Future Peace

Future Peace

I heard a loud shout from the throne, saying, “Look, God’s home is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain.”

Revelation 21:3-4

No matter how much peace you and I taste in this world, it will not be enough, not nearly enough. The shortfall comes from the fact that we are still living in a broken, disordered world—a place in which children are trafficked for sex and where greed causes financial meltdowns and where politicians grub for power and where we are not all we should be. For perfect peace, we need a reckoning—a true and perfect judgment that will only come, Scripture says, when Christ returns.

The final judgment is that moment when God will say, “Enough!” Enough chances, enough choices, enough time to turn and do the right thing. What have we done? How have we lived? His judgment will be both a seal and a sentence—a period at the end of our story and a verdict on how well we have lived it.

The last judgment is not something Christians should anticipate with terror. Instead, we should welcome it. As N. T. Wright observes, “In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance, and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be.”^a

But knowing our own sins and failings, how can we look forward to judgment? Wright points out that future judgment is “good news, first, because the one through whom God’s justice will finally sweep the world is not a hard-hearted, arrogant, or vengeful tyrant but rather the Man of Sorrows, who was acquainted with grief; the Jesus who loved sinners and died for them; the Messiah who took the world’s judgment upon himself on the cross.”^b

Meanwhile, as women who have tasted God’s mercy, we are called to spread the Good News while there is time for people to respond. Then, when judgment comes, they will, instead, find mercy.

Lord, thank you for your promise to make the world a place in which justice will one day flourish. Give me wisdom and courage to do what is just so others can know your peace.

^a N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008), 137.

^b Ibid., 141.