Final Judgment

The final demonstration from the third group of witnesses to Christ's deity: He performs the work of raising the dead and executing final judgment, a work only God can perform. Pastor Martin expounds John 5:17-29 as the central passage, shows how all the resurrection and judgment texts attribute to Christ the power to raise the dead by a word, the omniscience to judge secret deeds and thoughts in their full context, and the omnipotence to execute the sentence. He closes with solemn warning to the impenitent and blessed assurance for believers who are acquitted by the Judge who bore their hell.

In the final sermon on Christ's kingship in Revelation, Pastor Martin expounds 11:15-18, the sounding of the seventh trumpet and the great voices declaring, 'The kingdom of the world is become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.' Using the illustration of a family's photo album arranged in thematic cycles rather than chronologically, he explains that Revelation brings us to the consummation six or seven times under different figures. The substance of the vision is the proclamation of an arrived universal and eternal kingdom, and the worship of the twenty-four elders over the events that usher it in. The significance is a pointed word of admonition to the impenitent, a powerful summons to adoration for the saints, and a precious salve of consolation for the suffering church — for the kingdom is as good as come.

Concluding eleven weeks on justification by faith alone, Pastor Martin turns to the second front of the devil's attack: the error that justifying faith can stand alone, devoid of works. He expounds James 2:14-26 as a carefully developed argument that saving faith is never a dead or merely notional faith but a living principle that produces self-denying obedience, using Robert Johnstone's illustration of Paul and James as two armies firing from opposite flanks at a common enemy. He closes by pressing searching questions on both the antinomian and the legalist, urging hearers to embrace Paul with one arm and James with the other.

Pastor Martin expounds Psalm 1:5 -- 'Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.' He shows this conclusion flows from the fact that the wicked are like chaff. He examines the source of the psalmist's knowledge (divine revelation confirmed by conscience), the meaning of 'shall not stand' (not abide or endure, not merely appear), and the substance of the conclusion: the wicked will be crushed under divine judgment and excluded from the congregation of the righteous. He closes with the solemn prospect of judgment as a day of surprising discovery, fixed distinction, and final division.