Jeremiah 23:9-25:14
God judges people. Just to write that statement feels like I’m intentionally wrapping myself up in a huge spider web and tinkling the cord to beckon the tarantula. I might as well be saying “please whack me on the head with a tennis racquet”. Judgement is just such an unpopular concept today that we go to great lengths never to speak of it. We like to hold back on making definitive statements and we talk about journeys and things being ‘difficult’. And while that all can be fabulously helpful for us as we relate to one another we have to always maintain the fact that God judges us all. God looks at every single one of us and calls some of us good and some of us bad. It is as black and white as that. But before we leap into Dante’s inferno, it is worth checking out Jeremiah’s baskets of figs. God does see some people as good and some people as bad but his judgement is not based on human terms and is, in fact, quite shocking. The dividing line for people was not whether they were living in the promised land or offering their sacrifices at the temple or paying their tythe to the priests. It wasn’t about how many good things people were doing. The diving line for God between good and bad was determined purely by whether people had tried to obey His call to go into exile or whether they had ignored it and tried to doggedly cling onto their own fortunes in Israel. The judgement was on how people had responded to God, not about how much better they were than each other. And - get this for a head funk - those who God judged to be good were actually the ones who were in bondage and despair. The prisoners and the deportees and the slaves and the displaced were the ones who God saw as good, not because of their impoverished status but because they were willing to become poor for the sake of obeying Him. God will judge us all and he will reward those who pay the price for him.
1 Thessalonians 4:1-18
And so we will be with the Lord for ever. That is a phrase worth repeating over and over and over and over. That is a phrase so monumental that I want to tattoo it on my soul. I want to exude it with every pump of my lungs and every beat of my heart. Whatever life looks like now, no matter how beautiful or how savage, it will all fade into nothingness when He comes. Never mind about this cloud image and being caught up in the air - N T Wright has written really insightfully on this if you want to explore it further - what is really being rattled out here is the defining hope of the early church. That all the saints will go marching into the kingdom of Jesus to join him reigning over his flawless eternal paradise. Whether we die or remain alive, whether we are ugly or beautiful, knackered or full of beans we will be swung into his victory parade to dance arm in arm with people from every century and nation and people-group and culture. And he will be over us all and close to us all and fulfilling us all and smiling at us all. Let’s encourage each other with this thought. Let’s encourage each other with these words.
Proverbs 24:23-34
“An honest answer is like a kiss on the lips”. I’ll remind Lesley of that next time she wants my opinion on her outfit.
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