Revelation 20:4-15.
4. And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them; and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.
5. But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished.
This is the first resurrection. 6. Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first' resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years.
7. And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, 8. And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. 9. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. 10. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night forever and ever.
11. And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it-from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them.
12. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.
13. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.
14. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. 15. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.
Ver. 11. " A great white throne" is here presented to us, as having been seen, seen in vision, by John. This is commonly called "The great white throne,"
And there was "him that sat on it" seen too.
"God commanded us to preach unto the people, and to testify that it is he (Jesus of Nazareth, ver.38), which was ordained of God to be the judge of quick and dead" (ver. 42), so said Peter.
"God now commandeth all men every where to repent; because he hath appointed a day, in which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he bath raised him from the dead." So testified Paul.)
Then we read "from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them."
Here, clearly, we have the end of all that on which, and in connection with which, man had been found, in time, a dweller upon earth. This last of God's acts in time is described, here, very briefly, "from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away." Peter also; in his second epistle, describes this scene; and tells us how it shall be brought to pass, " the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up" (2 Peter 3:10); "the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat" (ver.12).
Time (as men speak) is that portion of eternity which is measured and marked off in portions, in connection with man here on earth, where he was originally placed by God as the center and head of this earth's system. When the system itself passes, time (as we speak) passes with it. God's last act as to this earth is this causing the heavens and the earth which now are, and which are, by the word of God, "kept in store, reserved unto fire" (2 Peter 3.7), to pass away.
Some argue from what has been here, on earth, to what will be in another and entirely different system of things. And that what is true now would be true then. This is folly. If we do, by experience, know a little about things as they have been and are, yet do we know nothing correctly unless it be that which is derived from Scripture; and to God's word must we go, if we would know anything that lies beyond the passing away of the present system.
Next, we read of a judgment. And, mark it, I pray you, it is a judgment, not in this world, nor in the time of this world; but after "the earth and the heaven fled away," after the whole system has been purged by fire. But there is a judgment then. "And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works."
Who are judged? The dead only.
It is not a general judgment; but only of such as are, at that time, "the dead."
It is not a general judgment,-for the first resurrection had brought out of the grave (as God thought it due to Christ that it should be) all that were therein who had believed in and served Him.. "Blessed and holy is he that bath part in the first resurrection" (ver. 6). After living and reigning with Christ a thousand years, and being (together with those who had been alive and waiting for him, and had been changed), priests of God and of Christ (ver. 6) there is no question about judgment for them. God had shown what He thought it meet and right to do with those that slept in Jesus, and those that waited for Him. They had both been associated with His Son, reigning with Him a thousand years. Christ had come (1 Thess. 4) to raise those that slept through Jesus; to change those that were still alive and awaited Him. They will not be among the dead. But, from Adam downward, many had died as unrepentant sinners,—down even to the host of daring, open rebels, stirred up by Satan at the last: "Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle; the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city; and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them" (vers. 7-9).
Where are they to be judged? All that is said is—They stand before God.
There is no difference; the dead, small and great, stand before the throne. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them.
The trial will not turn upon human evidence. Books are to be opened-books of works; and another book to check them by-the book of life; that it may be shown that none that have their names in that book of life come into judgment. "And the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works"... "And they were judged every man according to their works."
Of the sentence, I may speak presently.
To two things I now call attention. First, that this scene presents "the dead" who have ceased to be in time; the scene is in "God's forever," and there they are: and Secondly, that they that stand to be judged, have been brought there by the resurrection power of the Lord Jesus Christ. If we turn to John 5 we shall see the proof of this second point.
There I read " the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son" (ver. 22). " And hath given him authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of man" (ver. 27). There are two resurrections mentioned here, the resurrection of life and the resurrection of judgment; both are the expression of His power, "marvel not at this: for the hour is coming; in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation" (vers. 28, 29). As to the first of these two classes, viz., those who partake of the resurrection unto life the Lord has known and wrought in them previously in a special way. This we find in vers. 24-26, " Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that heareth my word and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation but is passed from death unto life. Verily, verily, I say unto you the hour cometh, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live. For as the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself."
When- a creature; whose existence began yesterday, has to speak of his Creator, who is self existent and never had a beginning, surely humility and caution become him. I would remember this; yet where truth has been revealed in Scripture, that must, in all the details of it, be carefully gathered up as the humbled creature's safeguard against the cunning wiles and the vain reasonings of deceivers. In connection herewith, there are several things which I would now notice as to the Son of God.
First, because He is God, this same self-existence, this power to say "I am," the glory of being the First and the Last, is His. Himself, "the image of the invisible God" (Col. 1:15); "in him it was well pleasing that all fullness should dwell" (ver. 19); " in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily" (ch. 2:9).
Secondly, and more than this, He could say and did say " He that has seen me has seen the Father also" (John 14:9). "And now, O Father, glorify thou me, with thine own self, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was" (ch 17:4). Both these glories are referred to separately, in the first chapter of the Gospel of John. First it is said of Him, in His name of the Word, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God" (vers. 1, 2). And after, wards, "and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father" (ver. 14). "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him" (ver. 18). And of Him, as the Son, it is written, "Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power," etc. (Heb. 1:3).
Thirdly, the glories of being the alone Creator, the alone Upholder of everything, as also of being the one for whom all was made, are His.
"All things were made by him; and without him was not anything [not one thing] made that was made" (John 1:3). "God who created all things by Jesus Christ" (Eph. 3:9). "For by him were all things created that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers; all things were created by him, and for him; and he is before all things, and by him all things consist" (Col. 1:16,17).
Fourthly, as to the life which He gives to believers.
His own life is that which is God's, for He is God; and it has, therefore, all the moral character of God. He had in Himself, as God, immortality (1 Tim. 6:16) and incorruptibility but, as we saw above, in John 1 and Heb. 1, the whole moral character and glory of God was and is His, the Son's. I notice this because some speak as though the eternal life which He gives to the believer were merely the same thing as perpetuity of existence. When the Son of God speaks of having eternal life in Himself, which He gives to any that comes to Him, this is not merely perpetuity of existence: that is clear, for our life is "hid with Christ in God," and Christ himself is our life; "when Christ, who is our life, shall appear, we also shall appear with him in glory" (Col. 3:3,4). Certainly to any simple and honest mind such scriptures as these suggest far more than mere perpetuity of existence. As do these also: "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4); "born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God that liveth and abideth forever" (1 Peter 1.24); " the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us ... full of grace and truth. And of [out of] his fullness have all we received, and grace for grace" (John 1:14,16); " born ... of God" (John 1:13); "changed into the same image from glory to glory" (2 Cor. 3:18), etc. The Lord so makes us one with Himself in the Spirit, that without destroying our individuality as men having human life, He can speak of us who believe as having been crucified together with Him (Rom. 6:6), dead together with Him (2 Tim. 2:11); buried together with Him (Rom. 6:4); quickened together with Him, raised up together with, and made sit together with Him in heavenly places (Eph. 2:5,6). And this is true now. The mind that can see nothing more than perpetuity of existence in this, I can only suppose never tasted it. It is a spiritual nature, a moral being. Just so in speaking of "death," of "being dead," the Holy Ghost does not use these terms only in connection with the body. Besides Saul's "consenting unto the death of Stephen" (Acts 8:1), when he was stoned,-he (after Saul had become Paul) states of himself that he had, at that time, been "dead" as to God-"Even when we were dead in sins"; for he had persecuted the church, dear to God as it was (1 Cor. 15:9; Phil. 3, 6). He was morally, spiritually, dead.
But, again, I need not say that He "who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God" (Phil. 2:6), existed as God ere "he made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men" (ver. 7), and was "found in fashion as a man" (ver. 8). But I would remark that when God was manifest in the flesh, -that very body was one altogether peculiar,-born of a virgin, and this is told us in the angel's answer to Mary's question, "How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?" (Luke 1:34). "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee"; and as a consequence, "therefore, also, that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God" (ver. 35). Many overlook this truth that the babe, that which was born of Mary, shall be called Son of God.
And observe, too, here that as to the power of laying down His life as a man, and the power of taking it again, He was quite by Himself. "Therefore Both my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father" (John 10:17,18). Of what other man could this be said?
Again, observe here, a difference as to life itself. " The life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us" [in Jesus Christ] (1 John 1:2). This if, in Him, the source of all manifested life, is not the life of all the creatures. Nothing exists in creation wide, whether in heaven above, or on earth, or in the prison of wicked spirits, but what derived its life and being from Him. He made all good. In heaven, some fell-He still holds them in existence by the word of His power, fallen though they be. Man fell on earth: the race still lives on earth; and though death, the wages of sin, is at work on the human body, there is yet to be a resurrection of the just and a resurrection of the unjust. That He has given various kinds of life is clear. Angels, beasts, birds, fish, plants, men, etc., are the witnesses of various kinds of life, or of life in creatures of various kinds and entirely different destinies. In man he displays one life in how many various states and conditions; but of the heavenly saints alone can it be said, One Spirit with the Lord himself.
Resurrection is not part of God's law as laid down for Adam at his creation. It could not have been so, for death did not exist among men. When the Son of God so far identified Himself with man as to become seed of the woman, we learn that He was to be, also, Raiser of the dead, and Judge of quick and dead. When He comes for His own people, "and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation" (Heb. 9:28), He comes to fulfill his own promise made in John 5.24, as quoted above. In this resurrection there is no question of the merits of man, but only of the free gift of God, working on account of His estimate of Christ's merits. Now the first resurrection takes place in man's day, in time, from the earth as it is, and out from among the dead, one thousand years before the close of earth's history. And a body fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself (Phil. 3:21), one fit to go into the Father's house in, to see God in, and to share His glory in, the being like Him, when we see Him as He is, are gifts of His love. Gifts surely not natural to the position of Adam the first as placed in Eden, though natural enough for the last, Adam to give to those whom He has so associated with,, Himself that they can know that Christ Himself is their life (Col. 3:3,4). And this is our present blessing, according to John 14:19,20, "Yet a little time and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me: because...I live, ye shall live also. At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you."
But the resurrection of those who are to be judged, and judged according to their works-that does not take place in man's day of possessing this world, it is in God's eternity. None but the wicked rise then. They are raised by the power of One whom they knew not. Those who have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam, and perished in the gainsaying of Core, with every doer of unrighteousness, and the fearful, and the unbelieving, will then be raised without their consent, and against their every desire, raised in eternity, when time is no more, in God's eternity, and then the judgment will take place and the sentence be pronounced.
And now let me observe, that the language of the Bible is strictly the language of man in every-day life. It means what it says. Man with man makes himself understood very well without any school-master's over-accuracy, and no mistakes arise to the simple mind as to what he means. Is God the only one who cannot use language so as to correctly awaken man's mind to His meaning? I will take as an illustration of what I mean the words "forever." Who in every-day life, in the things of men, gets into any mistake about the words forever, or supposes that "forever," always means the same duration? No; the context always decides the sense. A father gave to a child a plaything. The child (but of five years old) asked " How long is this to be mine?" The father replied "forever." And the child said “Then it is my own, my very own; and I may burn it, if I like, or give it to my sister." Land is sold in Devonshire on leases of one, two, and four thousand years, but not “forever." A child was run over on the car-line; the judgment of the doctors at the hospital was that the child would be a cripple "forever." In all these, and in innumerable other cases which occur, there is no ambiguity, no mistake in the hearer's mind of what is meant; and is there to the simple man who, taught of God to be as a little child, takes the Scripture as it is written, any difficulty when God speaks? I speak as a fool; not as a wise man, nor as a learned man, but as a fool, who asks God to teach him, and who desires to let Scripture speak to him whatever it means -without vain reasonings or quibblings.
If I say, God is "forever," how long does this "forever" last? He who calls himself a Christian and hesitates to say "'tis an endless forever, the life of God," is a fool. And if, when the earth and time are passed, God, in God's endless forever, declares something is to be "forever," tis an endless forever, which God so pronounces, and will make good too. The bliss and blessedness of those who love the Lord Jesus Christ is as endless as is He who has loved them, and whom they love; and the woe of those brought up for judgment after man's for evers have ceased, and sent into torment, is too an endless forever: where their worm dieth not, and where their fire is not quenched (Mark 9:44).
God's word does use the words "forever," in the same way as do men for durations which have an end; but then it is said of something in man's day, and not when man's day, with all its subdivisions of time, is past. Ever and forever, etc., are so used-I give instances from Cruden's concordance-
Ever.
Lev. 6:13, fire shall ever be burning on the altar.
Psa. 25:15, mine eyes are ever toward the Lord.
Luke 15:31, and he said, Son, thou art ever with me.
Eph. 5:29, for no man ever yet hated his own flesh.
2 Tim. 3:7, ever learning, and never.
Forever.
Gen. 43:9, then let me bear the blame forever.
Ex. 12:14, a feast for an ordinance forever. 17. (said of the passover, a type until Christ came).
Ex. 21:6, bore his ear, and he shall serve him forever.
Ex. 32:13, give this land, and they shall inherit it forever.
Lev. 25:30, the house shall be established forever to him.
The "forever" of the Mosaic economy, with its mediatorship, priesthood, sanctuary, nation, etc., seeing that it all pointed on to another, the Lord Jesus Christ, was necessarily limited to the duration of that economy. Just as the " forever" of a man's service to another was limited to his life.
So again-
1 Kings 9:3, this house built, to put my name there forever.
2 Kings 5:27, leprosy cleave to thee and to thy seed forever.
Psa. 30:12, I will give thanks to thee forever.
Isa. 35:6, Jonadab said, Ye shall drink no wine forever.
Jonah 2:6, earth with her bars was about me forever.
How different is the "forever" in the above cases to its sense, where it is used either of God himself, or of the truth of His word, or of the blessedness which awaits His own people. That of which when time is done, and it is in God's eternity, the weal or the woe is "forever," is surely an endless portion; whether of the good, bound up in one bundle of life with the Christ of God, or of the wicked raised up in the day of God, still haters of Him and of His Son.
Rom. 1:2:5, the Creator, who is blessed forever.
Rom. 9:5, Christ, who is over all, God blessed forever.
Heb. 13:8, Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever.
1 Peter 1:23, the word of God, which liveth forever.
1 Peter 1:2.5, the word of the Lord endureth forever.
Gal. 1:5, God to whom be glory forever and ever. Phil. 4:20; 1 Tim. 1:17; 2 Tim. 4:18; Heb. 13:21.
Rev. 4:9, to him that sat on the throne, who liveth forever and ever. 10. 5:14; 10:6; 15:7.
Rev. 20:10, tormented day and night forever and ever.
Rev. 12:5, and they shall reign forever and ever.
Any one can follow out this as to the terms everlasting, eternal, evermore, etc.
My statement is plain, and, I trust, distinct. The words " forever," " ever," etc., if they are applied to anything or person, in man's day, may be a duration limited by the context, short or long. But if presented to us as being said of God, or of anything found in His presence, when man's day is passed, their they areas much for perpetuity as is the God who announces them; their "forever" is as long as His.
Reader! may God grant unto you, and unto me also, to receive His word as a little child, and to bow to it.