The Certainty of Judgment.
I. If it were a matter of choice whether we would be judged or not, whether we would be tried according to the terms of the gospel-covenant, or be utterly destroyed and perish for ever like the beasts, it is not to be doubted that very many persons, perhaps most, would choose the last. They would willingly enough part with the future rewards of religion, if they might but enjoy without fear or restraint the present pleasures of sin. If they could get rid of hell, they would not mind the loss of heaven. But, however, be it good or evil, it matters not; whatever we might wish, it is not now in our power to choose: we mustappear before the judgment-seat of Christ; we mustgive an account of our own works.
II. God knows us thoroughly, but there are some who do not yet know us namely, the angels, other men, and ourselves. To these, therefore, we shall be laid open and made manifest before the judgment-seat of Christ. (1) First of all, our whole hearts will be set forth before the angels; for though we are taught that those blessed spirits do continually watch over us for good, and are filled with heavenly joy when we serve God with regularity, order, and diligence, yet we have no reason to believe that they are now acquainted with the secrets of our hearts. If we are not quite hardened to all sense of shame, we must, at least in some degree, be affected by the consideration that our most secret sins, our most cunning deceits, shall be all laid open by the Judge Himself, before that mighty assembly of blessed and holy angels. (2) Let us remember again that our hearts and lives will be shown forth in their true and proper colours, to all men as well as all angels. Then it will be seen how different many of our outward actions and words were from our inward thoughts. Then will be seen how little use it is for man to approve, if God disapprove; how little harm it is for man to hate us, if God love us. There is nothing covered that shall not be then revealed, nor hid which shall not be then made known to the whole world.
Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times,"vol. i., p. 9.
Human Judgment the Earnest of Divine.
I. The outward course of justice strikes a chord in our inward conscience. The man was lately perhaps free, fearless, among his fellows; the crime was past; no evidence, he thought, at hand. Justice, instructed he knows not how, makes him its prisoner; no need, mostly, of outward force; the accused lies helpless in the law's inexorable power: pity has to yield to justice; one even course leads him on to his sentence. Guilt is so powerless. Conscience tells us that we too are amenable to justice if not to human, to Divine. The earthly attribute of justice is awful because it awakens in us the thought of the Divine, which is so unspeakably holy and awful to us because we are sinners.
II. God's justice, by those universal laws which express the divinely gifted reason of mankind, speaks further to the conscience by its minuteness. Human law does not leave petty offences unpunished. It imitates herein the merciful justice of God, who knows that the truest mercy to the sinner is to arrest him by light punishment in the beginning of his sin, and so deals to us in those offences which, not being amenable to human law, are a special province of His own immediate justice. Reason itself concurs with revelation that this judgment will be very minute, very searching. Judgment which did not take account of everything would be a partial, unjudging judgment: in man's sight imperfect; in God, an impossible contradiction. "Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment." Words are but the gushing forth of the inward self, the pouring out of the inward store, good or bad, laid up within us. Of every idle word shall men give account; for idle objectless words are the fruits of idle objectless souls, away from their centre, God. Words, tinged or steeped as they may be with the manifold evils of which men's speech is made up, will condemn.
E. B. Pusey, University Sermons,p. 289.
References: 2 Corinthians 5:10. J. H. Evans, Thursday Penny Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 313; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xviii., No. 1076; G. Calthrop, Words Spoken to my Friends,p. 29; Bishop Westcott, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxxv., p. 252; Preacher's Monthly,vol. ii., p. 259; vol. x., p. 367; J. Edmunds, Sermons in a Village Church,p. 1.