Who judges us? Does Jesus judge us or does God? Who occupies the judgement seat we face when our time on earth is up? Does Jesus sit in it, or does God?
Consider John 5:22 which says, “For the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son…” Does that mean that God has given up the judgeship to Jesus? Does that nullify passages such as Psalm 143:1-2 which says, “Hear my prayer, O LORD; give ear to my pleas for mercy!
In your faithfulness answer me, in your righteousness! Enter not into judgment with your servant, for no one living is righteous before you?” For if God no longer judges us, then does that mean that we no longer pray to Him for judgement?
We cannot just pick certain passages from the Scriptures without considering all of it. John 1:1 says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” What is the Word but the entire Scriptures? So, to just pick out certain passages without considering the whole, is to try to make sense of the letter ‘r’ of the word ‘scriptures’ without seeing the rest of the letters of that word. To just go by one passage of the Scriptures, then, is to miss the rest of the Scriptures.
The Scriptures appear to support the notion that God, rather than give up His judgeship, judges us through Jesus. Jesus himself in John 5:30 says, “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of Him who sent me.” Jesus also says, in John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” God has conveyed a judgeship through Jesus, and He has conveyed to us an understanding of Him through Jesus.
If Jesus sits on the judgement seat, he would be judging, then, under God’s Authority and God’s Law. Whoever is on the judgement seat, then, whether it be God, or Jesus, is doing the Will of God.
Consider John 3:16-17 which says, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” Some may ask, ‘Why does God need someone like Jesus to save the world? Why wouldn’t God save the world Himself?’ After all, He created the heavens and the earth Himself; He didn’t appoint someone to do that for Him, so why should His dealing with us be any different?
When God saw how the world’s people drifted away from Him, with many worshipping other gods or eachother, did He admit to failure by trying another method to draw the people of the world to Him, the method being to send his son Jesus? But God is perfect, so everything He does is out of perfection. So, did He really say to Himself in a figurative sense, ‘The people rejected me, so I will send my son Jesus to clean up the mess?’
Considering that God is perfect, He cannot fail. So, He must have had a motive in commissioning Jesus the job of saving the world. We have to look back to Genesis to see what His motives, or reasons for sending Jesus into the world, might be.
In Genesis God creates Adam and Eve, and He put the Tree of Knowledge among them. Eve, upon temptation from the serpent, offers an apple from the Tree of Knowledge to Adam, who takes a bite out of it. God could have manipulated Eve, the way He hardened the pharaoh’s heart in Exodus, so that Eve doesn’t listen to the serpent, but instead He Lets Eve offer Adam the apple. God could also have manipulated Adam into not taking a bite of the apple, but instead lets Adam bite it. The reasoning, then, is that God created man with a free will, which evolves into a will to discern what is good and evil, what is love and hate, what is war and peace. In so doing He lets Adam and Eve decide what to do.
One can determine from the Scriptures, and from reading John 3:16-17, that in sending Jesus, God is playing to the love that is in us. He gave us free will, and in doing so He gave us the will to love. He could have made all of us love Him as surely as He created the Heavens and the earth, but He instead is keeping our free will in place, leaving the decision to love Him up to us. He has also made it plain that we are not to see or hear Him, so just as He sent angels in the Old testament on His behalf as He remained in the background, He sent Jesus to us, to reason with us as God would have reasoned with us.
If we should find Jesus sitting in the judgement seat, it would be as if God Himself were sitting there since Jesus would appear to us on God’s behalf, and he would do God’s Will.
