The Final Sequence

A List of the Judgments

There are scores of references throughout the Bible testifying to the certainty of the Lord’s final judgment, both upon and of all mankind.

Many divine judgments have taken place throughout history, beginning with Adam and continuing to the time when great wrath will be poured out prior to the Lord’s return and the Judgment of the Nations (Mat 25). Following the Millennium, that period of 1000 years of the Lord’s direct rule on Earth, there will be a judgment of fire from heaven upon all those who will rebel against the Lord’s rule. Following that will be the Great White Throne Judgment of Rev 20.

[I will not discuss in this series the Judgment Seat of Christ, the coming judgment of believers; may it suffice here merely to maintain that the Judgment Seat of Christ, the Judgment of the Nations, and the Great White Throne Judgment are separate, distinct, and occur at different points in time for different groups of people. Perhaps the Judgment Seat of Christ will be a topic of a future article.

EDIT: Feb 2019
The article topic mentioned above is now complete and entitled The Day of the LORD.]

In order to detail the sequence that culminates with the Great White Throne Judgment and the end of all things, I’ll cover the following main points:

• The Certainty of Divine Judgment. I establish from the Scripture first that the Lord possesses the justice, righteousness, authority, and power necessary to execute judgment against all those who treat His person, Word, name, and people with contempt.
• The Nether World. The Bible provides many details concerning the state of those who die, both those who are truly saved and those who are not.
• The Resurrection of Life and the Resurrection of Judgment. Contrary to much modern thought—such as the spectacular biblical errors of the Watchtower cult!—death is not the cessation of existence. Rather, the Bible is very clear that all who die will experience exactly one of two resurrections: one is to Life and the other is to Judgment. Both are binding, unconditional, eternal, and irreversible relative to their respective recipients.
• The Lord Christ is the Judge of the Living and the Dead. I show from the Scripture the significance of this phrase in view of the Judgment of the Nations and the Great White Throne Judgment.
  [It has been my experience that postmil and amil eschatology adherents especially and completely miss the significance of the former term, the Judge of the Living.]
• The Judgment of the Nations. One of the earliest of the events to occur subsequent to the Lord’s return is the Judgment of the Nations. (Mat 25) I detail the timing, nature, purpose, and results of this, the first of the two condemnatory judgments.
• The Great White Throne Judgment. This will be the final event in human history. (Rev 20). I also detail the timing, nature, purpose, and results of this, the last of the two condemnatory judgments.
• The Final Sequence of Events of the Lord’s Judgments of All. Once the above main points have been established from the Scripture, it will be evident that there are many “moving parts” within the sequence and "machinery" of the Lord’s return and judgments. This last chapter will present the chronological and logical sequence of these “moving parts”.

The Bible provides a number of details about the afterlife and coming judgments for those willing to spend the time studying it and it is, perhaps, the most sobering and terrifying of all the truths of the Scripture. Yet, in spite of the fact that mankind has had nearly two millennia to study it, there are equal parts of disbelief, speculation, misunderstanding, ignorance, denial and indifference regarding the details of the great judgments that await mankind and the fallen angels—even (especially?) among those who stand in the pulpit or at the Sunday School lectern week after week.

The purpose of this series is to develop from the Scripture the final sequence of events that end ultimately with the great, final judgment of Satan, all the lost dead and the fallen angels, whose end is their eternal punishment in the Outer Darkness. This judgment is typically called the Great White Throne Judgment, based on its description in Rev 20.11.

The following chapters provide the formal, biblical defense for the assertions above.