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The Daily Word of Righteousness
Removing the Things That Offend, continued
But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death. (Revelation 21:8—NIV)
The Lake of Fire has authority over specific behaviors whether or not the individual is a believer. Either the offenses will be removed from us and cast into the fire or else we ourselves will be cast into the fire.
Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear. (Matthew 13:43)
The righteous will not shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father until the tares have been removed.
This brings us to our next concept, the timing. When will the offenses, and finally the offenders, be removed from the Kingdom of God? As we might expect, the offenses will be removed before we are caught up to meet the Lord in the air.
We understand from the fourth chapter of I Thessalonians and the fifteenth chapter of I Corinthians that the Lord Jesus will return with a shout, the voice of the archangel, and the trumpet of God. The dead saints will be raised from the dead and we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them to meet the Lord in the air.
From that point forward we always shall be with the Lord.
Now think for a moment. It is taught commonly we shall be caught up to meet the Lord in the air, be ever with the Lord, and after that stand before the Judgment Seat of Christ.
This sequence is not possible.
In this case the Lord would be receiving a stained, blemished Bride, raise her from the dead or change her from mortality to immortality, catch her up to meet Him in the air, and after that she would be with Him forever.
After the saints have been glorified into immortality they then would stand before the Judgment Seat of Christ and receive the good they have done and the bad they have done.
Can you see the impossibility of this in the light of what we have just studied in Matthew?
According to Matthew, at the end of the age the tares will be removed from the members of the Kingdom, and after that the members who insist on holding on to the tares will themselves be removed from the Kingdom. After this removal takes place the righteous will shine as the sun in the Kingdom of God.
Matthew makes perfect sense. But our traditional ordering of the sequence, placing glorification before judgment, does not make sense. It is not possible.
The traditional ordering is based, of course, on the idea that every believer will be made perfect at once at the coming of the Lord, and the Judgment Seat of Christ is merely an awards banquet in which everyone receives at least honorable mention.
Thus has Satan removed the fear of judgment from the churches. It is this thinking that has caused the current pathetic moral condition of the Christian churches.
To be continued.