“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)
As we continue to look at Jesus’s promise of judgment, recall that Jesus gave the assurance of Matthew 16:27 to his disciples in order to strengthen them for the journey of discipleship. They could take up their crosses and follow Jesus, following their heart’s deepest desire for everlasting life and the fullness of love, because judgment was promised to them.
Nothing they did would be overlooked, wasted, or invalidated. Their choices would matter. There would be a reward.
Jesus and the Day of the Lord
When we get hung up on the idea that judgment is always a bad thing, it’s because we’re conflating “judgment” with “condemnation.” But not all judgment results in condemnation, as anyone who has been exonerated in court can tell you. A judge sits in order to bring condemnation to some while awarding vindication to others.
Here in Matthew 16, Jesus focused on that second aspect of judgment. In a breathtaking statement, he promised his disciples that after his death and resurrection, he would come in the Father’s glory, accompanied by countless angels, to bring them a reward.
With this promise, Jesus invoked the scene of Daniel 7, where “the Son of Man” is received into heaven by God the Father and “thousands upon thousands” of angels. He applied it to himself and then combined it with the Old Testament’s many promises of judgment day, the “day of the Lord.”
In this statement to his disciples, therefore, Jesus revealed himself not only as the Messiah, but also as the badly needed righteous judge. He told his disciples — his friends — that he was in fact the heavenly king, the commander of countless hosts of angels, and that when God called the entire world to judgment, he would do it through him.
A Banquet of Consequences
Mind-blowing though this must have been for them to contemplate, Jesus assured his disciples that he would one day come back to them and reward their hard-fought faithfulness to him. Everything they did would matter.
This brings us to another area where we frequently misunderstand the gospel, or at least feel a great tension in it.
The Greek word translated “reward” might more clearly be translated “recompense,” or “to give back what is owed.” The word applies in both directions, good and bad. Jesus said that he would give to “each according to what he has done.” Robert Louis Stevenson did not actually say “Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences” (a famous misquote), but the words are true all the same. The promise of judgment is a promise that actions will matter, for good or for ill.
In our desire to highlight the grace of God, some of us Christians preach the gospel as though it means that nothing we do as Christians has consequences. All that matters is what Jesus did for us, and once we’ve believed in him, we’re more or less just waiting around for a rescue. Our good works aren’t really good and our bad works will be wiped off the slate, so we essentially just amount to a fairly large zero.
But this is not the biblical promise. Far from negating our lives and our actions, Jesus promised that when he came, he would judge every human being and pay them back according to what they had done.
Our lives on earth actually matter. Our deeds have eternal repercussions.
The Day of the Lord Is Darkness
For the disciples, as long as they followed Christ, this was good news. But it was also a warning. Remember, Judas was one of the disciples listening to Jesus that day. The expectation of a coming judgment, bringing with it reward for deeds done, should sober all of us as we live out our days in this world. It should make us aware of how fearful sin actually is, and it should put us on our guard against hypocrisy. We are indeed saved by grace, and forgiveness is great, and yet: “We shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ,” Paul wrote to believers in Rome. “So then each of us shall give account of himself to God” (Romans 14:10b, 12, NKJV).
At the same time, the expectation of judgment should give us eyes to see how precious righteousness, lived out in the lives of God’s people, actually is. Love is beautiful; faith is more valuable than gold. On the day of judgment, no work of love will be overlooked or go unrewarded. The writer of Hebrews commends his readers for the way they have cared for one another and writes, “God is not unjust to forget your work and labor of love which you have shown toward His name” (Hebrews 6:10, NKJV). We are not saved by works, but works matter, and God does not forget them.
In fact, it’s the consequentiality of works that makes hypocrisy so dangerous. The prophets spoke to Israel’s complicity with evil and the way it swept up even outwardly “religious” people. Amos, a prophet to the Northern Kingdom of Israel who was contemporary with Isaiah, had strong things to say to people who glibly invoked the day of the Lord as though God would simply be on their side, no matter what:
Woe to you who desire the day of the LORD!
For what good is the day of the LORD to you?
It will be darkness, and not light.
It will be as though a man fled from a lion,
And a bear met him!
Or as though he went into the house,
Leaned his hand on the wall,
And a serpent bit him!
Is not the day of the LORD darkness, and not light?
Is it not very dark, with no brightness in it?
(Amos 3:18-20, NKJV)
In context, Amos makes it clear that he is speaking to people who worshiped God outwardly, keeping God’s appointed feasts and making sacrifices, while they simultaneously rejected truth, oppressed the poor, worshiped idols, and loved evil. They treated religious observance as a “get out of jail free card” and assumed it would cover up the truth of who they were and what they did. For such people the day of the Lord would not bring deliverance, only darkness.
This “woe” might just as well have been spoken by Jesus to the Pharisees. He constantly called people away from hypocrisy and its false confidence to a true walk with God, one characterized by justice — righteous actions.
We’ve already noted the connection of judgment with “justice” and “righteousness,” but judging is also connected to discerning — rightly identifying what is true and what is not, what is sincere and what is false, what is pure and what is polluted.
Amos continued, speaking on God’s behalf:
“I hate, I despise your feast days,
And I do not savor your sacred assemblies.
Though you offer Me burnt offerings and your grain offerings,
I will not accept them,
Nor will I regard your fattened peace offerings.
Take away from Me the noise of your songs,
For I will not hear the melody of your stringed instruments.
But let justice run down like water,
And righteousness like a mighty stream.”
(Amos 3:21-24, NKJV)
This is not very different from Jesus’s own message: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Jesus preached the very same day of the Lord that was proclaimed by the prophets. Like them, he constantly called people to repentance — not merely to make an outward show of piety, but to return to God with their hearts and truly mend their ways.
The call to take up our cross and deny ourselves was not given so we would beat up on ourselves. It was and is given us for the sake of following Jesus, and that means joining him in his work of healing, redemption, and love.
We too are called to let justice run down like water, and righteousness like an overflowing stream.
The Son of Man Comes to Reward
Another Old Testament doomsday prophet, Malachi, spoke of God’s very different response to those who truly love him, unlike the hypocrites denounced by Amos:
Then those who feared the LORD spoke with one another. The LORD paid attention and heard them, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared the Lord and esteemed his name. “They shall be mine, says the LORD of hosts, in the day when I make up my treasured possession, and I will spare them as a man spares his son who serves him. Then once more you shall see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve him. (Malachi 3:16-18, ESV)
Ultimately, it is Christ who will inspire you to will and to work according to his will. He will do his own works in you. He will receive what you offer him. And he will never forget what it cost you, or fail to treasure your love.
Near the end of his own life, Paul wrote to his protégé Timothy, “Finally, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give to me on that Day, and not to me only but also to all who have loved His appearing” (2 Timothy 4:8, NKJV).
Paul could write these words not because he considered himself sinless, but because he knew he had followed Jesus. For him, therefore, the day of the Lord was not a day to be feared but one to be loved and eagerly awaited.
“He will swallow up death forever,” Isaiah wrote in one more “that day” prophecy:
And the LORD God will wipe away tears from all faces;
The rebuke of His people
He will take away from all the earth;
For the LORD has spoken.And it will be said in that day:
“Behold, this is our God;
We have waited for Him, and He will save us.
This is the LORD;
We have waited for Him;
We will be glad and rejoice in His salvation.”
(Isaiah 25:8-9, NKJV)
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This is Part 253 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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