Sm and Judgment to Come 45 And this will be the scope and purpose of the judgment of the Great Day. The transcendent question of the ultimate fate of men must be settled before the advent of that day; for the resurrection will declare it and the resurrection pre- cedes the judgment. For there is a “resurrection unto life,” and a “resurrection unto judgment” (John 5:29). While the redeemed, we are expressly told, will be “raised in glory”—• and “we know that we shall be like Him,” with bodies “fash- ioned like unto His glorious body” (Phil. 3:21)—the lost will be raised in bodies; but here I pause, for Scripture is almost silent on this subject, and conjecture is unsafe. It may be that just as criminals leave a prison in garb like that they wore on entering it, so the doomed may reappear in bodies akin to those that were the instruments of their vices and sins on earth. If the saved are to be raised in glory and honor and incorruption, (1 Cor. 15:42-44), may not the lost be recalled to bodily life in corruption, dishonor and shame? JUDGMENT TO COME But though the supreme issue of the destiny of men does not await that awful inquest, “judgment to come” is a reality for all. For it is of the people of God that the Word declares “we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ,” and “every one of us shall give account of himself to God” (Rom. 14:10, 12). And that judgment will bring reward to some and loss to others. Incalculable harm results from that sort of teaching which dins into the ears of the unconverted that they have no power to live a pure and decent life, and which deludes the Christian into thinking that at death he will for- feit his personality by losing all knowledge of the past, and that heaven is a fool’s paradise where waters of Lethe will wipe out our memories of earth. “We must all be made manifest before the judgment-seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he hath done, whether it be good or bad” (2 Cor. 5 :10).
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