Judgment

Guest post  by Carmen Bellamy.

Individual Judgment versus Communal Judgment

In ancient Jewish thinking, the lamp stand was a symbol for the presence of God. In the book of Revelation, the choice facing the church is: Will God remove his presence from the church (by removing the lampstand) or will God imbue the church with life through his presence? Even if there are individuals who are doing the right thing (as is seen in some of the seven letters), if God removes his presence from the community of the church all people will be affected, regardless of their individual piety.

In the Old Testament we see many examples of communal judgment. God brings judgment upon the Israelites through the nations of Assyria and Babylon because the people of Israel have forgotten their first love (God). Even the remnant who did not bow down to other gods is affected by these foreign invasions. The Assyrians and Babylonians did not care who was pious and who was not. They were equal opportunity enslavers.

So what about God’s separating of the goats and sheep in Matthew 25, is this judgment individual or communal? In the ancient world a flock of sheep were thought of as being one animal, not a group of individual animals (Just as the body is made up of many parts we do not think of our bodies as a collection of parts: arms, legs, chest, back, head etc… we refer to it as my body not my bodies; thus God considers His church or His sheep to be one body not a collection of individual body parts). Notice the communal response in Matthew 25 When did we… they do not respond as individuals saying when did I…

Thus it is that the point of the seven letters in the book of Revelation is not individual salvation. The letters are written to the Church in Ephesus, the Church in Pergamum etc, they are not written to Tom, Dick or Harry. The point is the presence of the Spirit of God in relation to the church.