Reading: Revelation 20:11-15
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If you are or have ever been at a place where you were just holding on, you’ll be able to identify with the Church at Smyrna. They had nothing – poor, desperate, afraid, underground, persecuted. Forget about giving shelter to the homeless or feeding the poor. They were the poor and the homeless.
And so as Jesus does with all of the seven churches, He gives them a promise – a promise that universally applies but will speak particularly to the desperation of those in Smyrna. “Those who overcome will not be hurt by the second death.”
The reference Jesus gives is later revealed in Revelation 20. It’s there that we read of a terrifying day, where the dead are brought before the Great White Throne to be judged. There before the Lord are volumes of books – all of the actions of every person who has ever died on earth. On that frightful day, they will stand before the Lord and will be judged according to their works.
Wait a second! Judged for their works? I thought we were saved by grace. I didn’t think our works could get us into heaven.
They can’t. While each person will be held accountable for every activity written in those books, there is only one criteria that provides the merciful paradise of heaven: their name has to be written in another book sitting before the Lord – the Book of Life.
I think this day of judgment is a day of courtesy that the Lord is extending to all mankind. All of those people who ever thought they could earn their way into heaven get to stand before God, and God will let them know that their works have not gone unnoticed. He’s going to reveal to them the good and the bad, even the great acts that were accompanied with evil motives. And as we stare into the Face of the Holiest Being we could never conjure up in our imaginations, we will realize exactly what Isaiah 64:6 means – “We are all infected and impure with sin. When we display our righteous deeds, they are nothing but filthy rags. Like autumn leaves, we wither and fall, and our sins sweep us away like the wind.”
By the time the judgment is over, we will say, “I deserve to go to hell.”
“Wait,” the Lord will say, His voice like the fading rumble of thunder from a recent storm. He will open the Book of Life, and there we will see our name inscribed, and like a parent whose child went missing but was found alive, we will crumble at the feet of the Alpha and Omega. Tears will pour forth out of us because we will be spared what we so justly deserve.
In that moment, planned before creation, we will fully experience the full measure of the grace of God.
Grace! You didn’t earn any of it. Nothing you did got you there. The good you did never canceled out the evil.
Grace! Those moments you had nothing to offer God. Those nights where you wallowed in suffering. Those times you had no strength to carry on.
Grace! It’s exactly as Paul writes in Ephesians 2:4-5. “Because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.”