66 The Fundamentals glory'; and before Him shall be gathered all nations; and He shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats; and He shall set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left” (Matt. 25:31-33). His voice will utter the cheering words, “Come, ye blessed,” and the awful sentence, “Depart, ye cursed” (Matt. 25:31-46). Without hesitation, equivocation, or compromise Jesus of Nazareth repeatedly assumed the right and the ability to dis- criminate the moral character and desserts of all mankind from Adam to the day of doom. His sublime consciousness of uni- versal supremacy relieved the claim of everything like audacity, and only made it the natural sequence of His incarnate God- head. “All power,” He said, “is given unto Me in heaven and in earth” (Matt. 28:18). This idea germinated in the minds of His followers and apostles. The vivid picture recorded in the twenty-fifth chap- ter of Matthew gave a coloring to all their subsequent thoughts about their divine Master. They ever after spake of Him as “ordained to be the Judge of the quick and the dead” (Acts 10:42; 17:31). They testified that “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ ; that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad” (2 Cor. 5 :10; Rom. 14:10). Thus the mind of John the Apostle was prepared for the subsequent revelations of Patmos, when he heard his glorified Lord claim to “have the keys of hell and of death” (Rev. 1 :18), and saw the vision of the “great white throne, and Him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away” (Rev. 20:11). But who is this that claims to grasp and wield the thunder- bolts of eternal retribution; who professes to be able to scrutin- ize the secret purposes and motives, as well as the words and deeds, of every man that has been bom, from the first dawn of personal responsibility to the day of death? Can any- thing short of indwelling omniscience qualify Him for such
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