Removing the Divine Gavel
What comes to mind when you see a gavel? Perhaps you're conjuring images of a courtroom or a judge's call to order. Judges use gavels not only to maintain control but also to signify a ruling or proclamation. Ultimately, the gavel symbolizes judicial authority—that the judge wields the power to acquit or condemn the defendant standing before them. Unless you have found yourself at the mercy of a judge, it is likely that the significance of a gavel means very little to you. But what you may or may not realize is that a gavel hangs over you even now—that one day, a judicial decree will resound, a divine gavel will fall, and you will either receive eternal life or eternal death.
Everyone in their heart of hearts is aware of God's impending judgment. Throughout human history, people have devised countless religions and philosophies to deal with this problem. All such attempts can be reduced to a simple formula: if your good deeds outweigh your evil deeds, you can expect to attain some form of postmortem paradise or existential ecstasy. Modern society in the West is unique in that, rather than work around this problem, it has decidedly tried to remove or ignore it altogether. After all, the notion of an omnipotent and omniscient Judge is simply too terrifying to bear.
Despite the West's best attempts to remove the divine gavel, humanity's intrinsic knowledge and feeling of impending doom remains. In fact, in attempting to ignore God's justice, sinful man has only fashioned a lesser gavel, which he hangs over himself in pathetic mimicry of God's judgment. If we do not acknowledge God as Judge, we will simply make ourselves judge instead. Truly, we have sought to place the gavel of God in our own hands and take our seat on his judgment throne. It is no wonder then why so many of us suffer from deep existential depression, dread, and despair.
The Divine Gavel Remains
But reality is worse than this. While we may tell ourselves that we have removed God's gavel, it nonetheless remains. Indeed, the divine gavel hangs over us still—its fall inevitable and drawing ever nearer. In the end, the lesser gavels that we use to call order to our lives and signal judgment on ourselves will give way to the almighty and definitive decree of God. We will one day stand before a Judge outside ourselves and be subject to his verdict according to his law. And when he weighs our deeds—good and evil—against his law, he will be unable to acquit even one of us. We will not be able to hide behind even the best of our intentions; we will be laid utterly bare before the thrice holy God who beholds everything—yes, even our ugliest depths that we have made privy to none. As Hebrews 4:13 says, “…no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account” (see also Ps. 139:1–12). This divine Judge will uncover our dirtiest corners. Consider Isaiah’s woe in chapter 6:1–5 upon seeing God in his cosmic temple: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isa. 6:5). Like Isaiah, we cannot endure such a witness.
Our situation is therefore hopeless. We cannot point to any righteousness in and of ourselves when God measures us against his law—the immutable standard of entry into his glorious country. Heaven's gates remain closed so long as we plead before God on the basis of our good works. But we are not merely shut out from paradise as if God has no desire that we come in. Even if God were to open wide his ancient doors to any and all who would ascend his holy mountain, his most delightful realm would remain empty and bare (Ps. 24:3–4). For inside that shimmering land lives and reigns the terrible Judge, before whom we cannot stand. None dare enter there. The barrier to heaven is God himself, whom we are unable to approach on our own merit (see 1 Tim. 6:16).
The Divine Gavel Has Already Fallen for Those in Christ
But here lies a most sudden and glorious turn. This Judge whose gavel will fall is also a Judge who loves us. The Maker whose eyes see all things is also a Maker who pursues our very hearts. The King whose reign extends over heaven and earth is also a King who wants his kingdom full (Luke 14:15–24). And when there was found none worthy or willing to come in, he sent his own Son to our faraway and rebellious country to free us from bondage, dress us with radiant garments, and lavish us with his everlasting love as his own royal children. Christ has done just that, setting the captives free and leading them up the holy mountain of the LORD by his pure heart and clean hands. As heaven's gates lift up their heads that this King of glory may enter, we are free to follow after him into God's holy presence with jubilant boldness (See Deut. 31:8; Col. 1:20; Heb. 4:16, 7:25, and 9:12). There waiting for us is not only our Judge, Maker, and King but our Father—his arms extended wide to welcome us home as his sons and daughters.
How can this be? What of the divine gavel? Is God no longer just that he might become merciful? Far from it. For in entering our broken world, Jesus Christ submitted himself to the law and all of its demands, fulfilling it perfectly on behalf of all those who would only believe in him. We cannot claim any righteousness of our own according to the law, but we can claim his righteousness, which he offers to us freely through faith in him. As Paul wrote in Philippians 3:9, he had not “a righteousness of [his] own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.”
And if we trust in Christ for our righteousness, what becomes of our sin? Behold this most profound exchange: we can claim Christ's righteousness for ourselves because he has first claimed our sin for himself. Indeed, for the Christian, God’s gavel has already fallen, having crashed headlong onto his own Son, hammering the nails of divine justice through him and pinning him onto the cursed Tree of Death as the totality of divine wrath that ought to have befallen us crushed him (Col. 2:14). On that sorrowful Friday afternoon nearly 2,000 years ago, God beheld everything—our depths and dregs, our hidden ugliness, and our dirtiest corners. But rather than behold these things in us, he beheld them in his Son. Before the agonizing gaze of his own Father's forsaking wrath, the God-Man cried out in dereliction, yielded up his spirit, and died. Such was the divine gavel that knows only perfect justice, that calls all things to order, and that signals definitively the irreversible judgment of God. If our faith rests in this perfect sacrifice, there looms over us no condemnation (Rom. 8:1). God counts nothing against us. Truly, it is finished!
In Whom Will We Be Found?
Paul the Apostle stressed that his hope—so profound that it compelled him to count all else as loss—was to gain Jesus Christ and be found in him. When we stand before God in judgment, his all knowing justice will seek us out and find us either in Christ or in ourselves—and to be found in oneself is really to be found in Adam (see WCS Q. 17–19). There is no third alternative. In whom will you be found?
If you have not placed your ultimate trust in the perfect person and work of Christ, who lived and died on behalf of sinners, that terrible Friday afternoon is but a ghastly foretaste of what awaits you. God will have looked on his Son nailed to the Cross without having seen your sin. What a terrifying thought.
But if your faith rests in the Lamb who was slain in your place, take heart! For in Christ, you need not fear God's gavel on the last day—let alone man's lesser gavels. You can even look forward to that divine gavel with joyful anticipation, for it will signal God's irreversible declaration that in Christ, you are innocent. More than that, as your loving King, God has delighted to drape you—the unworthiest of subjects—with the glory and righteousness of his Son, adopting you as a fellow heir of his kingdom alongside the Prince of Peace himself. Covered in Christ's regal robes, we not only can stand before the throne of judgment with confidence but can expect a royal welcome into that most blissful realm, the land for which we were made and now eagerly await.
Footnotes
See Michael Horton "Evangelicals and the Evangel Future," Modern Reformation 31, no. 2 (March–April 2022) and "'Behold the Man!': Why Jesus Makes Us Uncomfortable," Modern Reformation 33, no. 5 (September–October 2024).
Robert Jay Lifton—a renowned psychiatrist and pioneer in brain research—has observed that the source of today's many neuroses is a nagging sense of guilt, the origin of which is difficult to discern. See Robert J. Lifton, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 101 as quoted in Michael Horton "Evangelicals and the Evangel Future," Modern Reformation 31, no. 2 (March–April 2022). https://www.modernreformation.org/resources/essays/evangelicals-and-the-evangel-future.
