world, specifically in the concept called “pluralism.”
We’ve all heard the allegory of the blind men feeling different parts of an elephant.
Each man describes a completely different animal based on what part they are feeling.
The moral of the story is that each is relating just a small but true part of a larger truth.
This parable is a feel good way to reconcile the differences between the thousands of different religions in society.
In fact, somebody should make a song out of it so they can add a verse to It’s a Small World.
Pluralism: The Good and the Bad
On the surface pluralism seems like a reasonable explanation for the diversity of faiths we see.
Nobody gets their feelings hurt by being told they are wrong and everybody gets to do what they think is true.
A little deeper inspection though shows that just like relativism this view falls apart under it’s own weight.
To allow all these discordant faiths to agree the pluralist has to do a few things, but first let’s take a look where faiths disagree.
Do All Religions [Basically] Agree? Eh, No.
To make that less than a 2 year doctoral thesis we’ll limit our discussion to the most populous religions.
Not that numbers equals truth but even the most PC pluralist isn’t going to say that the Heaven’s Gate Cult or the Branch Davidians has a truth claim equally as valid as Buddhism or Islam.
Bottom line: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism all have a diagnosis for what is wrong with humanity and a cure to fix it.
It’s past the scope of this article to delve into all the differences but they are not insignificant. Here are a few:
The number of gods. Some religions believe there is no God while others believe in only one and still others embracing many.
The problem of sin. All religions describe a very different program to curing sin.
The body and mortality. Each religion seeks to explain the purpose behind our bodies and solve the riddle of death.
In all these examples, the cures range from faith in Christ, to an esoteric experience where we see we are immaterial self aware beings with all knowledge or to realizing that all we are is fleeting conscious states.
The pattern here is clear.
There are a diversity of perceived spiritual problems–and a myriad of just as diverse solutions.
What We Must Avoid
To try and boil all this down and just say that people are broken and need a cure would be as silly as saying a person has “sick” and needs “better”.
If your appendix has ruptured you will not find a doctor that recommends in vitro fertilization.
Each specific diagnosis needs a specific remedy.
Maybe the pluralist believes that God will save those not of a certain tradition based on how they responded to what knowledge they had accessible to them. For example, the Christian God might save Buddhists because they were sincere in their belief.
Unfortunately this is not what ANY of these individual faiths teach. Also, past just the general diagnosis, religions disagree on what makes up a human.
What the Pluralist Must Do to Make Religions “Agree”
Do we have an enduring soul or are we merely a collection of momentary states? Either people come in two (or more) distinct flavors or you have to believe these both of these self contradicting things to be true at the same time.
So how does the pluralist make all of this work for them?
For example, there is no mechanism in the Christian worldview where the Buddhist’s sin problem is resolved outside of faith in Christ. Nor is there is no mechanism in the Buddhist tradition whereby the Christian becomes enlightened.
So the pluralist must create their own system whereby the two are compatible and neither can hold the other as incorrect.
This involves either treating all religious exclusive claims as either being non-literal (mythical) or having limited importance.
This would include any claims to miracle which would seem to add credence to one faith over another. What really matters to the pluralist is harmony, love, justice and unity.
In other words, how you live your faith (orthopraxy) is more important than what how your faith says you should live (orthodoxy).
The Pluralist’s Sleight of Hand
But did you see what just happened there? The pluralist in attempting to negate all the exclusive claims of different religions created an exclusive claim of their own.
The pluralist denies the Muslim a chance to define his or her own religion with exclusive claims but is completely free to do so themselves.
Pluralism fails pluralistically. Which brings us back to the elephant.
A pluralist takes each person describing their religious truth and enlightenment and says “Yes but what you don’t know is that you are blind and only see in part.”
That’s perfectly laughable because the implication is that the pluralist can see just fine and in whole–and you can’t.
In the end, he’s more than happy to make a claim to exceptional knowledge that he won’t let any single faith make own their own.
The Pluralist Is Just as Blind
As you can see, pluralism isn’t an overarching view that combines all faiths in one big bubble bath of goodness. It’s just one more view claiming special enlightenment and truth–which isn’t very pluralistic, don’t you think?
So when someone says “What matters is that it makes sense to me and enables me to grow spiritually,” it’s easy to see the benefit to this claim even taken at face value and not applying it to itself.
It allows everyone to do what they want how they want to do it.
But if there is no objective truth to be found outside of one’s belief then you can never be wrong in what you believe.
In essence you’ve created a Stepford God that is made in your own image–he’s a robotic butler who will never contradict you but always please you.
Unfortunately this approach destroys the distinction between the terms “truth” and “belief” and implies that something is true because “I believe it.”
Where Pluralism Threatens the Christian Church
So where does pluralism affect the Christ follower and it’s church. Here’s a quote from JP Moreland’s book Love Your God with All Your Mind that I think says it well.
[Such] a church . . . will become . . . impotent to stand against the powerful forces of secularism that threaten to bury Christian ideas under a veneer of soulless pluralism and misguided scientism. In such a context, the church will be tempted to measure her success largely in terms of numbers—numbers achieved by cultural accommodation to empty selves. In this way, . . . the church will become her own grave digger; her means of short-term “success” will turn out to be the very thing that marginalizes her in the long run.
The call is clear to preach the obnoxious and offensive gospel to a world and church that most of the time doesn’t want to hear it.
Absolutism [What You Need to Know--and Why]
**Guest post by Rob Powell. Part of a series on truth.**
True or False: Sean Connery was the best James Bond ever?
Of course the answer is true…
And as long as I keep this statement limited to my experience and preference it remains valid.
But, as soon as I try to put my preferences into a broader context and say “Sean Connery was THE best James Bond ever” I’m no longer stating my subjective preferences but claiming an objective truth and people will disagree with me (even though the rest of them couldn’t tote Connery’s martini glass).
Absolutism’s Enemy
It would be foolish of me to say that my personal tastes and preferences are true for everyone but somehow this idea has morphed into the consensus that everything is relative and we can’t really know anything as objectively true.
Blame it on the Enlightenment and modernism, political correctness, or El Nino but in some circles if you try to say that something is objectively or absolutely true you will hear “Well that may be true for you but it’s certainly not true for me,” regardless of the subject.
Does that mean that all knowledge is slave to personal bias and our own cultural baggage?
Is anything objectively true regardless of whether someone observes it and interprets it or not?
Relativism would have us think that the answer is an emphatic “no.”
Where Relativism Doesn’t Work
But do any of us actually live like that? Do people drive in a way that suits their biases and cultural milieu…or do they follow the rules of the road?
When figuring out how much Tylenol your toddler needs for a fever are you going to follow the dogmatic and restrictive instructions put on the bottle by “The Man” or will you play it like Ol’ Blue Eyes and say you did it your way?
What if engineers put structural supports where they “feel good” instead of where they will support the weight of the building?
Bottom line: Relativism really hasn’t made headway into areas where wrong beliefs have immediate consequences.
So where do we see it most prevalently? We see it in areas where there is a layer of ambiguity between the belief and its out-workings.
Absolutism Versus Relativism
Couple that with not wanting to offend other people [or have other people telling us what to do] and we get an “I’m okay, you’re okay” sentimental load of horse puckey.
But relativism doesn’t stop there. If you make a claim to objective truth today you can be labeled a bigot, close minded or intolerant.
Absolutism has come to be seen as close minded fundamentalism.
But in reality Absolutism is merely having a belief. It’s picking a team instead of rooting for the referees so you’re not disappointed when your team loses.
In the strictest sense absolutism isn’t that any one particular viewpoint is correct. Absolutism just says that there is an objective truth that matches what really is.
But if there is absolute truth why is it okay for my wife to say the car is too cold while I’m cracking the window because I think it’s too hot?
Because subjectively we are interpreting the temperature as hot or cold.
Objectively the car is 71 F . It would be incorrect for one of us to say it’s 71 F and the other say it’s 95 F.
Both of us can’t be right.
How Absolutism Defeats Relativism
Believe it or not, but within absolutism you can be tolerant of other beliefs. Yet tolerance used to mean we could agree to disagree–not that every idea was legitimately true.
The easy defeater to Relativism’s claim that all truth is culturally biased and only true for the believer is to simply say this:
“Then your belief that truth is culturally biased and only true for the believer is also culturally biased and only true for you?”
Relativism has no ground to stand on to say how truth is to be handled and interpreted on a scale grander than n=1.
I guess I can see the appeal of relativism. It takes the onus off the believer of having to provide evidence for their beliefs. It just has to feel right or pass whatever smell test they want to put on it. Or not.
You know, whatever.
We’ll get to how this plays itself out in greater detail with regards to the pluralist and the atheist another day but what does believing in an absolute truth mean when it comes to the professing Christian?
It means that Jesus’ exclusionary claims as the Messiah are not bigoted and intolerant. They are either true or they are not.
It means Jesus was either the Son of God or He wasn’t–but He can’t be both at the same time.
Once we know there is truth to be found we can study the evidence and come to a conclusion one way or another. It is a call to be like the Bereans in Acts who though open minded still studied the Scriptures to make sure Paul and Silas were speaking the truth.
So the next time you hear a relativist say “There’s no such thing as absolute truth”, ask them if they’re absolutely sure about that.
Now, discuss…
Search
Recent Posts
Get Updates | Subscribe
Somewhat Essential
Categories
Archives
