Rejoice, young man, during your childhood, and let your heart be pleasant during the days of young manhood. And follow the impulses of your heart and the desires of your eyes. Yet know that God will bring you to judgment for all these things. —Ecclesiastes 11:9

For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad. —2 Corinthians 5:10

---

[1] My friend had accused me with a smirk and a scoff of being nearly a dandy that night; I wore a crimson red button-down with the sleeves rolled up just so and black pants and shoes with a black leather belt, the glint of whose silver buckle found its sister in my wristwatch. I answered with a knowing chuckle, buttoning the shirt in the car on the way. I watched a golden, early autumn sunset out of the corner of my eye and cupped the wind in my hand out of the rolled-down window, that peculiar tang of the first scents of Carolina fall commingling with the waning heat of the cloudless day.

It was to be a night for controlled revelry; my friend and his two roommates along with their sundry and respective ladies and I went to the local taproom-and-pizzeria, the kind of place with a bar full of local taps (sans liquor), billiards and darts, shuffleboard and various video games upstairs. The lower level served as a “family-friendly” eatery during the daylight hours, and a typically raucous bastion of refuge from dusk till the wee hours. We arrived on the cusp of that transition, ordering a couple of enormous custom-built pizzas and ice-cold pints of beer. I took the end seat near the aisle, across from my friend.

While waiting on our orders to come through, visions of Italian sausages dancing in our heads, we sipped our cold, dark pints and compared notes on the particular flavor profiles of the brews. Indulging briefly, sipwise per any new round, in the only means by which men can share beer—for the sake of gentlemanly education—we then quaffed them heartily between rousing discussions amongst us all about school, work, beer, relationships, nicknames, and the other fare whose romantic tint is never quite captured in the retelling (save for over a beer, with pizza, naturally).

As topics turned to familial relationships, our cheeks were flush with various microbrews, and laughter was the modus operandi in light of the conviviality of this particular occasion. All became bards, our hands players whose stage was the air before us in which to gesticulate; randomly one would interrupt the other with a more hilarious, more nuanced, more highly involved—and sometimes utterly distasteful—anecdote about themselves or a family member, or friends who were as family. At one point, the good brother, my friend sitting across the table, said something about his father’s propensity toward perfectionism and impossible expectations. Then he relayed something that struck me as particularly meaningful—particularly hurtful. It was only a momentary impression, a gut instinct, an intuition based on a flicker, as when the curiously informed of ancient visual arts discern with a squinting glance the counterfeit from the original. I couldn’t be sure then, amidst the pizza and cold, sweet beer; so it set me to thinking. I gazed beyond the wet black of the stout before me. My lips pursed, mind having turned from the process by which a beer can produce very little head and nevertheless not taste flat—to this at hand, to this pain to which my friend had become accustomed, the same sort of scar I bore; I wiped my brow with a foppish crimson sleeve….

“He’ll get his,” I announced decisively, brow slightly furrowed, silencing for a stunned moment the delightful chaos of jovial sentence fragments being slung across the thickly lacquered wooden slab of a table in response to my friend’s mention of extreme paternal idealism.

As is the case when anyone predisposed toward hilarity confronts absurdity, I became the fart among young children for having said as much, and in so serious a tone; they all gazed upon me with cocked eyebrows and incredulous half-smiles until bursting into laughter and asking where the hell I had come up with that in the midst of all this diversion. My friend laughed harder than them all, but because to him it wasn’t absurd at all.

---

Months later, I explained what I had meant by that as we stood outside our cars in a different city on a warm spring noon.

You see, we’ll all have to stand before the judgment seat of Christ some day. Before “every tear” is wiped from our eyes, before we enter into the great beyond, we must pass the judgment in which our works and words are tested by fire. It always makes me think of the scene in Terminator 2 wherein Sarah Connor’s flesh is [2] ripped off by a blast of nuclear radiation, but her bones cling to the fence until consumed by fire and ultimately torn and vaporized by the shock wave that has already torn down buildings and cars and people like vapor before her. That’s how we will be, in the day of judgment: we will stand before His glory, and “every careless word that people speak, they shall give an accounting for” (Matthew 12:36, Jesus Himself speaking), and as our works are ripped and burned along with our flesh, what will remain will be the simple acts of kindness, the lies, the wounds taken and received on a spiritual level. Remember a long time ago when your old friend from back in the day betrayed your confidences and cut you deep? No, you’ve long since incorporated that into your psyche, dealt with it to the best of your ability, moved on. Your hippocampus and neurons in the parahippocampal region have let those memories go a long time ago in favor of newer, more important things. But the memory of almighty God is not subject to neuroscientific inquiry. He will repay that old debt. Not only do I say so if he or she is a reprobate. The terrific glory of God will not be diminished by our being saved, make no mistake! The same God who drove the righteous prophet Isaiah to woe over his unclean lips unto death (6:5) is the one who lives today, still declaring, “Vengeance is mine; I shall repay” (Deuteronomy 32:35; Romans 12:19-21). That’s no empty promise, beloved.

And that also means that we, too, shall give an account. We won’t be damned for our offenses if true believers, that’s absolutely the case. But to suffer the gravity of having to account for a careless word to God! And who shall escape that? Shall you (1 John 1:8)? Isn’t a careless word the least of our offenses in the long run? “You don’t know what you’ve done to me! I —king hate you!”—wait, really? Wait a year, when the passions of the heart give way to the grace of betterment. “Ah, I’m sorry, I got carried away….” Fine. You’ve settled the score once through forgiveness; and Christ has forgiven you, too, if you’ve sought Him fervently (1 John 1:9). Yet it’s not as if that went unnoticed.

And so with my dear friend’s father, who demanded unreasonable things of him and hurt him with things asked. All those hurtful things that he wasn’t even aware of will come back to him on That Day. You see, we deaden our hearts and minds to the things that hurt others; betimes we even overlook those things that hurt the ones we love, not even willfully but because we are ignorant of the pain we have caused them. Yet this is the plight of the unjust ruler, too, who has deadened his ear to the pleas of the widow begging for justice; we are no better. So, we shall get ours just as much as our neighbor will get his. I must confess, I have grinned when I have thought of my enemies, the ones who’ve hurt the ones I love, when I’ve considered it; but Isaiah admonishes us against this foolishness (since we are always, too, the ones who hurt the ones whom others love!): “As often as it passes through, it will seize you; For morning after morning it will pass through, anytime during the day or night, And it will be sheer terror to understand what it means” (28:19). For this reason, we ought to pray for mercy. “You, why do you judge your brother? Or you again, why do you regard your brother with contempt? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God” (Romans 14:10).

I think of my own family in this; being [3] no strangers to Wrath, are we exempt? Am I? Certainly not. Years ago, I had Matthew 12:36 taped to the back of my front door, so I’d see it every time I went out; but it became so heavy to me that I ultimately took it down, which was just as stupid as cursing in the first place. That verse coupled with ringings of the likes of John the Revelator’s vision (”I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged from the things which were written in the books, according to their deeds.”—20:12) ringing in my head were too much for me to stand.

A man I knew once was betrayed by a coworker whom he trusted, who gained just under today’s equivalent of $600,000 from a series of illicit transactions within his company that should have been the property of the man I knew. He was bitter about his loss for long, long after that, and the grudge destroyed his happiness for all that time. Was it worth it? I’m not that man; but I doubt so. But to put a price on happiness, on peace and joy, seems unwise; and since this was a genuine wrong, the right course of action would have been to pray for the poor bastard who got away with six hundred K and the weight of sin on his shoulders, it seems to me.

The only thing that can overcome the wrath of judgment is love. “We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world” (1 John 4:16-17). I get so caught up in defending my own honor, as though I have any apart from Christ, that I forget this, and get angry.

But what good do we have that we haven’t been given?

So yes, it’s true that my friend’s father will get his; but it’s also equally true that I will get mine, for every word misspoken and every deed ill-done. To understand this brings terror; have I prayed for my friends, let alone enemies, today, so that we all shall persevere and have confidence in the day of judgment, as John admonishes? We can’t claim ignorance, can we? “You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, be on your guard so that you are not carried away by the error of unprincipled men and fall from your own steadfastness” (2 Peter 3:7).

---

Note: All Scripture references come from the New American Standard Bible (NASB) unless otherwise noted.

Technorati Tags: [4] judgment, [5] Jesus, [6] Christ, [7] accountability, [8] vengeance, [9] rage, [10] hatred, [11] love, [12] wrath, [13] forgiveness

Rejoice, young man, during your childhood, and let your heart be pleasant during the days of young manhood. And follow the impulses of your heart and the desires of your eyes. Yet know that God will bring you to judgment for all these things. —Ecclesiastes 11:9

For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad. —2 Corinthians 5:10

---

[14] My friend had accused me with a smirk and a scoff of being nearly a dandy that night; I wore a crimson red button-down with the sleeves rolled up just so and black pants and shoes with a black leather belt, the glint of whose silver buckle found its sister in my wristwatch. I answered with a knowing chuckle, buttoning the shirt in the car on the way. I watched a golden, early autumn sunset out of the corner of my eye and cupped the wind in my hand out of the rolled-down window, that peculiar tang of the first scents of Carolina fall commingling with the waning heat of the cloudless day.

It was to be a night for controlled revelry; my friend and his two roommates along with their sundry and respective ladies and I went to the local taproom-and-pizzeria, the kind of place with a bar full of local taps (sans liquor), billiards and darts, shuffleboard and various video games upstairs. The lower level served as a “family-friendly” eatery during the daylight hours, and a typically raucous bastion of refuge from dusk till the wee hours. We arrived on the cusp of that transition, ordering a couple of enormous custom-built pizzas and ice-cold pints of beer. I took the end seat near the aisle, across from my friend.

While waiting on our orders to come through, visions of Italian sausages dancing in our heads, we sipped our cold, dark pints and compared notes on the particular flavor profiles of the brews. Indulging briefly, sipwise per any new round, in the only means by which men can share beer—for the sake of gentlemanly education—we then quaffed them heartily between rousing discussions amongst us all about school, work, beer, relationships, nicknames, and the other fare whose romantic tint is never quite captured in the retelling (save for over a beer, with pizza, naturally).

As topics turned to familial relationships, our cheeks were flush with various microbrews, and laughter was the modus operandi in light of the conviviality of this particular occasion. All became bards, our hands players whose stage was the air before us in which to gesticulate; randomly one would interrupt the other with a more hilarious, more nuanced, more highly involved—and sometimes utterly distasteful—anecdote about themselves or a family member, or friends who were as family. At one point, the good brother, my friend sitting across the table, said something about his father’s propensity toward perfectionism and impossible expectations. Then he relayed something that struck me as particularly meaningful—particularly hurtful. It was only a momentary impression, a gut instinct, an intuition based on a flicker, as when the curiously informed of ancient visual arts discern with a squinting glance the counterfeit from the original. I couldn’t be sure then, amidst the pizza and cold, sweet beer; so it set me to thinking. I gazed beyond the wet black of the stout before me. My lips pursed, mind having turned from the process by which a beer can produce very little head and nevertheless not taste flat—to this at hand, to this pain to which my friend had become accustomed, the same sort of scar I bore; I wiped my brow with a foppish crimson sleeve….

“He’ll get his,” I announced decisively, brow slightly furrowed, silencing for a stunned moment the delightful chaos of jovial sentence fragments being slung across the thickly lacquered wooden slab of a table in response to my friend’s mention of extreme paternal idealism.

As is the case when anyone predisposed toward hilarity confronts absurdity, I became the fart among young children for having said as much, and in so serious a tone; they all gazed upon me with cocked eyebrows and incredulous half-smiles until bursting into laughter and asking where the hell I had come up with that in the midst of all this diversion. My friend laughed harder than them all, but because to him it wasn’t absurd at all.

---

Months later, I explained what I had meant by that as we stood outside our cars in a different city on a warm spring noon.

You see, we’ll all have to stand before the judgment seat of Christ some day. Before “every tear” is wiped from our eyes, before we enter into the great beyond, we must pass the judgment in which our works and words are tested by fire. It always makes me think of the scene in Terminator 2 wherein Sarah Connor’s flesh is [15] ripped off by a blast of nuclear radiation, but her bones cling to the fence until consumed by fire and ultimately torn and vaporized by the shock wave that has already torn down buildings and cars and people like vapor before her. That’s how we will be, in the day of judgment: we will stand before His glory, and “every careless word that people speak, they shall give an accounting for” (Matthew 12:36, Jesus Himself speaking), and as our works are ripped and burned along with our flesh, what will remain will be the simple acts of kindness, the lies, the wounds taken and received on a spiritual level. Remember a long time ago when your old friend from back in the day betrayed your confidences and cut you deep? No, you’ve long since incorporated that into your psyche, dealt with it to the best of your ability, moved on. Your hippocampus and neurons in the parahippocampal region have let those memories go a long time ago in favor of newer, more important things. But the memory of almighty God is not subject to neuroscientific inquiry. He will repay that old debt. Not only do I say so if he or she is a reprobate. The terrific glory of God will not be diminished by our being saved, make no mistake! The same God who drove the righteous prophet Isaiah to woe over his unclean lips unto death (6:5) is the one who lives today, still declaring, “Vengeance is mine; I shall repay” (Deuteronomy 32:35; Romans 12:19-21). That’s no empty promise, beloved.

And that also means that we, too, shall give an account. We won’t be damned for our offenses if true believers, that’s absolutely the case. But to suffer the gravity of having to account for a careless word to God! And who shall escape that? Shall you (1 John 1:8)? Isn’t a careless word the least of our offenses in the long run? “You don’t know what you’ve done to me! I —king hate you!”—wait, really? Wait a year, when the passions of the heart give way to the grace of betterment. “Ah, I’m sorry, I got carried away….” Fine. You’ve settled the score once through forgiveness; and Christ has forgiven you, too, if you’ve sought Him fervently (1 John 1:9). Yet it’s not as if that went unnoticed.

And so with my dear friend’s father, who demanded unreasonable things of him and hurt him with things asked. All those hurtful things that he wasn’t even aware of will come back to him on That Day. You see, we deaden our hearts and minds to the things that hurt others; betimes we even overlook those things that hurt the ones we love, not even willfully but because we are ignorant of the pain we have caused them. Yet this is the plight of the unjust ruler, too, who has deadened his ear to the pleas of the widow begging for justice; we are no better. So, we shall get ours just as much as our neighbor will get his. I must confess, I have grinned when I have thought of my enemies, the ones who’ve hurt the ones I love, when I’ve considered it; but Isaiah admonishes us against this foolishness (since we are always, too, the ones who hurt the ones whom others love!): “As often as it passes through, it will seize you; For morning after morning it will pass through, anytime during the day or night, And it will be sheer terror to understand what it means” (28:19). For this reason, we ought to pray for mercy. “You, why do you judge your brother? Or you again, why do you regard your brother with contempt? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God” (Romans 14:10).

I think of my own family in this; being [16] no strangers to Wrath, are we exempt? Am I? Certainly not. Years ago, I had Matthew 12:36 taped to the back of my front door, so I’d see it every time I went out; but it became so heavy to me that I ultimately took it down, which was just as stupid as cursing in the first place. That verse coupled with ringings of the likes of John the Revelator’s vision (”I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged from the things which were written in the books, according to their deeds.”—20:12) ringing in my head were too much for me to stand.

A man I knew once was betrayed by a coworker whom he trusted, who gained just under today’s equivalent of $600,000 from a series of illicit transactions within his company that should have been the property of the man I knew. He was bitter about his loss for long, long after that, and the grudge destroyed his happiness for all that time. Was it worth it? I’m not that man; but I doubt so. But to put a price on happiness, on peace and joy, seems unwise; and since this was a genuine wrong, the right course of action would have been to pray for the poor bastard who got away with six hundred K and the weight of sin on his shoulders, it seems to me.

The only thing that can overcome the wrath of judgment is love. “We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world” (1 John 4:16-17). I get so caught up in defending my own honor, as though I have any apart from Christ, that I forget this, and get angry.

But what good do we have that we haven’t been given?

So yes, it’s true that my friend’s father will get his; but it’s also equally true that I will get mine, for every word misspoken and every deed ill-done. To understand this brings terror; have I prayed for my friends, let alone enemies, today, so that we all shall persevere and have confidence in the day of judgment, as John admonishes? We can’t claim ignorance, can we? “You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, be on your guard so that you are not carried away by the error of unprincipled men and fall from your own steadfastness” (2 Peter 3:7).

---

Note: All Scripture references come from the New American Standard Bible (NASB) unless otherwise noted.

Technorati Tags: [17] judgment, [18] Jesus, [19] Christ, [20] accountability, [21] vengeance, [22] rage, [23] hatred, [24] love, [25] wrath, [26] forgiveness