Following the victory over the principal enemy, the dragon, the devil, who has been despatched to hell, John sees the judgment of the dead before the great white throne. The old order is about to disappear. What is coming is for eternity. Some commentators distinguish between different judgments, such as the judgment of the nations to determine who may and who may not enter into the Messianic Kingdom,1 or the judgment of the believers, which is more of an assessment, before the judgment seat of Christ, to receive reward according to works,2 and then the judgment before the white throne, which is a final judgment.
These kinds of viewpoints have also their drawbacks however, for what should be seen as a ‘judgment of the nations’ at the beginning of the Millennium seems also to be indeed a judgment referring to eternal well-being or eternal woe,3 and the ‘judgment seat of Christ’ really is also the judgment seat before which everyone will come to appear.4 God’s righteous judgment will come, and He will reward everyone according to his or her works.5 The unnamed Majesty on the ‘white throne’ is definitely God, but Christ is certainly there as well. There is no mention of ‘celestial beings’, of the ‘sea like crystal’, ‘angels and their princes’ or of any of the other things that John previously saw around the throne.
Did the Father not place everything in Jesus’ hands?6 Where the Father has His throne, the Son has His throne too.7 The first time John saw the throne, he did not notice the Lamb initially, even though He was indeed present.8 First of all, before the judgment takes place, the earth and the Heavens flee away. We have already heard of the flight of the Heavens that are rolled up like a scroll.9 But later on ‘the Heavens’ (atmosphere/ Universe) are apparently still in existence, since the eagle flies in their midst10 and the ‘two witnesses’ have the power to shut up Heaven so that no more rain falls.11 However, here it states emphatically that ‘there was no place for them’. If this does not indicate complete disappearance, it does predict a total ‘transformation’, a ‘transmutation’. The Lord Jesus Himself says that ‘Heaven and earth’ will pass away12 and that God will create New Heavens and a New Earth.13 Whether God will use the present Universe’s ‘raw materials’ to do so is not known, but it is possible. The basic blocks, the elements that He took ‘from within Himself’ were thus created and will be there forever. Peter apparently thinks of the elements themselves being destroyed by fire, of atoms, protons, electrons, neutrons and other particles dissolved. “…the ‘Day of the Lord will’ come like a thief, in which the Heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works [the works in it] will be burned up. Since all these things are to be destroyed in this way, what sort of people ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, looking for and hastening the Coming of the ‘Day of God’, because of which the Heavens will be destroyed by burning, and the elements will melt with intense heat!14 Basically our ‘material world’ consists of a ‘condensed form of radiation and energy’. Think about what happens when in an ‘Atom Bomb’ or a ‘Hydrogen Bomb’ the atoms are split. What is left is only radiation and heat. For ‘the elements’ that make up the existence of our present ‘material earth’ and ‘Universe’ look at the ‘remarks’ below. They will be ‘decomposed’, in a sense ‘pass away’, but they could be ‘re-melted’, ‘re-used’ and ‘hammered’ into something new, like a blacksmith or a goldsmith does – but ‘transfused’ with eternal proportions, ‘glowing’ of everlasting life in their new existence. ‘Rolled up like a scroll’, can also include ‘rolled out like a scroll’ again. Like a carpet being ‘rolled up’ and then ‘rolled out again. Just as the ‘scrolls’ are taken out of the ‘Holy Ark’ in the synagogue, ‘rolled out’ to be read at the ‘bema’ and ‘rolled up again to be put back in the ‘Holy Ark’ again. The ‘Aaron Kodesh’ (“Holy Ark”), where the Torah Scrolls are kept, is situated in the front of the synagogue. In the Sephardic tradition, it is referred to as the ‘heichal’ (“chamber”). The Ark is the holiest place in the synagogue. The Ark is opened only during special prayers and when removing the Torah to read during prayer services. It is customary (but not obligatory) to stand when the Ark is opened. We will see how the LORD will do this ‘rolling up’ of the ‘elements’ of the Universe! Heaven and earth will pass away,15 but the Word of God that creative Word that was there in the beginning,16 will never pass away. The Universe, the atmosphere and the earth as we know them will cease to exist in their present form, but there will be a New Heaven and a New Earth. Once upon a time God proceeded to create matter. He took ‘reasons from within Himself’ to do so. ‘Creatio ex Nihilo’, from within Himself. Hebrews 11:3 “By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the Word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.” People belong to this Created existence of matter and time. The re-creation is at hand. Creation, that has been groaning under the consequences of man’s sin and that has been suffering birth pangs for centuries and that also was subjected to frustration, will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the same freedom and glory with which the ‘children of God’ will be clothed at the resurrection!17
Creation is looking forward to this. Peter is looking forward to it. In keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a New Heaven and a New Earth, where righteousness dwells.18 But before we are there, there is first the judgment before the white throne. All who did not share in the first resurrection are standing there. Or maybe they will be present there as well not to be judged but to find out what their new role will be in the New Heaven and upon the New They are already certain of eternal bliss and they have already been privileged to serve the Lord for a thousand years. They will go from glory to glory to glory to…glory!
• Some elementary knowledge about the basic elements of the building blocks of the Universe. An ‘Element’ is a substance made from only one type of atom. What differentiates an atom of, say, Carbon from Uranium, is its Atomic Number. The ‘atomic number’ is how many protons make up an atom. Six protons make up carbon, and ninety two protons make up uranium, thus they are different elements. An atom of hydrogen is generally made of one proton and no neutrons. However, there are atoms of hydrogen that exist with one proton and one neutron, or occasionally two neutrons. This is called an isotope, which is the same element with a slightly different structure. In nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry, nuclear fission is a nuclear reaction or a radioactive decay process in which the nucleus of an atom splits into 2 smaller, lighter nuclei. The fission process often produces gamma photons, and releases a very large amount of energy even by the energetic standards of radioactive decay. Nuclear fission of heavy elements was discovered on December 17, 1938 by German Otto Hahn and his assistant Fritz Strassmann, and explained theoretically in January 1939 by Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch. Frisch named the process by analogy with biological fission of living cells. For heavy nuclides, it is an exothermic reaction which can release large amounts of energy both as electromagnetic radiation and as kinetic energy of the fragments (heating the bulk material where fission takes place). In order for fission to produce energy, the total binding energy of the resulting elements must be more negative (greater binding energy) than that of the starting element. A Quark is a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of ‘matter’. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. Due to a phenomenon known as colour confinement, quarks are never directly observed or found in isolation; they can be found only within hadrons, which include baryons (such as protons and neutrons) and mesons. For this reason, much of what is known about quarks has been drawn from observations of hadrons. The ‘God particle’ is referring to ’Higgs boson’, a particle in physics sometimes referred to as the ‘God particle’. The Higgs boson is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics, produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. It is named after physicist Peter Higgs, who in 1964, along with five other scientists, proposed the mechanism to explain why particles have mass, this Higgs mechanism also implies the existence of a new boson. Its existence was confirmed in 2012 by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations based on collisions in the LHC at CERN. On December 10, 2013, two of the physicists, Peter Higgs and François Englert, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their theoretical predictions. Although Higgs’s name has come to be associated with this theory (the Higgs mechanism), several researchers between about 1960 and 1972 independently developed different parts of it. In mainstream media the Higgs boson has often been called the “God particle”, from a 1993 book on the topic, although the nickname is strongly disliked by many physicists, including Higgs himself, who regard it as sensationalism. The intelligence of the Creator goes beyond our limited understanding. How great Thou art!
Bible References:
1.Matthew 25:31–40 2.2 Corinthians 5:10 cf. 1 Corinthians 3:10–15 3.Matthew 25:46 4.Romans 14:10; Hebrews 9:27, 10:27 5.Romans 2:5–10 6.John 5:19–29, 3:35 7.Revelation 3:21, 22:3 8.Revelation 4:2, 5:6 9.Revelation 6:14 10.Revelation 8:13 11.Revelation 11:6 12.Matthew 24:35 13.Isaiah 65:17, 66:22 14.2 Peter 3:10–12 15.Matthew 5:18, 24:35 16.John 1:1–5 17.Romans 8:18–21 18.2 Peter 3:13
