Sin and Judgment to Come 47 ing; and secondly, that His warnings of divine judgment upon sin were more terrible than even the thunders of Sinai. Dur ing all the age in which the echoes of those thunders mingled with the worship of His people, the prophetic spirit could discern the advent of a future day of full redemption. And it was in the calm and sunshine of the dawning of that long promised day that He spoke of a doom more terrible than that which engulfed the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah, for all who saw His works and heard His words, and yet repented not. THE PERFECT STANDARD And here we may get hold of a great principle which will help us to reconcile seemingly conflicting statements of Scrip ture, and to silence some of the cavils of unbelief. The thoughtful will recognise that in divine judgment the standard must be perfection. And when thus tested, both the proud religionist Christendom “exalted to heaven” like Capernaum by outward privilege and blessing, and the typical savage of a degraded heathendom, must stand together. If God accepted a lower standard than perfect righteousness He would declare Himself unrighteous; and the great problem of redemption is not how He can be just in condemning, but how He can be just in forgiving. In a criminal court “guilty or not guilty” is the first question to be dealt with in every case, and this levels all distinctions; and so it is here; all men “come short,” and therefore “all the world” is brought in “guilty before God.” But after verdict comes the sentence and at this stage the question of degrees of guilt demands consider ation. And at “the Great Assize” that question will be decided with perfect equity. For some there will be many stripes, for others there will be few. In the vision given us of that awful scene we read that “the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works’’ (Rev. 20:12).
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