In this enlightening episode, we explore the profound themes from the newly released book, God’s Unbreakable Oath. The narrative challenges traditional views of the final judgment, urging the imagination to visualize a divine event of mercy and reconciliation. Listeners are taken on a transformative journey through vivid imagery that depicts redemption and the restoration of those who suffered on earth. Through this lens, the final judgment is not a day of doom but a testament to divine mercy, offering a new understanding of heavenly justice.
00:00:05 Introduction and Overview of God’s Unbreakable Oath
00:03:00 Imagining the Final Judgment: A New Perspective
For the next few days, I’m going to be reading from my newly published book, God’s Unbreakable Oath. It’s available on Amazon, and I want to encourage you to get a copy. It’s about the salvation of all mankind, and I give you evidence throughout the Scripture, and I want to read a section to you, various sections throughout this week. This one’s on imagining some of the events of the final judgment. It is well within the bounds of faith to allow our imagination to picture events in the final judgment. This is hardly ever done, because that day has most frequently been seen as one of doom, and imagination, unless obsessed by misery, shrinks from picturing that. But when we have gathered together scriptures that reveal it is a momentous event of mercy and reconciliation after the darkness has passed, then our imagination springs to life like King David’s, who after being delivered from the hand of Saul, imagined that it was God who had brought him the victory, flying down on a cherub, with smoke coming out of his nostrils, coals of fire flaming from his mouth, hailstones and bolts of lightning shooting out from everywhere. Psalm 18. Here is imagination taking full advantage of the redemptive work of God. So if David can do it, Why can’t we add our strokes of colour to the magnificence of his mercy? So over in a corner of the kingdom sits a woman with her daughter, both now redeemed, resplendent, full of joy, safe in the arms of God. This is the woman whose daughter, while on earth, had been brutally raped and killed by a gang of boys, her desolate body thrown off the school bus. Over in another area of heaven is that little boy whose father’s life was terminated by the blast of a bomb at a wedding party, now happy with his Abba. His pleas, Abba, wake up, finally answered for all eternity. Scattered throughout the multitudes are those millions and millions of formerly homeless children who eked out an existence at the railway stations of the world or under its bridges, feasting now at the table of the king, along with all those millions whose little bodies could not survive their breadless days. And over there is that vast cradle of abandoned babies who never even saw the light of day, eviscerated before even coming to birth, now being gathered up in the arms of tearful, grateful, repentant mothers. And then there are those other millions whose parents or children had been ripped from their pleading arms and filed into the gas chambers like frightened flocks in a slaughterhouse. but not a scar on their bodies now, brightly shining souls that have no years, inhaling the joy of freedom to roam the jubilant landscape of a new earth. All these, and billions more, back in the earth days of death, had looked into the face of the beast, had known the nights of soaking fear and grief, and the interminable dawns of barely masked rage, crying out for justice to be done, for retribution for themselves and their loved ones. Millions obsessed by the images of their tormentors rotting in jail or burning in hell, longing for closure. But when closure came, the pain barely diminishing because nothing was going to bring them back. Many believing Jews and Christians calling for rights to be restored, eager for the hot breath of revenge, looked for justice, but there is none, for salvation, but it is far from us, Isaiah 59. Holy and true sovereign, how long will it be before you judge and take vengeance on those living on the earth who shed our blood? Revelation 6. But the end of the final judgment appears to have something bewilderingly undone. Mercy pervades in everyone and to everyone, Romans 11.32. No one is looking for revenge now, no desire for it in all creation. What happened to the cry for justice? The page seemed to have turned while no one was looking. But the astonishing fact is that justice has been restored to the world through mercy. It is important to realize that the justice that the final judgment will provide bears no resemblance to earthly justice in this fallen world. Heavenly justice restores all that was lost. Earthly justice, at best, punishes those who have laid lives waste. Heavenly justice involves resurrection to wholeness. Earthly justice involves restraints on life, or its termination. For if justice is to give life back to those from whom it was stolen, or to restore rights to the poor and starving, or to return to the arms of loved ones those cruelly snatched from them on earth, and to make good the dignity of those buried in mounds of shame by the world’s tyrants, If justice, in fact, brings back our joyful self in the image of God, then that is precisely what has been done through the merciful resurrection of Jesus Christ for all humanity. Christ’s conquest of death invests humankind with incorruptible immortality. It shows the door to hatred as pure love moves in. Minds and hearts, all forgiven and reconciled to the Father in the final judgment, are freed from that gnawing pain which previously drove them to rage at their enemies as the only way they knew to throw off their grief. On this corrupt earth, revenge says to the ones who inflicted horror on their family, My pain knows no relief by what you did to my loved ones, and I want you to feel this same pain forever. But that creation, the groaning one, is now delivered from its bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God, Romans 8. The Christians who, in this natural realm of earth’s history, were sickened by the idea of mercy fulfilling justice, now in the kingdom of God, embrace it like a long-lost friend. They had wanted an eternal hell as the ultimate expression of the law of an eye for an eye, Exodus 21. There had to be a hell. They had insisted to answer the epic atrocities the world had vomited on its trembling inhabitants. But now they see that they’d been thinking in terms of laws that were made for this world. The laws of punishment equal to the crime, an eye for an eye, in the scriptures were for the purpose of restraining the evils of human nature and bringing some limited justice to victims surrounded by a world of sin and death, Romans 13. But Jesus makes clear to all now, in the final judgment, the wider meaning of the Sermon on the Mount, the Sermon of the Kingdom, where he steers the wheels of earthly justice off the road and introduces an entirely new way of going forward for his followers. it was a shocking instruction even then almost beggaring belief now in the kingdom it turns all human judgments on their head it pronounces the end of the cycle of this world’s justice by the inauguration of mercy You have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you. Therefore you shall be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect. Matthew 5 But love your enemies, do good and lend, hoping for nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for He is kind to the unthankful and evil. Therefore be merciful as your Heavenly Father also is merciful. Luke 6 If Jesus, while on earth, had been commanding his followers to be merciful like their heavenly Father, what are the courts of heaven to be like in the final judgment, 1 Corinthians 6, governed by a creation no longer under the dread urge to hate? And if God called his followers to be perfect in mercy as he is perfect in mercy, how could he possibly go against his own command and burn most of humanity in hell for eternity? So mercy blooms in the kingdom of heaven. It is not like this world’s mercy, not demeaning, not standoffish, not a patronizing mercy bestowed by lords on minions. No one is left ashamed by it or diminished because the ones giving mercy are the joyful recipients of mercy themselves. For there is no difference, for all have sinned, Romans 3. Nor is it a human thing. It is God-given. God has committed them all to disobedience, that he might have mercy on all, Romans 11. So nobody is expressing mercy on someone who is less than they are. People are bestowing mercy on one another from God. And it is a mercy so weighted with glory, so far-reaching in its joyful purpose, that there is nothing passive about it, like this world’s. We are looking at rhapsodic generosity here, even though tinged, perhaps, with some painful tears of reconciliation. As we saw in the parable of the prodigal son, this mercy is jubilant. It embraces, and it restores honor and brings reunion, and it cannot resist a party. everybody’s partying luke fifteen everybody’s celebrating everybody else no thought here of let’s try you out for a year or two and see how you do Thus, humanity, having gone through the blazing glory of God’s presence in the lake of fire and brimstone, has been terrified at the sight of its sinfulness, melted by the purity and beauty of their Creator-Redeemer, and humbled and overjoyed by the abundance of His mercy. As if we could, but one day we will, let us go into the crowds of the redeemed in the final judgment and hear from one, probably like many others, who wrestles in his new mind over how mercy fulfills justice. Well, that’s a little portion of my book in God’s Unbreakable Oath. And it’s in volumes, it’s in two volumes, volumes one and two, and it’s available on Amazon for you. You know, I don’t get much out of these books financially. I’m not trying to advertise this to get money. Only 6% comes to an author, and the average author gets only 200 copies of his book sold. That’s quite a statistic, isn’t it? I want to spread the word because it is glorious, glorious news. What I do in this chapter, or rather in this volume, is to take you through Romans 9 through 11. Now, that’s an incredibly complicated passage of Scripture, but you will discover it’s not as complicated as you thought. I show you in that volume, in volume 2, when we go through Romans 9 through 11, how God has elected the whole human race. Election is not for a few. Election, and I can prove it through Romans 9 through 11, is for the whole world. What good news is that? God has determined. that he will elect the whole world for salvation. We look at Jesus’ life as well. Did you know that there are three aspects of Christ’s life that need to be examined? How Jesus calls the world to himself, how Jesus separates the world from himself, and how Jesus then unites the world again with himself. When he separates the world, that’s the second coming of Christ between the sheep and the goats. And when he draws them together, that’s the judgment. The second coming of Jesus is the separation of the world. The judgment is the reconciliation of the world through trials, through the judgments, through the fire and brimstone, through the Lamb of God on the throne as one slain. Well, I hope you will join me in reading and enjoying this book, my book, God’s Unbreakable Oath, available on Amazon. I’ll see you next time. Cheerio and God bless.
