“I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened . . The dead were judged according to what they had done according to the books”. (Revelation 20:12).
On Judgement Day everybody receives what he or she deserves. It is the execution of God’s righteousness.
The Judge will be Jesus, as He Himself stated:
“When the Son of man (i.e. Jesus) comes in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, He will sit on His throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on His right and the goats on His left . . . Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world’ . . . Then He will say to those on His left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels’, then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life”. (Matthew 25:31 – 34, 41, 46).
Who then are the “blessed by my Father”, that inherit the Kingdom of God? Are these people sinless? When we look at the passage carefully, we will notice, that it is not those who deserve to be in God’s presence, but those who inherit it. How can this be understood? The heirs of someone are (as a rule) his children. They do not inherit their fortune because they deserve it, but because they are the children of the testator.
In New Testament terms, every person that asks for and receives God’s pardon through or from Jesus, becomes by that virtue a child of God, and belongs to His family, because the barrier, separating us from God, is removed. Being a child of God then, we can confidently call God our Father! But to belong to ‘the family of God’, one must be born into it. It says of Jesus:
“He came to that which was His own (i.e. the Jews), but His own did not receive Him. Yet to all who received Him, to those who believed in His name (Jesus means Saviour, Rescuer), He gave the right to become children of God – children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God”. (John 1:10 – 13).
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