THE JUDGMENT-SEAT OF THE CHRIST
It is remarkable, dear brethren, that at Corinth Paul was brought face to face, in the circumstances which arose, with the idea of the judgment-seat. We read in Acts 18: 12 that the Jews led him to the judgmentseat, then Gallio drove them from the judgment-seat, and then they laid hold on Sosthenes and beat him before the judgment-seat. So that one thing after another was contributing to impress upon Paul the idea of the judgment-seat, and he turns it to account in a spiritual sense. He says, “We must all be manifested before the judgment-seat of the Christ”. The judgment-seat had come before him in a forcible way, an impressive way, in the circumstances which arose at Corinth, and the Spirit of God turns it to account and brings before him the thought of the judgment-seat of the Christ He says, “we must all be manifested before the judgment-seat of the Christ, that each may receive the things done in the body, according to those he has done, whether it be good or evil”. That is the culmination in our course here of the working out of the principle of responsibility.
We have been speaking in the meetings a good deal about responsibility. That is not to make us afraid nor to put us under law, but there is such a thing as responsibility, and in Christianity responsibility is fulfilled. It says, “that the righteous requirement of the law should be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to flesh but according to Spirit”, Rom 8: 4. God is not writing off responsibility; on the other hand, while the Lord was here He stated at the end of His course that He had fulfilled responsibility. He says, “I have glorified thee on the earth, I have completed the work which thou gavest me that I should do it”, John 17: 4. I think that in Him every feature of responsibility was fulfilled, and that the Lord intends that we, too, should fulfil responsibility before He takes us from this scene. I do not think He is going to take us away as having failed in our responsibility, but rather, I think He intends to show that the saints can be here as fulfilling every responsibility that lies upon them, not, of course, in their own energy or ability, but the Spirit of God has come in for that very purpose.
With Paul it was no doubt ordered of God, that circumstances should arise which would impress him with this idea of the judgment-seat and he brings it in in writing this letter to the Corinthians. He says, “we are always confident, and know that while present in the body we are absent from the Lord ... we are confident, I say, and pleased rather to be absent from the body and present with the Lord”. That is what they would naturally desire—to be absent from the body and present with the Lord! but he goes on to say, “Wherefore also we are zealous, whether present or absent, to be agreeable to him”. Then he shows that he is facing the matter soberly, and it is an important thing, dear brethren, that we should face matters soberly. He says, “we must all be manifested before the judgment-seat of the Christ”—manifested—that is, everything is coming out exactly as it is. It is a good thing for us to see that, and anyone who is going on with God would wish it, for no one would want to be living in what is unreal. It says, “we must all be manifested before the judgment-seat of the Christ, that each may receive the things done in the body, according to those he has done, whether it be good or evil”.
Now that is the filling out, if one may so say, of what Solomon the Preacher came to at the end of his preaching. You remember that the book of Ecclesiastes is the Preacher, or it could read, the Former of assemblies, and the conclusion in Ecclesiastes is this, “Let us hear the end of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil”. See how it finishes! “Whether it be good or whether it be evil”. That is to say, it is not the idea of condemnation, nor the idea of punishment or anything of that sort, but it is that everything is to be brought into the light, whether it is good or whether it is evil. God is going to have everything manifested; God will bring every work into judgment; He is going to pass a judgment on everything that has been done in the whole of our lives, and we have to receive it, too. We are not to deceive ourselves, we are to see things exactly as God sees them. That is the great comfort, dear brethren. It may be sobering and exercising for us, but at the same time it is a great comfort to feel that there will not be a single thing in which we have a divergent thought from God’s thought. We shall see things exactly as He sees them and we shall approve of them exactly as He approves of them.
It is an immense thing to think we are going to finish up entirely in accord with God Himself and His own judgment about everything. There is another thing: if I receive the things done in my body, whether they be good or whether they be bad, I shall find that the Lord is infinitely fair. He says, ‘I will give you credit wherever I can give you credit and will show you what is wrong whenever it is wrong’. I think I can see there is a double value in that. In the first place, we shall feel that there is not a shade of difference between us and Christ; nothing in which we are not in full accord with Himself. On the other hand, it seems to me to be of the greatest possible advantage to us, because we are to judge the world, and to judge angels, exercising a function of judgment. We have to be formed in ability to do that and the detail of our lives, as it comes under divine scrutiny, is to be shown to us exactly as God sees it. I think I can see what great educational value that will have in forming us in the ability to judge the world and judge angels. So there is this matter of the judgment-seat of Christ. The apostle says, “we must all be manifested before the judgment-seat of the Christ, that each may receive the things done in the body, according to those he has done, whether it be good or evil”.
If we read the epistles and find what is said about one and another, I think we get certain examples of that. We get, for instance, the sorrowful example of Demas. Paul says, “Demas has forsaken me, having loved the present age, and is gone to Thessalonica”, 2 Tim 4: 10. Well, the motives that governed Demas in his movements are just exposed there. The Spirit of God exposes them, for that is the idea of judgment. A judgment is passed upon a matter; it is set out exactly as it is in the sight of God, and so you get that in relation to Demas, and likewise you get it about others. You also get commendatory remarks about one and another. We have the epistle to Philemon and how Onesimus is mentioned in that epistle. Onesimus evidently had been Philemon’s slave and had run away from him, but somehow or other he had been brought into contact with Paul and had been converted, and was now profitable. Paul would have been glad to keep him to minister to him, but he had the sense of what was due to Philemon; so he sent Onesimus back, and Onesimus is called, in the epistle to the Colossians, the faithful and beloved brother. That is how he would now minister to Philemon.
You will find it very interesting, when you have time, to look into the various ones who are mentioned by name in the different epistles and notice what is said about them, because you will get from what is said a kind of anticipation of the judgment-seat of Christ. You see the things that are good commended, and the things that are not good exposed and manifested, because we all have to be manifested. That means that things are just brought out in the light exactly as they are—as God sees them. We may as well face it, we may as well make up our minds that we will accept the judgment-seat of Christ in our conduct day by day, and see that everything we do is brought into the light and made manifest. God will take pleasure in making manifest all that the saints have wrought that has been pleasing to Him. We can rest assured of that, for He will not leave out a single thing that is pleasurable to Himself; He will delight to bring it to the light. So we may well be encouraged to pursue what is right and to seek to be pleasing to the Lord; that is what the apostle says in the chapter we read in 2 Corinthians. He says, first of all, that “we do not wish to be unclothed, but clothed, that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life”, chap 5: 4. Then he says, “Now he that has wrought us for this very thing is God, who also has given to us the earnest of the Spirit”. It is a very encouraging thing, dear brethren, and at the same time a sobering thing, to recognise that God is working in every one of us. Now do not let us hinder Him, for He is working so that what is really of Himself and according to Christ should be formed in us. Do not let us hinder it; let us not pursue things that are contrary to the line on which God is working.
It says that we are to grow up to Christ in all things, and that the assembly is the body of Christ—a wonderful vessel in which what Christ is in His manhood is to be displayed. It takes all the saints of this dispensation (I do not know how many there will be eventually in the assembly when it is complete, I suppose some millions) to form the vessel which is the body of Christ, and which is great enough to express and display all that Christ is in His manhood in moral excellence; and the assembly is in the hands of God with that in mind, and we ourselves are part of it. Grace has been given to us all to have part in the assembly, the body of Christ, this vessel great enough to express in perfection all that Christ is in His manhood, and to express it so that in the end there will not be a single thing lacking or a single thing redundant. I think the assembly as the body of Christ will be the greatest expression of divine wisdom and skill, a vessel formed of creatures such as you and I, so set together by the work of God that in the end there is a perfect setting out in us of what was in Christ as Man.
Now that is a great thing and it is wonderful that we should be taken up to have part in it, and so we are to look at our life here to fill it out responsibly in the light of what God is doing. We are not to fear this thought of responsibility; it is not a question of being legal or being in any sense in bondage. The Lord took pleasure in fulfilling responsibility. He said, “To do thy good pleasure, my God, is my delight”, Ps 40: 8. “Thou hast prepared me a body” (Heb 10: 5)—a vessel in which the will of God could find perfect expression; and the Lord delighted to fill it out. Now the saints of the assembly, from Pentecost down to the coming of the Lord, are taken up in order to be the filling out of that. It is a wonderful conception. The more you think of it the more wonderful it becomes, and the greater God becomes to you in His ability so to set the saints together and perfect in us His work, that in the end, as I said, there is nothing redundant or superfluous and nothing lacking, but a complete expression of Christ in the assembly which is His body, the fulness of Him who fills all in all.
In the light of these things, the apostle says (v 5), “Now he that has wrought us for this very thing is God, who also has given to us the earnest of the Spirit”, and then He says (v 9), “Wherefore also we are zealous, whether present or absent, to be agreeable to him”. That is a great thing for every one of us, every day: is it our thought to be agreeable to Christ? He is the great standard of all that is pleasing to God. You know how the heavens were opened upon Him and there was the voice to Him at the time of His baptism, “Thou art my beloved Son, in thee I have found my delight” (Mark 1: 11), and a voice to Peter, James and John on the mount of transfiguration, the holy mount, saying, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I have found my delight”, 2 Pet 1: 17. Have you ever asked the Father to show you what it was in Jesus that caused Him such delight? Have you ever asked Him to show it to you, or do you just accept it as a kind of foregone conclusion that, of course, He found delight in Jesus, without stopping to enquire what was it in detail that caused Him such delight? I believe, dear brethren, if we would get to God about it and ask Him to show us in detail what there was in Jesus that afforded Him such delight, it would help very much in the formative work going on in our souls to bring about conformity to Christ. That is what God is after.
It is a wonderful conception and wonderful grace that you and I, actually known before the foundation of the world, should be brought into being with this in view, to have a part designed by God in this wonderful vessel that is the body of Christ, the perfect expression of all that Christ is as a Man, and that means the perfect expression of God manward and at the same time the perfect presentation under the eye of God of what man is for His pleasure, and so there is the double thought.
I just put these things before you, dear brethren, to show how important then this present time is. Our life here is leading up to this, that we must all be manifested before the judgment-seat of Christ. It is, so to speak, a divine requirement. There is nothing penal about it, nothing in it to cause fear, save that reverence and fear which we read of in Hebrews 12. At the same time it is intended to make us sober in the acceptance of responsibility. The assembly of God in a place is there responsibly—responsible to maintain the truth and each one of us is to face this matter of responsibility. We have the ability to answer to it, as Romans 8: 4 says, “in order that the righteous requirement of the law should be fulfilled in us”—not exactly as a matter of duty, it is what has come to pass. God is not going to let it fall to the ground. The Lord has set out what He looks for in man and He has found it perfectly in Christ, and now the righteous requirement of the law is to be fulfilled in us who walk not according to flesh but according to Spirit. The end of it all is going to be the judgmentseat of the Christ; that is the terminus of the line of responsibility. We must all be manifested before the judgment-seat of the Christ, and that means simply that what we have done, the things done in the body, are going to be shown to us. I do not think it will take very long. According to John 4 you do not get the impression that the interview the Lord had with the woman took a long time. What she said about it was, “Come, see a man who told me all things I had ever done: is not he the Christ?”. That is to say, she really had passed the judgment-seat of Christ. She had the whole thing set out before her exactly as the Lord saw it, and that is what the judgment-seat of the Christ is going to be for us.
If I might just add this further word, there is no reason why we should not anticipate and have it now. There is no reason to put off and say it is going to be after we are taken to be with Christ. I believe we can anticipate the judgment-seat now and see that day by day the things that we do are made manifest in the sight of God, so that we get a sense that we have been before God as to what we have done and that we have His judgment about things. Things that He disapproves of we have learned to disapprove of and repudiate and judge in the light of the cross. Things that He approves of we commit ourselves to, with a desire that we should learn more and more how to be pleasing to Him, and we can only learn it in Christ. May the Lord bless us on these lines, dear brethren, for His Name’s sake!
SHEERNESS
20th October 1967
From Ministry of the Word, 1968
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