‘But you, why do you judge your brother? Or you again, why do you set at nought your brother? For we will all stand before the judgment-seat of God. For it is written, “As I live, says the Lord, every knee will bow to me, and every tongue will confess to God.”
Thus as both we and our brothers and sisters in Christ are under His Lordship both in death and in life, we are responsible to Him for ourselves but are in no position to judge how another reveals his response to his LORD. It is the LORD's responsibility to take account of that. It should be noted that this is in respect of how each responds to Jesus as LORD, and of how he demonstrates his loyalty to Him as LORD, in things which are morally neutral. We can certainly ‘pass judgments' concerning those who refuse to submit to His Lordship, and on actions which the LORD has specifically forbidden, for it is then not we who pass those judgments but the LORD.
Even worse is it to set at nought and despise those who are the LORD's because we consider them not to have appreciated the freedom that we have in the LORD. By doing so we despise the LORD Himself, for they are His, and it is He Who has allowed them to continue in this way. All such judgments should therefore be left to Him. And this in the light of the fact that we will all stand before the judgment seat of God. Each and every one of us as Christians will have to give account of ourselves to God. We must therefore be concerned to ensure that we ourselves have lived obediently in accordance with what we believe to be right from our study of the Scriptures, rather than concerning ourselves with how others consider that they should respond to the LORD.
The word for judgment-seat here is bema, which was the word used to describe the seat where a justice would sit in order to pass judgment. It is used of the judgment-seat of Pilate, of Herod's throne, and of Caesar's judgment-throne (Matthew 27:19; John 19:13; Acts 12:21; Acts 18:12; Acts 18:16-17; Acts 25:6; Acts 25:10; Acts 25:17). It is not differentiating it from other descriptions of the judgment seat, such as the ‘great white throne', which could also have been called a bema.
Paul then supports the idea of the judgment-seat of God from Scripture. “As I live, says the Lord, every knee will bow to me, and every tongue will confess to God.” In these words we have the magnificent picture, taken from scenes when men were gathered together to pay fealty to earthly kings, of the whole world bending the knee to God and to Christ, and owning the Lordship of the living God. There will be no unbelievers then, but for many it will be too late. They are there to be judged, not to be received with favour.
‘As I live, says the LORD' is possibly taken from Isaiah 49:18 (although occurring in various places). ‘Every knee will bow to me, and every tongue will confess to God' is taken from Isaiah 45:23 LXX (‘to me every knee will bow, and every tongue will swear by God'),and introduced by the words ‘I have sworn by Myself --'. In context the former phrase would appear to be introduced so as to link the citation with Christ as the One ‘Who lived' and as the ‘LORD of -- the living' (Romans 14:9). It is on this basis that He can judge. The remaining words are applied to Jesus in Philippians 2:10-11. In 2 Corinthians 5:10 Paul refers to this judgment-seat as ‘the judgment-seat of Christ'. Paul saw no difficulty in interrelating ‘Christ', ‘LORD', and ‘God'.