“For the Son of Man is going to come with His angels in the glory of His Father, and then He will reward each according to what he has done.” (Matthew 16:27)
To this point in the gospel of Matthew, we have seen Jesus’s message heighten, his miracles grow more frequent, and the reactions to him grow more polarizing. When he first came on the scene, preaching “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” and teaching Torah with authority, he might have been mistaken for another rabbi or just a new prophet. Many wondered if he could be the Messiah, and his enemies grew more and more strident in their rejection of him.
But over the last few chapters, all of this speculation has reached a boiling point. Jesus has made his stand at the foot of Mount Hermon and declared that he has come to gather the faithful people of God into a new assembly, one that belongs specially to him — “my church.” He has declared his power and victory over evil spirits, pagan gods, and Death itself. He has promised to invest his church with the judicial power and teaching authority of heaven.
And he has made himself so central to this entire thing that he calls upon his followers to deny themselves and acknowledge him instead, even to the point of laying their lives down in the course of following him. He has declared himself as the way and the source of life, eternal life, and the only truly worthy object of desire.
The prophets of the Old Testament, especially Isaiah, had a phrase they used to signal eschatological themes — that is, themes pertaining to the eschaton, “the end.” God’s people expected a day to come when the present evil age would end and a new age, in a real sense a new world, would arrive.
The key phrase was “in that day.” “In that day,” Isaiah and other prophets proclaimed, the proud would be brought low and the humble exalted. In that day, the poor and oppressed would find justice, and the enemies of God would be destroyed. In that day, the divided houses of Israel would be united to one another again, and the Gentiles would come to the light of their rising and be joined to them and to their God. In that day, God himself would be seen on the earth, and God’s king would be set upon the throne, ushering in an age of justice, healing, beauty, and abundance.
Here in Matthew 16:27, Jesus’s words to his disciples reference Daniel’s Son of Man passage, which we’ve looked at many times. But they also bear a strong echo of Isaiah’s “day,” what the prophets also call “the day of the Lord.”
Remember that Jesus had just told his followers to pick up crosses and follow him, through suffering to death and beyond. He had asked them to deny their own rights and needs in favor of trusting him.
Jesus dared ask his followers for such radical, self-denying, life-giving commitment only because he could promise them restoration and reward. One day soon, he told them, he would come in the glory of his Father with all the angels and reward every person according to what they had done.
Judgment Is Coming — And That’s Good
In our day, we have grown so accustomed to hearing the gospel as a message of freedom from judgment that many of us have lost this dimension of Jesus’s message. For the early church, it was a paramount part of the gospel. After confessing that Jesus has ascended into heaven, the Nicene Creed assures us “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” The Apostles’ Creed, with its roots in the same ancient traditions, simply says, “He ascended into heaven and is seated on the right hand of the Father Almighty, from whence he shall come to judge the living and the dead.”
Early Christians never dreamed of preaching a gospel that didn’t include final judgment. And for them, such a gospel really was gospel — it really was “good news.”
For many of us today, that sounds like a contradiction in terms: isn’t judgment a bad thing, and isn’t the whole point of the gospel that Jesus came to free us from it?
Many of us come by these feelings naturally. We have been burned by hell-heavy versions of the good news that don’t sound good at all, or we’ve experienced Christian mores as vehicles of condemnation.
We’ve learned to position grace and forgiveness as opposites of judgment and even to preach versions of the gospel that would have Christians escaping the judgment seat of Christ altogether. But neither of these impulses is biblical.
The Cry of the Downtrodden
In a biblical worldview, judgment is good and necessary. For Jesus to come and judge the world, as he told his disciples that he would do, is to answer the cry of the world’s oppressed and downtrodden. In both Hebrew and Greek, “judgment” and “justice” come from the same word, and they are closely related to “righteousness.” When Jesus told us, in Matthew 5, that we are blessed when we hunger and thirst for righteousness, he was blessing a state of hunger and thirst for judgment.
The Psalms and Prophets are full of pleadings for justice and judgment. The Messiah is called the Just One; he does not “judge by the sight of his eyes, but judges the poor righteously” (Isaiah 11:3-4, paraphrased). In many respects, the Old Testament is one long cry for God to come and act in history, and the thing it cries out for is judgment — just judgment, the putting right of the world.
Such a cry is not silent in our world today. When our neighbors cry out for justice in issues of race, gender, and economy; when warfare tears our world apart; when human beings are sold, abused, and murdered with impunity, we too cry out for judgment. When death visits us, especially too early, when suffering strikes us as undeserved, we cry out for God to judge.
We want the comfort of validation: to be told that what we feel is wrong really is. And we want to experience justice — a justice that may at times look like vengeance, but ideally will look like restoration.
The Judgment that Restores
One of the pivotal “in that day” passages in Isaiah is found in chapter 11, where he showcases the reign of the messianic king, a reign so filled with wisdom, justice, and righteousness that it renews and restores creation itself:
There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.
And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,
the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and might,
the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.
He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
or decide disputes by what his ears hear,
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;
and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.
Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist,
and faithfulness the belt of his loins.The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together;
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze;
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra,
and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den.
They shall not hurt or destroy
in all my holy mountain;
for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.In that day the root of Jesse, who shall stand as a signal for the peoples—of him shall the nations inquire, and his resting place shall be glorious. (Isaiah 11:1-10, ESV)
To cry out for judgment is to cry out for the right-making of the world. It is to ask for what the prophets promised, for what would come “in that day.”
Mercy and Truth Have Met Together
Most of us have grown up thinking of judgment as something to be feared, and certainly, it is fearful — that is, something solemn and serious that should make us slow down, take stock, and walk soberly in this world.
But the identification and punishment of wrong is only one part of judgment. That’s why the poor and oppressed cry out for it; why our own hearts cry out for it. Judgment also involves discerning and rewarding right, and because it comes from a good God whose prerogative is compassion, it also includes mercy, forgiveness, and healing.
In Psalm 85:10 (KJV) David declared, “Mercy and truth are met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” The word “righteousness” here is also translated “justice”; it is the root of ideas like “justify” and “set right.”
Jesus, the righteous Judge, will come to judge evil — but he will also come show mercy, to heal creation, and to put our hearts right. For those who acknowledge him, who take up their crosses and follow, he promises a just reward.
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This is Part 252 in a series on the Gospel of Matthew, which you can access here. Unless otherwise marked, quotes are from the Holman Christian Standard Bible.
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