Twice the judgment-seat of God, or of Christ, is spoken of in the New Testament. In Rom. 14:10 "the judgment-seat of God" is spoken of in view of preventing individual judgment of others in certain matters. The best manuscripts have "the judgment-seat of God"in Romans 14:10. In 2 Cor. 5:10 "the judgment-seat of Christ" is presented in view of provoking to do good.

The subject in itself is one of the most solemn, and at the same time most blessed, and this so much the more as we understand it rightly.

I believe that each act of our lives will be manifested there, according as the grace of God, and His ways with us in connection with our own acts will then be known.

We read (in Rom., chap. 14) that "every one of us shall give account of himself to God." In this passage the judgment-seat is mentioned in connection with an exhortation to brethren not to judge one another in respect of days, meats, or any other such thing.

I am disposed to think that the acts alone will be subject to manifestation; but all the private acts of our lives depend so intimately upon our inward feelings, that it is in a certain sense difficult to distinguish between the acts and the simple thoughts. The acts manifest the power of the unseen thought, or of the feeling.

I believe that the whole of our acts will be detailed before the judgment-seat; not, however, as if we were in the flesh, and thus to our condemnation, but to make evident to our own eyes the grace that occupied itself with us-regenerate or unregenerate.

In the counsels of God we were elect before the foundation of the world; hence I think that our personal history will be detailed before the judgment-seat, and parallel with it the history of the grace and mercy of God toward each of us will gloriously appear.

The why and the how we did this or that, will be manifested then. For us, the scene will be declarative not judicial. We are not in the flesh before God; in His eyes, by grace, we have died with Christ. But then, if we have walked according to the flesh, we must see how we lost in blessing thereby, and what loss we have incurred. On the other hand, all the ways of God towards us, all the ways of wisdom, of mercy, and of grace, will be perfectly known and understood by us for the first time.

The history of each one will come out in perfect transparency; it will be seen how you yielded, and how He preserved you; how your foot slipped, and how He raised you up again; how you were drawing near danger and shame, and how He by His own arm interposed.

I believe this is the bride making herself ready, and I consider that to be a wondrous moment. There will be no flesh then to be condemned; but the new nature will enter into the full knowledge of the care and of the love which, in true holiness, and in righteousness, and even in grace, have followed us step by step all through the running of the race-all through our life here below.
Some parts of our life, till then entirely unexplained, will be fully disclosed and become altogether plain. Some tendencies of our nature, that perhaps we do not judge to be so pernicious and deadly as they are, and for the mortification of which we are perhaps now subjected to a discipline that we may not have interpreted aright, will then be perfectly explained; and, what is more, the very falls that plunge us now into bitter anguish will be seen then as what God used to preserve us from something more terrible.

I do not think that until then we shall ever have had a full knowledge of the badness of our flesh. How blessed for us to know that while we are not in the flesh in the eyes of God now, the flesh will no longer be attached to us then.

On the other side, I doubt not, the manifestation of God's grace toward us individually will be so magnificent that even the sense of the perversity of the flesh that we had, will be overwhelmed by the greatness of the sense of divine goodness.

Oh why do we not deny and mortify the flesh when we think of that hour ? The Lord grant that we may do so more and more to the glory of His grace. This great subject of the judgment-seat brings the soul to a very full knowledge of our individual standing "in Christ" before God, through grace.
J. N. D.