April 18, 2024
When people are confronted with gross injustice and complain about the obvious inequities in life on earth, part of our response to their complaint embodies the fifth reason to believe in Life After Death.
Revelation 19:1-2 depicts a celebration where “a vast multitude in heaven saying:
Hallelujah!
Salvation, glory and power belong to our God,
Because His judgments are true and righteous,
Because He has judged the notorious prostitute
Who corrupted the earth with her sexual immorality;
And He has avenged the blood of His slaves
That was on her hands.
The prayers of the martyrs are finally answered. There is justice on earth with the reign of Christ!
As I write these words, virulent and malevolent Islamic militants in Iraq are seeking to erase Christians and other minorities from their region. They are a powerful reminder of the gross injustices in this world of ours.
I listened to commentators last night talk about how America can’t right all the wrongs occurring in our world. We are well aware of how we live in a world where Christian children are abducted and enslaved by Muslims in Sudan and Nigeria, where teenagers are slaughtered simply because they are Jewish, where drug peddlers destroy millions of lives, where con artists steal elderly people’s life savings, where pornographers distort the truth about women and destroy families, were predators prey on innocent and impressionable children that leave scars for a lifetime, and where people like ISIS steal the land, homes, livelihood – if not lives – of people who are simply not like them!
The injustices of our world are not just restricted to the aforementioned tragedies. Recently a reporter talked about how the children flooding into our country from Honduras and Guatemala are representative of “most” children in impoverished and troubled lands. How blessed/fortunate I am to have been born in England and now live in America! What about Americans who were not blessed/fortunate to be born into a loving home? Even the best homes can be stricken by unforeseen illness, accident, or heartbreak of some kind while others seem immune from all trouble.
In the book Immortality: The Other Side of Death by Gary Habermass and J.P. Moreland, we read:
“It is obvious that in this life goods and evils, rewards and punishments, are not evenly distributed. Inequities abound. Good people often live miserable lives, and evil people often prosper. If God is infinitely just, as theism affirms, he must rectify these injustices. Because that rectification does not take place in this life, it must take place in the life to come.”
We know within our hearts, souls, and minds that there is a compelling need for justice – someday and somehow. Revelation describes that day. Until then true and complete justice will not and cannot be fulfilled no matter how valiant our efforts may be!
How do we “judge” the monstrous atrocities of a Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot? Does Hitler escape full judgment by committing suicide? What about his victims who were stripped of everything and died miserably in concentration camps? Was that “the end” of them and their “unjust” fate? Do the heroic lives of those who waged war against evil, sacrificing their lives to save the victims of Nazism and Communism, simply end at the grave? If justice shall prevail “in the end,” then death must and cannot be the end!
Scholar Harry Blamires writes succinctly: “… this life on earth presents us with an unfinished scenario” – and one that cries to be finished! He goes on to write: “Our moral consciousness presupposes a point of clarification at which all good is known as good and all evil is exposed as evil.”
That necessary point of clarification is beyond death!
