If you've read my post of forgiveness, you'd understand me when I say I am not quite the most popular student at school. People often pass judgment on me, and most of the time I judge myself much the same way. The most interesting part of this is when you take in to account that I attend a Christian school (though we refrain from daily prayer, which is strange).

Many people today scoff Christianity because, amongst a mountain of other problems which I will address later, we come off as extremely judgmental. They look at our judgments and then say “Well, if you are Christians, and you say, 'only God is fit to judge, since he's the only perfect being', yet you judge constantly!”, then they throw the hypocrisy card, and Christians as a whole cannot combat their accusations.

I do have an explanation, though I must add a disclaimer before hand. You'll see the asterisk for this disclaimer later in the explanation, though I feel I must make it know beforehand, to increase the likelihood of someone actually reading the rest of the post.

*JHBlancs realizes this is an incomplete description, as it does not address the actual reasons behind judgment. In order to truly grasp the concept, JHBlancs (hereafter referred to as I) has agreed to add another post in short time about other aspects of the topic. I will only speak of God's judgment today, so as to clear up misconceptions. Later, I will speak on human judgment.

When one accuses a Christian, and said Christian balks as he realizes the accusation is true, both parties misinterpret the word in question. “judgment”, I (and many of my mentors) believe, has a double meaning, though they are similar. There is the human judgment, where one man tells the other he has done wrong, and then seeks to punish the man. Then, there is God's judgment, which is more complex.

Allow me to paint a picture:

“A man walks into the small, rural gas station. He planned everything out: kill the clerk, cut the phone lines, rig the place to blow, then get out of there with the safe. Once the police figure out, he would have been miles down the road, dropping the safe off in a lake. Then, he'd run into the wilderness, where he stashed enough supplies to live to months.

“As he looked around, he instantly recognized problems. There was a family with three children in there with him, and one child screamed when he saw his handgun when he shifted his coat. The father came up to him and inquired about the handgun. In response, the man panics and punches the father in the face, throwing him on top of the little-most child, suffocating her. The wife let out a scream, which the man cut short with two bullets. The clerk brought out a shotgun, but the man was too fast and killed the clerk with two more bullets.

“The two remaining children were breaking apart, their lives completely destroyed. The man decided to leave them as he opened the register, finding less than eighty dollars in there. The man went for the safe, which was too large for him to lift. Still in a panic, he ran out into the vehicle the family came in with, stole everything of value, and, being close to the Canadian border, escaped to Canada.

“The search for the man was fruitless. The two children would never return to normalcy, despite the therapy heaped upon them. The family of the killer, already in shambles, fell completely apart, as this was the final push to shove them all apart; none of them would ever speak to each other again

“As to the man himself, after making it across the Canadian border, pawning off everything from the vehicle,and driving hundreds of miles from anywhere, in the freezing north of the Northwest Territories, the ghosts of what he did still plagued his mind. He stopped his car and walked for miles into the cold. Finally, he took his pistol out, put it to his mouth, and pulled the trigger.”

Now, I will not judge this, though I can tell you where God was. God was there, God gave the man the choice to buy the handgun, to execute the plan, to kill, to steal, to run away, to suicide. God was there. I believe that God gives us choices. That is the first part of his type of judgment. Adam and Eve were both given the choice of whether or not to disobey God, and they did.

The second type of judgment happens when the bullet ricocheted through the man's brains, killing him painlessly. I will not speak of the man's verdict, though I will say, “that Jesus was the defendant's lawyer, and God was a merciful judge. They went through all the choices God let him make, not in the last days of his life, but his life as a whole. The prosecutor, Satan, put in his expert witnesses, all attesting to the man's damnation, though God already new their testimonies. The man himself was frightened and awed. When all was said and done, judgment was passed.”

I will speak on heaven and hell later.

God doesn't hand out judgment in the human sense, he hands out judgment in the way that ultimately makes sense. He wants humanity to come to him by their own volition, and if he plays any part in our salvation, he feels we have been cheated out of our true heaven.
For, if we come to know God and Jesus by meeting Him halfway, when both parties know that God forced the mortal into the immortal's path, then the temporary man does not truly understand salvation.

More to come on this topic.



(For interesting insights into Death, Time, Hell, Nature, and other themes, look for Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series. Don't expect it to be biblically accurate.