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The Mighty One, God, the LORD, speaks and summons the earth from the rising of the sun to where it sets.\xa0From Zion, perfect in beauty, God shines forth. Our God comes and will not be silent; a\xa0fire devours before him, and around him a tempest rages. He summons the heavens above, and the earth, that he may judge his people:\xa0\u201cGather to me this consecrated people, who made a covenant with me by sacrifice.\u201d And the heavens proclaim his righteousness, for he is a God of justice. (Psalm 50:1-6)

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Psalm 50 tends to get under my skin and arrest me every time I read it.\xa0 It gives me pause, and makes me uncomfortable.\xa0 In that sense, it is an apocalyptic psalm.\xa0 That word \u201capocalypse,\u201d literally meaning \u201crevelation.\u201d\xa0 This is a Psalm that reveals the way things truly are, and in doing so, it leaves me unsettled.\xa0 But before I go further, a bit of context.

Over the past few Sundays, you may have noticed that Pastor Michael and I glossed over a pretty major piece of our Matthew 25 parables.\xa0 That piece being God\u2019s judgement.\xa0 Not because it isn\u2019t important, it just wasn\u2019t the focus of either sermon\u2014the Kingdom of God in the here and now was.

But that doesn\u2019t mean we can avoid the topic of judgement altogether.\xa0 Indeed, across the gospel of Matthew, out of some 148 unique stories, no fewer than 60 talk about or refer to the final judgement (I haven\u2019t personally counted, but that was the tally of one of my Matthew commentators). \xa0\xa0

We don\u2019t like talking about judgement though.\xa0 And I don\u2019t mean just Pastor Michael and I.\xa0 None of us enjoy the topic really.\xa0 We\u2019ve seen the language of God\u2019s judgement used in really demeaning and weaponized ways to scare, harm, and ostracize people.\xa0 And that has turned us off.\xa0 We\u2019re also just really not in favour of judging people these days\u2014unless we don\u2019t know them and we\u2019re on social media.

And yet, we simply cannot avoid the fact that our Bible and our God talk about judgement.\xa0 So how do we talk about judgement well?\xa0

How do we allow the promise of God\u2019s judgment to remind us appropriately that we are not a law unto ourselves nor ourselves the judge without becoming disillusioned about the nature of our God who in Christ, will pass judgement that for some leads to a weeping and gnashing of teeth?

There are no simple answers, but perhaps the beginning of an answer is simply to behold our God.\xa0 To remember that He is God and we are not.\xa0

That seems obvious, but when we judge God for his promise to bring judgement upon humanity, are we not, in fact, setting ourselves over him as those who know better?

Perhaps we need to hear again the more ancient witnesses to the justice of God.\xa0

In this passage, God is summoning his legal assembly with its witnesses in preparation for judgement.\xa0 Who are the witnesses that he calls?\xa0 Well first he summons the earth.\xa0 As he does, we see God approaching with tempest and fire roaring before Him.\xa0 The Earth, offering its deference to the coming judge.\xa0 Then God summons the heavens to his court.\xa0 And with the Heavens and the Earth assembled as witnesses, God lastly summons his covenant people for judgement.\xa0

It is the earth and heaven that God created first\u2014more enduring elements of his creation.\xa0 It was earth and heaven that God summoned as witnesses when he made his covenant with Israel in the desert in Deuteronomy 4 and 30.\xa0 It was the heavens and earth who bore witness in the opening verses of Isaiah as God brought his charges of unfaithfulness against his covenant people before their exile to Babylon.\xa0

It was the earth that shook and the heavens which grew dark when God Himself took the place of his guilty people in death on the cross.\xa0 This judgement for us who follow Christ is the decisive one.

The heavens and the earth, these ancient bodies have born faithful, unflinching witness to God\u2019s judgement and justice from first to last.\xa0 And here \u201cthe heavens proclaim his righteousness for he is a God of justice.\u201d

Will we recognize the witness of the heavens and the earth that God is God and we are not?\xa0 That he is just and able to judge and we are not?\xa0 Our Christian humility in approaching the topic of judgement begins with just that submission of ourselves to the Triune God who alone is worthy to judge.

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