Revelation 20:11-15 The Final Judgement

You're listening to the podcast of the Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches through his series, Thy Kingdom Come, taking us through the book of Revelation. Let's listen in.

Good morning, everybody. I'm Don Filsak. I'm the lead pastor here. I just want to be the first to welcome you to Recast Church. Maybe not the first. Hopefully somebody greeted you at the door as well.

But we're going to go ahead and get started here. I love to hear the chatter, by the way. That's not a bad thing. I love it that people are talking and interacting, and that's a major part of what it means to be a church.

But a special welcome to those of you that are checking this thing out. I recognize that maybe church in a school is not what you're used to, and so glad that you've stepped out to try something different this morning, and glad that you're here.

And a special welcome to those of you that call this your church as well. Just glad that you're here and that you've gathered together on this crisp fall morning to worship God. I have one quick announcement before we get started this morning.

It's kind of an exciting announcement to me, but we will be having a special meeting. And when I say special meeting, I think it's a very special meeting on October 9th. The timing of that is going to be announced.

We don't have the exact time yet. I don't know if it's going to be in the evening or maybe immediately following the service, and so we're working through some of the details there. But October 9th, the purpose of that meeting is going to be to vote on a loan in order to begin the process of building.

So you can go ahead and do that if you'd like. I mean, that's all right. Especially those, I noticed that some of the people on the set up and tear down crew were clapping louder than everybody else. So you can hear some cheers in there.

It does take quite a bit to set things up here, even though we've just got kind of a small area here. It's still quite a bit. The elders have settled unanimously on a proposal that we will be bringing to you for your approval.

And part of that, it requires two weeks of announcements that that vote is coming up. So this is one of them. Next Sunday, absentee ballots will be available that will spell out all the details. And all of the details of the vote will be available for you next Sunday morning, October 2nd.

And all ballots will be due by the end of the meeting on October 9th. We're going to be sending every member a ballot as well in the mail, so that everybody that's a member here currently will be sure to get one of those ballots, even if it's by post office.

But again, they'll be available here. You do not need to attend the meeting to vote. And to be quite honest, we talked at the family meeting, we covered a lot of Q &A about the building and things like that.

If you have questions about the loan, you can feel free. Maybe you can't make the meeting when we get that on the schedule. You might not be able to make that time, but feel free to set up a time to talk with me about it at any time.

You can contact the office, talk to Haley even this morning. If you've got questions or concerns or you want to know a little bit more of the details in advance, we can walk through that as well. But I think this would also be equally a good time to talk in terms of membership.

Membership at Recast is about spiritual accountability more than anything else. And yet we recognize that those who have willingly entered into that formal relationship with the church for spiritual accountability have more commitment and more intentional investment in the church because they've taken that formal step.

And so that's all part of that whole voting process. Anybody can vote. We allow anybody here to vote. You can grab a ballot next week. And even if you're not a member here, you can vote and let your wishes be made known.

But approval of the loan will be based on the majority of the voting membership. Now it's not too late to enter into the membership process before that vote takes place. But be sure you're not doing it only so that you get your vote to count.

Okay, that would be a poor reason to join a church. Membership is more than just the right to have your vote count. It's really a define-the-relationship kind of commitment that you're doing where you're letting everyone else know that you need church community and that you recognize that the church needs what you have to offer as well.

And so it is a formal spiritual entering into relationship. Yeah, DTR, there you go, define-the-relationship. That's up on the screen there. But it is a formal kind of defining that and saying, I'm here and I'm calling this my church.

I'm going to confess that over the years, it's been seven years since we started Recast, I don't know what level people are at in their involvement here unless we have a one-on-one discussion or you join through membership.

And so that helps me as a pastor to kind of know, oh, I guess they're really here. I see people come and go on a regular basis, and I have over seven years. But when somebody actually commits in membership, I recognize that they're saying that this is their place.

Applications for membership are available at the welcome table any Sunday. You can ask Haley for where those are if you can't find them in the little file folder that's out there. But there's a file folder, and one of the files is labeled application for membership, and those are available there.

But with all of that out of the way, I want to take a minute to explain our short and very heavy text that we're going to be looking at this morning in Scripture before we come to worship and worship in song, obviously.

I hope you were worshiping before you got here. But God has designed me personally as your pastor with a strong commitment to his word. That's just over the course of years and over the course of experience, and really part of that's a byproduct of where I attended Bible college and where I attended seminary, and then just people that God led into my life, and maybe even part of that is the pastor that I had growing up.

Just an expositional walk through the Bible is really how God has designed me and what I feel convicted of. I don't get up and I don't preach quips or anecdotes or movie clips, headlines, newspaper articles, or even spiritual therapy.

Although I do believe that God's word does have a therapeutic effect in that it helps to correct and make us more whole, that we don't come to God's word because sometimes what we need, how many of you know that sometimes we don't need to be healed in our brokenness?

Instead, sometimes we need a two-by-four upside the head. Have you ever been there in life? And so spiritual therapy is not what my preaching is about. It's about making God's word known so that sometimes we do need that.

Sometimes we do need therapy, right? Sometimes we need a correction in our heart where we are broken over something and God just comes in and gently grabs our heart and holds us, right? Sometimes that's what we need.

But then there's other times, man, I need conviction. I need to be slugged. And so that's the reality of the way that God has made me, and I want to be a man who preaches the word of God. And so truth be told, over the last seven years, that has meant for us at various times that we've had to be uncomfortable.

We've had to be uncomfortable with some of these texts. We've had to kind of go, well, there's my culture on the one side, and then there's the text on the other, and I'm going to have to make a choice here.

I'm going to have to pick one or the other, and that's not always comfortable. Some subjects that are just not our favorites will occasionally be the topic for the morning. And this morning, we are coming up against the final of all final judgments, the great white throne judgment, and ultimately the culmination of that is hell itself, eternal torment for those who have rebelled against their creator.

This morning, we're going to be studying just five short verses in the book of Revelation, and I would challenge you that I don't believe you could find a single one of these five verses on a coffee mug anywhere.

I don't think you're going to find the coffee mug. I think you could search the planet over, and you're not going to find a single one of these verses on a coffee mug to start your morning. You're not going to find them on a motivational poster.

You're not going to find them on anybody's dining room wall. You know how people like to put their verses, they like, what is that, the stickers that they put on their walls for, you know, verses. You're not going to find these verses there.

But ironically, I'm going to contend that maybe they should be there. Maybe they should be there in a variety of different motivations, a variety, when we get down to the applications, we're going to talk about what if it was on your coffee mug.

What if it was the first thought? What if these five verses were there for you to contemplate and consider as you started out your day? How would your day look differently? Because as we get to the very end of it all, and when I say the end of it all, I don't mean the end of the book, I mean the end of all human existence as we know it.

When we get to that final judgment, God is not holding back anything and boldly proclaiming his just and righteous judgment. And all Scripture is meant to motivate you and me. It's meant to motivate all of us.

All Scripture is intended to change us now. All Scripture is recorded so that we might apply it to our lives in 2016. Not in some future notion, not in some far out there, well, this is going to happen 100 ,000, you know, 2 ,000 years from now, but it's meant to change us where we live.

And I would suggest to you that if these verses were on your coffee mug every morning, you might live a different kind of day. So let's open our books, Bibles, to Revelation 20, verses 11 through 15. Again, it's Revelation 20, verses 11 through 15.

If you don't have a Bible, please raise your hand. Mark's got some back here. We just want everybody to have a copy of God's Word so that you can go through it with us throughout the morning. And so if you didn't bring a Bible or a means to navigate there, grab one of those, and you can take that home with you too.

We want everybody to have a copy of God's Word with them that they can take home. But Revelation 20, verses 11 to 15, recast. Remember, this is God's Word to us. This is a powerful thing that transcends anything that you read, anything that we take in visually.

This is what God desires for you and I to know this morning. Then I, remember this is John, the apostle John speaking, receiving visions. Then I saw a great white throne, and him who was seated on it.

From his presence, earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life, and the dead were judged by what was written in the books according to what they had done.

And the sea gave up the dead who were in it. Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire.

This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. Let's pray as the band comes to lead us in worship this morning.

Father, everyone in this room is a sinner. That's a given. Maybe the one thing that I know about everyone here, there's not a whole lot of other common ground, but I know that to be true, about everyone's heart.

And so we can come across a text like this and see all of those who are condemned, those whose name are not written in your book, cast into the lake of fire. It can be terrifying to us. It can seem unjust to us.

We could put you on the bench and try you and determine whether or not this is kind, whether or not this is good, whether or not this is loving. You're the creator and we've rebelled against you. And so, Father, I pray that you would open our eyes to the devastation of this judgment, but equally to the glory and joy of your salvation.

You've opened a way that none need to endure this fate, but rather come to you because you've provided an opportunity. So, Father, I pray that as your redeemed people, we would rejoice this morning. That you are making a way forward for your just and right king who will set up an eternal kingdom without sin and that you will indeed remove sin from the picture and it will be done away with one final time.

It's not super pleasant or exciting the way that that's all going to go down and at the same time, we rejoice in the result. We are very thankful and grateful that you have an eternal kingdom out there for us.

And I pray that you would move in our hearts, that we would apologize to you for the rebellion that we have committed and that from that place, we would rejoice and praise you with songs this morning.

In Jesus' name, amen. Well, I want to start out by just saying thank you to Dave and the band for leading us in worship. And I also want to just say thank you to Haley. I don't know if she's still in here, but she is.

I don't know if you recognize that although—go ahead and stand up for a second. Although—is that all right? Although she's been working for us, it has been a ministry. It's a ministry, even though working in the office and she's been working, obviously, as the administrative assistant.

Yeah, thanks. You can go ahead and sit down. She's like, I don't know what to do. Yeah, yeah. Yes, you need to. No. But just very grateful for the work and the time and the energy that she's put in. And like she said, she's still going to be around here.

And so just grateful for that. I want to encourage you all to get comfortable. I recognize maybe this is your first time here, and so you're not quite sure how we roll. But you can get up and get more coffee, get more donuts, juice, whatever you need.

And then also, you're not going to distract me if that seat gets uncomfortable and you need to get up and stretch out in the back or whatever. The main purpose is that over the next half an hour or so, we can keep our focus on God's word.

And if anything becomes a distraction to you, just try to keep your focus on God's word. And that means also keeping your Bibles open to Revelation 20, verses 11 through 15. If you came in after we read that, that's our text for this morning.

That's my outline. That's the structure. That's where we're going. So having that available so you can reference it from time to time is beneficial. And as I mentioned, this week we come to a pretty intense text.

You heard me read it, and it's kind of an abrupt ending of condemnation and people being thrown in the lake of fire. And then we come to worship, right? And that can be pretty tough. But the fact of the matter is we've seen cycles of judgment throughout this book already.

Judgments upon the earth really are the bulk of this text, the main movement of the cycles of the trumpets and the bowls and the wrath of God being poured out. And we saw the removal already of Antichrist and the false prophet two weeks ago, and they were cast in the lake of fire.

Last week we saw the demise of Satan himself, the evil one, the dragon, the ancient serpent, who was also cast into the lake of fire. And now there are just a couple of things that stand between Jesus and his eternal perfect kingdom.

And I say that because the title of this entire series through the book of Revelation is Thy Kingdom Come. What we're seeing when we're looking at the book of Revelation is the revealing of the king, the revelation of the king, and his bringing in and ushering in an eternal kingdom for those he has redeemed that will worship him in perfection without sin and with righteousness, without death, without any of the effects of sin.

And so we, I mentioned at the beginning of a lot of my sermons throughout the series that we, that things need to change, right? Like the things need to change from your every day in and day out weekday to get from where we live today to a kingdom without sin.

Like how many of you recognize that there's a radical shift that must happen in order for us to get from where we live here in 2016 to a place of sinless perfection, without racism, without all of this killing and slaughter that we're seeing going on in our, on our streets.

Who would have thought that America would be where it is right now 20 years ago? And yet we see all kinds of difficulties, all kinds of problems, all kinds of strife. It seems to me like violence is on the increase.

Would you guys agree with me on that? It just seems like that seems to be the tendency in the headlines, and maybe our media is just covering it more. Maybe they're sharing more detail. I don't know. Maybe it's not necessarily increased because the fact of the matter is there's been violence from the first sin.

From Cain and Abel we see the institution and the beginning of violence and the way that it takes root in our lives. But there's just a couple of things that stand between Jesus and his eternal perfect kingdom, and it is sin and death.

Human rebellion is sin, rebellion against the Creator, and it takes all kinds of forms and manifests itself in all kinds of ways in our hearts and in our lives. Everything from spiritual pride is a sin, and self-righteousness, going through the motions and thinking that we have earned God's favor is sin, all the way to rejecting him and mocking him is sin, right?

So there's a huge, a huge spectrum of what constitutes human rebellion. But then we also know that the primary effect of that, what was promised us in the garden after sin, was that death would be our reality.

And we live our entire lives in the shadow of death, or the valley of the shadow of death. All of it is lived under that specter of a limited time frame. All of us have to come face-to-face with our own mortality and recognize that there's a day coming for us.

There's a reality in which we are limited. And so that needs to be dealt with. Sin and death need to be dealt with in order to get to an eternal kingdom without sin and death. Those have to be resolved.

Those are entrenched in our human experience and in the world around us, and it's got to be done away with. And God has promised all throughout Scripture that a great and terrible final day of judgment is coming.

All the way back in the Old Testament prophets, probably not many of us spent our quiet time there this week in reading the Old Testament prophets. It's good reading. It takes a little bit with a little bit of work and a little bit of struggle and wrestling to get down to the meanings of these things, and yet it's very, very rich and very rewarding if you do.

But there's a lot of prophecies there about the coming day of the Lord and the final judgment. And our text begins this morning with John's vision of a huge, bright throne. Now he's, remember, given vision after vision after vision.

He's recording them, not necessarily in chronological order of the way that they're going to transpire in the future, but in the way that he received these visions. And in this particular vision, he sees a huge, bright throne.

White regularly symbolizes purity, and many times we've seen that God will judge the nations in righteousness and truth, in purity. And God himself sits on this throne, and before his presence, it says in the text, the earth and the sky flee, but they cannot escape.

They want to get away. I believe it's a metaphor here. It isn't meant to be taken literally as if the earth in the end times is going to escape its orbit of the sun and take off into interstellar space trying to get away from God, right?

He's not a literal trying to escape. It's a metaphor given to John to show the intensity of this great day of judgment and the reasonable fear of this great judge. It is a terrifying thing for sinners to fall into the hands of the Almighty.

And the desire to run is a pretty natural response. What did Adam do when God confronted him in the garden after he sinned? He hid himself. Sinners do not want to be in the presence of God. Sinners, by nature, desire to get away.

And the psalmist in Psalm 139 said something similar in poetic form, just thinking about the omnipresence of God, a big word that just means that he is everywhere at the same time. The psalmist in 139 said, Where can I hide from his presence?

Where can I go to be kind of private and away from the searching gaze of God? Where can I go to be away from him? And then he lists places he might try to hide from God. But in the end, he concludes, God is everywhere.

There is no place to run and hide from God. At the end times, there will be a desire to run, but no one can flee. There's no running, no hiding from this great day of judgment that is coming. But instead, we see in the text that the dead, great and small, will be gathered before the throne of God.

And just to get this out of the way, you might be wondering, am I going to be there? That's a pretty fundamental question at this judgment. You're like, am I going to be present for this judgment? This is pretty intense.

It seems like everybody wants to get away. What's going on here? And I want to be honest with you that I don't know for sure, for certainty, if we will or will not be here. I lean toward this being strictly a judgment for unbelievers.

I think that that's the case. And there are scholars that I read throughout this week that are right down the middle on this. Half of the commentaries that I read were saying, yes, we're there. Half of them were saying, no, we're not.

But I think that the phrase dead in verse 12 helps to inform why I believe that this is indeed just unbelievers. I think it's metaphorical rather than literal. I think this is the dead as in the spiritually dead.

Last week, we saw the second resurrection in our text at the end of the millennium, which indicates that all are alive at the arrival of this. They are reunited with their bodies. There has been one resurrection preceding the millennium for those who are his, and then there's another resurrection that is after the millennium.

And now all are alive and restored to their bodies, their physical bodies. And now we come to this judgment. So how could they be dead? And I believe that they're spiritually dead. But last week, we saw Jesus share his authority to judge with his saints.

And it seems quite possible in context then that we will take part in this judgment. We will be there, but not as defendants, but as judges. We will actually, in some way, shape, or form, take part in this judgment as judges alongside of our Savior.

But the worst-case scenario, if I'm wrong, I want to clarify for you. If I'm wrong and we go through this, the worst-case scenario is that we stand before God, the books are open, and he will declare to us our utter guilt from the book of the record of human deeds.

And how many of you recognize that if he opens that book on us, we would rightly and justly be in trouble? Do you recognize that? We would be in trouble. And yet, we don't have anything to worry about.

As Jesus will say, that ledger has been paid. There is no debt with this one. And we will be acquitted, released, adopted, and eternally loved by our Lord and Savior. I believe we're already promoted before this judgment happens, but the worst that will happen is we'll get a chance to review the great debt that we've been forgiven.

That's a pretty amazing reality. A huge debt that we have been forgiven. But if I'm right, and then this is a judgment for only those who are indeed unbelievers, and this is a judgment for those who were great in this world, and those who were small in this world, but remain spiritually dead.

And I think a lot of times in our mind, we have a category in our mind, or a way of thinking about the final judgment, or the way that things kind of go down, that we anticipate that more people in poverty will be promoted, and more people that are rich will be in trouble.

And some of the things that Jesus said have been taken a little bit out of context and a little misapplied. But at the same time, this is a very clear indication that at that judgment, there will be both kings and homeless people.

Everyone who is not spiritually alive will be present together, and they'll all be in the same boat together.

And they will stand before their Maker, and the books, the books,.

Let that sink in, the books will be opened. Many will stand in the very presence of the One that they sought to mock, to ridicule, to persecute, to deny. Many of those standing there will be in the presence of the One that they denied and refused to worship.

And all of those dead will stand in the presence of the One that they rebelled against in their own heart. It's a truly terrifying thought. Does that seem heavy? That is very heavy. And every indication is that the first set of books opened are a record of the deeds of all humanity.

We could say it so much that it's merely cliche that God is watching us, right? How many of you just kind of knew that as a given? God's watching you, God's observing you. Now, you might not be mindful of that throughout the day.

We might live a little bit differently if we thought that routinely and regularly. Sometimes we let that thought slip from our minds and we move on to different things or whatever, and then we can find ourselves by Wednesday really needing a significant reminder that God is with us, right?

Traffic jams really need a good reminder that God is there with you. It's so much more than a cliche. And it's funny that we live in a world that is currently undergoing a huge shift regarding privacy, right?

We have a culture that longs for privacy and then shares everything about ourselves on social media. Think about the irony in that. We want the freedom to share whatever we want, when we want to, but we want to be able to control who can see it?

Yep, some people are laughing because you get how ironic that is, right? That's nonsensical. But our problem, our problem in our lives in a genuine way is more than that the NSA is listening in to our cell phone calls, which I think they are.

It's more problematic than Russian hackers getting into our private e-mail servers. But our problem is that not only is our entire life being watched, but our entire life is being recorded. It's being recorded.

Whoa, that's heavy. Let that pull you up short for just a second. Life is being recorded. This text indicates, even if it's merely metaphorical, even if there's no physical, literal book, which I don't know if there is or isn't.

I don't know if we're going to see a book or if it's just a metaphor. Again, we're talking about apocalyptic literature here. There's a lot of metaphors in it. But even if it's metaphorical, the indication is that all that humans do are recorded in heaven in some way.

All of our actions, all of our behavior, all of our deeds, all of our words. And that the spiritually dead will be judged according to what they did. According to what they did. God will be righteous, just, and true at this judgment.

He will not offer sentence on anyone without evidence of their rebellion against him. Everyone with evidence. And this is where we need to think about two parallel lines of thinking. We all have a ledger of our rebellion against him.

And the default setting of the human heart is condemnation before him. That's the default setting. All condemned, all unrighteous, no one righteous. Nobody will be able to stand before God and declare their innocence.

All he needs to do in order to prosecute is roll the tape. That's it. It's a done deal. We've incriminated ourselves. You get that? And the evidence is clear. He will not prosecute anybody unjustly. No one will be condemned that is innocent.

There's no evidence that he's not taking into account. Remember, he knows it all and he sees it all. And he's recorded it all and he has it all for us. I think many of us in our mind have an illusion of the righteous unbeliever.

How bad are they really? How bad is it to be an unbeliever? How bad are we really? And you can have this illusion in your mind of the person, and maybe you even have someone in your mind that they're like, they don't go to church, they're not in with Christ, they don't have a relationship.

Maybe you even know it because you've had a conversation with them and they're pretty swell. They're a pretty good person. They do good things. How many of you have someone in your life like that, that's a bit of a conundrum to you?

You're like, they just seem to be really good. And then we wonder, what does this day look like for them? But God is clear that no one will have a clean account. He's clear about that. Abundantly clear.

No one has a clean account. Now, we can be deceived. We can look on the outside and we can go, well, that's a righteous person, that's a good person, that's a nice person. But there's no one righteous among us.

You have not met a person, not a single person, who does not have a record of their rebellion against their creator. Not even your super nice and generous aunt, who works at food pantries and took trips to Africa to help those in poverty.

No one has a record that will exonerate them before the Almighty on that day. None. Not even you or me. No one will be exonerated by their record. No one will be off the hook because of the things that they have done.

If anything, if it is up to the things that you have done, then you will be condemned. If that's all that you have to show for yourself, and that's all you have to stand before God on this great day of judgment and say, but look at what I've done.

Didn't I do some good? He's going to roll the tape. And everyone in this room knows what that looks like. No one in this room wants him to roll the tape. You don't want him to roll that tape. You certainly don't want the person sitting next to you to see the tape.

None of us want that. And so you know your own worthiness of condemnation as you sit here. You know it. No one has to point it out to you. And that's heavy. We know it about ourselves. It's a scary thing.

We're no different. Everybody in this room has enough sin and rebellion against their creator that is recorded clearly against us to bury us alive. It's not him condemning us, but the evidence of our lives justly and rightly condemning us.

And that's where we would stand. Except for the other book.

I'm going to talk about it in a minute. Another book the text says was opened, which is the book of life in verse 12. But first we have to go to verse 13. Verse 13 serves as a reminder that this judgment includes death and Hades.

This is a glorious part. This is the part that is comforting to me. This is the part that just really drives home the glory of this eternal kingdom that is being ushered in with, thy kingdom come, thy will be done.

Death and Hades are personifications of death and the grave. They are the two primary enemies of humanity that remain. Remember Satan, Antichrist, False Prophet are gone. Satan is condemned. And in verse 14, death and Hades are cast into the lake of fire.

And in this we see the glorious and beautiful, worthy of celebrating death of death itself. The death of death. Some of us would like to see some vengeance on death, right? You've lost loved ones. You've seen it yourself.

And it's a terrible enemy to behold. We are, by the way, never commanded in scripture to rejoice in death. There is never a time where we have this tendency in the Christian faith to kind of go, oh, he just passed on.

Oh, death was a reward for them because, you know, it was the right time or whatever. Death is the enemy. Death is going to go away. It is not a friend. It is not ever for anyone a good thing. There's always a corruption and a warping of the way that God made it and designed it.

We were not meant to die. Death was brought through sin through our rebellion. And here in this text in verse 14, death and Hades are cast into the lake of fire. And now in verse 15 is the final removal of all rebellion against the Creator.

And despite the fact that verse 12 and 13 both end with the criteria for judgment being the deeds of mankind, look with me at the end of 12 and 13, they are identical. They are judged according to what they had done, verse 12, and they are judged, verse 13, according to what they had done.

Very clear that their deeds are the primary thing that they're judged for. But verse 15 gives a very important final criteria for condemnation. Their deeds are indeed worthy of condemnation. And without intervention, they will surely be condemned.

Without intervention, we all, I said the default setting is condemnation. We all would be condemned except for some intervention. This other book, the book of life that was opened. It's the key. And if anyone's name is not found written in the book of life, then they are cast into the lake of fire to experience a second death.

The establishment of their guilt based on their deeds, but there's one more piece of evidence we're looking for. But was their name in the book of life? Was their name in the book of life? All of us have the same issue.

All of us have the same issue with our ledger. Everyone you've ever met has the same issue with their ledger. Everyone worthy of condemnation. But is their name written in the book of life? The book seems to be pretty key, right?