Pantocrator - The Divine Judge

Saturday, 27 August 2005

Divine Justice is often overshadowed by modern day evangelists proclaiming the joyful news central to the Gospel of Jesus. As such, the idea of divine justice and law is relegated to small print in the tracts, gospel songs, fellowship and acts of praise and worship. Christ, resurrected, has won for us forever the redemption from sin through his perfect sacrifice on the Cross. We hear professions and personal proclamations of faith in the power of grace from Jesus "who saves".

Indeed, "God Saves" is the very name which is Yeshua or Jesus as we know from his Greco-Latinized version. Yahweh Saves.

Yet, the history of salvation which reveals the grace of God's great love and faithfulness to his people, the prototype being Israel which is fulfilled in the Church today, is also grounded on his great mercy.

We experience his mercy in his love, and we experience his love first because of the Divine Order, which is known as his Law, which is his Justice. God is Just.

We know the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, as God's Love. We also know the Son as God's Love Incarnate. We know the Father as Creator. And we know the LORD as Yahweh Sabaoth - the Almighty.

Through his mercy we are given the grace of truth, and faith, and experience salvation freely. Divine justice expects fidelity and steadfastness, which are also gifts of the Spirit. In fact, all these are signs of the life of God's Love, the Holy Spirit in us: right judgement, wisdom, piety, perservance, understanding, counsel, and fear of the Lord.

Why would Fear of the Lord be a gift, if we are to be a joyful people experiencing the salvation and the power of the resurrected Lord? Because Divine Justice is part of the whole plan.

In death, we are all present at the Last Judgment, where we find ourselves out of space and time, but in eternity, where all of creation is already before the Lord. God's infinite mercy extends us to perfect grace, of truth. Truth will completely illuminate our souls and we will be able to perceive with perfect clarity our worthiness to share perfect communion with his Life. As spirit before God, we can enter into his Life through the glory of Christ when we completely surrender to him, and expurge from our souls all imperfect attitudes and desires. If in our ordinary earthly lives, we have cultivated this practice of life through prayer, contemplation and charity, as we stand before the Divine Judge, our virtuous attitude will reflect his grace and glory. We would enter worthily into fullness of glorified life with Christ. This is the meaning of resurrection in Christ, where our glorified humanity is realised and reflect the perfection in the Divine Logos, the Incarnate Lord, Jesus who is Christ.

Should we have retained obssessive habits of sin, repressed will against God's law, or are possessed of inordinate attitudes, when the spirit of Truth illuminates our soul, we find ourselves fraught with unworthiness, and beseiged by the same possessive desires that drive us from fulfilling his will, which is to find life in him.

Therefore, when humans are obssessed with inordinate attitudes, desires and behaviours and when even filled with grace we turn away from cooperating with Divine light and life, we do not reflect and burn with that life and light from God. We fall. We "less reflect God's glory" or even worse, "shy away from", "be adverse to", "reject" the light and life that is offered to us. Instead, daunted by the carnal and inordinate desires we have cultivated in our earthly lives, our souls are disposed to a hell of frustrated existence where it can never find satisfaction or completion, the state of hell is a frustrated exile from God where we are never at rest, never able to experience the slightest gratification. That is the worst torment, and such lost souls will know no better.

Yahweh as Lord and Divine Judge does not send us to our destruction. Of our own will and volition, we have lived our lives of either virtue or evil, and that conduct will determine our disposition for him. While salvation in Christ is perfect and expiation for our sins is complete, the truth in our redemption from the separation of Divine life is that we no longer dwell in Sheol after death but are open to a full life of grace in God. According to the teaching of our Lord and the Apostles, our conduct of a life grounded in faith must produce the signs of life in Christ, not a noisy proclamation devoid of love, not a faith devoid of charity. Christ was the epitome of the law fulfilled because he showed that grace and faith expresses its life in God through compassion, charity, love and faithfulness. Virtues he showed by the fullness of his humanity, even in the face of death as a naked criminal with the horror of crucifixion.

Divine Justice needs to be proclaimed, and it can only be heard best when we proclaim the life of virtue which the Holy Spirit calls us out to live. I have heard too many evangelists mistaken the power of Christ's sacrifice as being the carte blanc for human salvation. It is only part of the revealed truth. The whole truth must be proclaimed: our life in Christ is complete when it reflects his glory by the manner of our actions, our thoughts, our aspirations and how we influence our community through our gifts, spiritual and material. Yahweh is not only Lord of the Spirit, but God of all creation - all things, as Paul teaches, is subject or subordinate to him.

The Christian concept of heaven is the fulfilment of the Judaic promise of paradise regained: it is a tangible existence of complete and perfection communion in the life of Yahweh, beatific and free of any illusions.

This vision, which is echoed in John's Apocalyse, is of the union of all creation in worship of the Lamb, the Merciful Judge and Lord of All, the End and the completion of all creation.

We cannot ignore Divine Justice. It is founded on the law that is given to us, and we made free only because we have entered into an exclusive convenantal relationship with Yahweh through our faith and baptism in Jesus. Our freedom experienced in our life in Christ is born through our freely-chosen convenant with God! It is a not the freedom some evangelists are mistakenly touting as freedom from sin. Sin is the idea of resisting God's life, failure to cooperate perfectly with grace, inability to reflect God's goodness in our life, and simply, be confounded in our contemplation of the Divine by using our own personal will to unravel his nature. It is all these which led the first angelic spirits to fail to reflect his Divine Will, and "fall" from grace.

Grace alone, cannot save. That lesson is as old as creation. Grace is God's life freely given to all created things, in order to exist. It is not withdrawn. Spirit and souls that fail to be nourished by grace will exist in a torment of imperfect existence, unfulfilled and frustrated. How can these be saved? Well, Christ has opened the flood gates of Life by revealing we are able to experience full communion with God through life in him. Obeying his teaching, obeying his call to virtue.

In his parable of Lazarus and Abraham, he makes it clear: if we choose a life of comfort and ignore a life of virtue, there is no salvation thereafter. We determine our disposition towards God by the manner of the lives we live today, in this imperfect world, through exercise of our wills, whether we live in response to the Spirit or in resolute refusal to cooperate with grace.

Grace is not a carte blanc guarantee to Christians, that overpowers our free will. It is the generous gift of God to all of nature to exist, in order that the Logos might be glorified and revealed to us. Faith and virtue is still the ultimate expression of fullness of life in Christ, and in the archetype example before us in the history of our salvation, is expressed, once and for all, in the painful and horrible death he endured. This is the price and proof, that we must live lives of virtue to cultivate our spiritual disposition and commitment towards a life in God, a life filled with grace.

Grace cooperates with humility, with fidelity, with all the gifts of the Holy Spirit. But our minds and hearts, and human will, is the fulcrum by which we cooperate with grace to establish God's life in this universe, and make him manifest and real, through virtue. The Apostles and church Fathers are unmistakable in their teaching of this truth, and the Scriptures concur with this.

The Grace and Peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.

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