The Judging

DEVOTION

THE GOSPEL OF JOHN

THE JUDGING

John 12:44-50

44 Then Jesus cried out, "When a man believes in me, he does not believe in me only, but in the one who sent me. 45 When he looks at me, he sees the one who sent me. 46 I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness. 47 "As for the person who hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge him. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save it. 48 There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; that very word which I spoke will condemn him at the last day. 49 For I did not speak of my own accord, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it. 50 I know that his command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say." 

NIV

We have certainly got the point about Jesus being the light and that he was sent by the Father to redeem all people who are sinners, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We know without question that we were all in darkness, in the darkness of our own mind, our own life and that when we heard the words of Jesus and believed we were taken out of that darkness and brought into the wonderful light of Jesus. As for those who hear his words and do not believe, well it says not keep, but we cannot keep them unless we believe them and this keeping is not in the sense of the Pharisees keeping the Law, but it is in the sense that we must continue to believe in him, continue to look to him for our salvation. As we see Jesus does not judge us but the Father will judge and it is clear what he is judging. He will judge whether or not a person accepted the words of Jesus. Some people might think that God judges all our sin, that we must stand before him and see a video of sorts of all the sins we ever committed in our life. Yet the scripture is quite clear that once he forgives us he will never bring our sins up again. He tells us that he will remember them no more. So then this judging is all about whether we have believed and continued to believe the words of Jesus all our lives until the day of our ascension or rapture, or how ever else we want to call the day we stand before the almighty Father in heaven or if we have not believed. It comes down to that parable Jesus told about the goats and the sheep, the judging is all about whether we are in or out. This command is to believe and to keep on believing, to keep his words, yes in a sense to obey his words, which is to believe. We know our salvation cannot be dependent on our strict obedience to all the law, or to all the, what we would call, the rules Jesus set up, the commands for living a holy and righteous life, for we can never accomplish being totally free of some sin. It is impossible in the human form to live totally without any sin at all, if we think we are, we are lying to ourselves and God. So this keeping is not keeping every command to perfection, although we certainly should endeavor to live a life which pleases God. Yet the greatest pleasure he takes in us is in our believing the words of Jesus telling us he came to die for our sins, that we might leave the darkness and come into the light and be saved by the grace of God. Surely our life as we live it, with all our failures, all our faults, all our sin is not pleasing to God, but because we are in Christ, he is pleased with us and he will judge us accordingly and we will hear those words, come and enter into my rest. So we can rest in the simple fact, we have accepted, still they are others who have rejected. The judge will decide.