Secrets of the Kingdom: Saves Us and All Who Enter It


Most Christ followers today don't talk much about the Last Judgment.  Maybe it's because it doesn't fit our culture of relativism and individuality.  Or maybe it's because of the excesses of previous generations of church folk.  Many of them had a joyless faith in which clouds of guilt and judgment hung over them and everyone else.

But Jesus spoke often about the Last Judgment.  Some of his most unforgettable parables were about it.  One of them was the parable of the net in Matthew 13:47-50.  

Jesus said fishermen went and cast a large net in the sea.  When it was full of fish, they took it to the shore.  There they emptied it and separated the fish.  They took the good ones and saved them in baskets, but threw the bad ones away.  

Jesus said the kingdom of God was like that.  At the end of the age, angels will separate the righteous from the wicked.  They'll take the wicked and throw them into hell, or the fiery furnace.  Jesus implied the righteous would live forever with God in his kingdom.

Jesus' opponents had no problems with his idea of the Last Judgment.  Their problems were with Jesus' identification of the righteous and the wicked.  Jesus defined the righteous as those who put their faith in him, and the wicked as those who didn't (John 5:24; 3:17-18).  This meant that many of those leaders were headed for the fiery furnace.

The parable of the net tells us that for a time, the righteous and the wicked are swimming in the same sea.  This means the righteous will sometimes suffer in the world because of the wicked.  Sometimes they will be killed.  But this is God's will until the end of the world when the resurrection occurs (the fishermen pull the net full of fish to the shore) and he separates the wicked from the righteous (the fishermen separates the good fish from the bad).

Though it makes us uncomfortable, we need to hear this parable and the lessons of it.  It tells us that God saves us through our faith in him.  It also tells us that we'll have to give account of ourselves to God.  What will be important at that time will be our faith in Christ and how we expressed it in our daily behavior!

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