It must be said, with more than a little regret, that many Christians believe that the Day of Judgment is the time at the end of history when God loses all sense of proportion. If we believe what the Bible teaches about Hell, as we should, but don’t believe what it teaches about gradations of moral behavior, then this makes God the ultimate Leveler. Stalin, who killed all those people, and Aunt Maude, who liked her elderberry wine a little too much, are both in the bad place, and furthermore, unlike Dante’s levels, they are both in the same spot in the bad place. But the binary choice that the Scriptures do present — salvation or damnation — does not flatten moral distinctions within those two categories.
Aside from the gaudiness of some of the punishments in the Inferno, Dante’s instincts about moral structure were sounder than those of our egalitarian age.
“Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment” (John 7:24).
But part of rendering a right judgment is understanding the fact that the winnowing that will occur extends down into particulars. God will not not judge the world in the aggregate. He will not judge by the gross ton. His judgments will involve glasses of cold water that some people gave and other people didn’t (Mark 9:41). His judgments will include every idle word that some people spoke and some people didn’t (Matt. 12:36). God will render to every man according to his deeds (Rom. 2:6). The apostle Paul also says of false teachers that their “end shall be according to their works” (2 Cor. 11:15). He also asked that Alexander be rewarded “according to his works” (2 Tim. 4:14).
“And if ye call on the Father, who without respect of persons judgeth according to every man’s work, pass the time of your sojourning here in fear” (1 Pet. 1:17).
Now in line with all the Reformation, we hold that the dividing line between the sheep and goats is a line drawn by the electing good pleasure of God, and is not according to works. But once the Lord’s infinite wisdom has drawn that line, the punishments and the rewards that are apportioned to the reprobate and the elect respectively most certainly are in line with how we have lived our lives. The scriptural testimony to this reality is abundant.
So how does this figure in with a discussion of mere Christendom? One of the central characteristics of our cultural disease is our societal relativism. This is the end result of what C.S. Lewis called the poison of subjectivism, and it results in the abolition of man.
“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (Is. 5:20).
But this moral inversion is not something that can be achieved in a day. Before you reverse good and evil, you must flatten good and evil, and before you flatten good and evil, you must flatten greater evil and lesser evil and greater good and lesser good. Moral egalitarianism is a rot that proceeds slowly.
Woe unto them that call lesser evil greater evil, and greater evil lesser evil; that put darkness for twilight, and twilight for darkness; that put white for off-white, and off-white for white!
Now when God’s representatives speak to the civil ruler, they are speaking prophetically. And when the prophets of God speak, they must represent Him well. If He does not lose a sense of proportion in the Day of Judgment, then His representatives must not “get to preaching” in such a way as to get carried away. And they must not get to denouncing in such a way as to create a moral equivalence between excessive consumerism on display at Radio Shack and Stalin’s genocidal technique of artificial famine. They must not flatten the abortion holocaust and extra questioning at the airport for a guy named Muhammad.
Those who draw glib examples of moral equivalence between full-throated pagan societies and raggedy Christian ones are people whose judgments are not to be trusted. Someone once wisely said, about another issue, that if your pastor says that wine in the Bible is actually grape juice, then why should you trust anything he says?
The same principle is operative here. Jesus calls men “fools and blind” over just this principle. They did not know up from down. They did not know whether the gold sanctified the altar or whether the altar sanctified the gold. They could not tell a gnat from a camel. They did not have a sense of proportion. They tithed out of their spice rack and neglected the weightier matters of the law (Matt. 23:23).
This is why so much of the contemporary “prophetic” witness to our civil rulers is such a joke. It not so much dressed in camel hair with a leather belt as it is decked out in a Kuba the Clown outfit. And then it blames the lack of responsiveness on hardness of heart, and walks off saying o tempora! o mores! in a Donald Duck voice.