Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts: and then shall every man have praise of God (1 Corinthians 4:5).
When I was a boy, I often heard my father say, ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’ He would usually utter this pained phrase just under his breath after watching one more person take their place in the long line of people who rewarded his many acts of assistance and help with bitterness, anger, or perhaps worst of all, indifference. He was a ‘steward of the mysteries of God’, a minister in Christ’s church, and so he was very used to being on the receiving end of the slings and arrows which inevitably fly from the wounded men whose sinful madness has convinced them to lash out at the one trying to treat their affliction.
The Apostle Paul, who coined the phrase ‘stewards of the mysteries of God’ to describe himself and his fellow-laborers in the great gospel harvest, felt the sting of betrayal quite often during his earthly ministry. It is not for nothing that our Lord described Paul in this way,’…he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel: For I will shew him how great things he must suffer for my name’s sake’ (Acts 9:15-16). When we consider the suffering of Paul, we usually think of stonings and beatings and imprisonments and shipwrecks, we think of all the times he was compelled to show his unending love for the Lord who had saved him by presenting his own body to be cut down and mauled, but there were also countless hours of struggle and conflict to keep the churches he had planted all over the world from descending into heresy and strife.
Despite all of his sacrifices, Paul finds himself under judgment from a faction of the Corinthian church. Various eloquent speakers had shown up and undermined his authority among a people very used to judging men based on the outward trappings of our dying world. As Christians living in this strange and contradictory world ourselves, we too face the judgment of our confused but outwardly confident neighbors: people who speak with an unearned authority gleaned from snippets of shallow philosophy they found while rummaging through the trash bin of the internet. Despite our ever-accelerating grasping toward some illusory, technocratic heaven on earth, our world has much in common with what we find in the Book of Judges, ‘In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes’ (Judges 21:25).
The ignorant judgment of man is a consequence of the fall and thus cannot be cured by gadgets or good intentions, so we must ground our understanding of truth and goodness in the God who changes not. As Paul tells the Corinthians, ‘But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man’s judgment: yea, I judge not mine own self’ (1 Corinthians 4:3). ‘A very small thing,’ is the judgment of ignorant men, so we need not spend one minute of our lives obsessing over what people who have not even begun to wrestle with the truth think about us. More importantly, we cannot let them pressure us into conforming to their way of death. For their corrupt moral systems by which they judge us, being disconnected from the divine font of wisdom, are simply figments of their imaginations—as truly applicable to your life as a bad Hallmark movie.
Further, as Paul makes clear, my own judgment matters little in the grand scheme of life and death. People like to say, ‘You can’t judge me, you haven’t walked in my shoes’ or some such colloquial variant, but we must understand that we are terribly unreliable witnesses when it comes to testifying against ourselves. Given enough time, I’m sure I could justify basically every stupid thing I have ever done, but to whom would I be seeking justification? How very convenient of me to establish a courtroom in which I am not only on trial, but I also get to serve as prosecutor, judge, and jury. It is amazing how many cases I can win in that courtroom of one. Is this justice? No, of course not, but fallen men do not want justice, not true justice. People tend to want their enemies punished or those who’ve done them wrong to be destroyed, but when it comes to our own trespasses and sins, we want nothing but second chances and do overs. It takes an act of God to move men’s hearts away from the tragic consequences of imagining ourselves to be little judgmental gods: false gods who lack the courage to live with the reality our personal reigns of terror create.
Let us not live in this lie for even one second. For there is a judge of all men, as we read in Revelation, ‘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. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.’ (Revelation 20-12-15). It may be hard for us to imagine, but the Apostle John shares this vision with the church of all ages to provide us with immense and abiding comfort. Do we feel comforted when John graphically describes the exaltation of the good and the utter destruction of all evil? We should feel no comfort at all if we imagine our personal judgment of ourselves or the judgment of our neighbors will count for anything when the universe of nature and supernature cracks open like a hatching egg to reveal the purpose of everything. The only judgment which will matter is the judgment of the creator, sustainer, and redeemer of everything, and so Paul submits himself to the judge whose gavel rings through eternity, not as some appeal to his own merit, but rather as a recognition of reality, something all men will face sooner or later.
Time then is the only thing which separates our world of lies from the truth: all lies have an expiration date. As Paul writes, ‘Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts: and then shall every man have praise of God’ (1 Cor. 4:5). All the secret things will be made known in time, and they will be revealed by the judge of the earth whose light pierces the darkness and reveals just how wrong the herds of the confidently ignorant have always been.
But how does this judgment begin. From the mouth of the judge, ‘I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness. And if any man hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not: for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world. He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day’ (John 12:46-48). ‘…I came not to judge the world, but to save the world…’, here is where we go to meet the One who has filled Paul with the confidence to stand before emperors and princes and ungrateful backstabbers. Paul knows he can face them all because he knows he has been justified by the One who justifies the ungodly; the One who goes out into the darkness to find those worthy of death only to die in their place, to take the punishment the perfect judge knows they deserve and let that punishment crush Him instead.
Paul is a humble steward of this mystery, this revelation of who God is that flows through the preached word and the rightly administered sacraments directly into the stone hearts of a broken humanity—smashing and renovating and reviving the walking dead into creatures worthy of God’s praise. Nah, not just praise, but a share in the work of the divine. What does Paul say a few verses later to the Corinthians, ‘Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world? and if the world shall be judged by you, are ye unworthy to judge the smallest matters? Know ye not that we shall judge angels?’ (1 Cor. 6:2-3). What we must begin to understand is that one of the things which will be revealed in the second coming, the second Advent of our Lord, is just what it means to be an image bearer of the Almighty God. Your precious time on this fallen planet, time filled with joy and pain, hope and fear, that time is not in vain, for it is the exact amount of time the God of time has determined it will take to make you a holy saint; a saint who will rule and judge a creation put right. Time will strip the lies away, especially the lies we tell ourselves.
May we daily rise to meet this destiny.