God will vindicate his people and fight for them. God will fight against his enemies and he will prevail. So everyone faces this coming day of judgment, but depending on who you are and where you stand with your Creator will fully determine how you stand before him as Judge.

What do you think of when you hear the word “judgment”? It will normally depend on who you are and the actual context. If for example you did some heroic or brave or sacrificial feat for another person, you might at one point have a day of reckoning. There might be a public award ceremony where your valiant efforts are recognised and rewarded.

Or you might have been caught out doing something wrong, and you know a day of reckoning is coming, and you do NOT look forward to that. Payday is coming, and you know you do not want to be there. We all likely have experienced both scenarios.

Let me offer one example of the latter, going way back when I was quite wrong. I had gone to a nearby small shop, and for some reason, decided I would snatch some candy or something. The gal there caught me. She took my name and phone number (I was not smart enough to come up with fake ones), and I was in great fear as I walked home.

When I got home, the phone did ring. But my mom was having a shower, so it never did get answered. So I missed out on my mini-judgement day way back then. Needless to say, I was greatly relieved. Judgment was avoided – at least on that occasion.

But there is of course a full and final judgment day coming, one that we ALL will be involved in. None of us will miss out on it. And of course there will be only two options available to all of mankind. Either you are right with God through Christ, and he has taken the judgment we deserved, or you are not right with God, and your judgment awaits.

We make that choice now. If we do not say no to sin and self now, and cast ourselves upon the mercy of Christ and his substitutionary atonement for our sins, then the day of judgment is coming, and NO one will want to be there. But if we have availed ourselves of the forgiveness of sins through faith and repentance, then we can indeed look forward to that day. So it all depends on which camp you happen to be in.

I want to tease this out just a bit further by discussing a few passages I have once again come upon in my daily Bible reading. I am once more back in the Old Testament prophets, and three similar and familiar passages can be discussed here. All three have to do with eschatological judgment.

As mentioned, for those who are his, it will be a day of real good news. For those who are not his, it will be a day of real bad news. The three texts contain a very familiar phrase, but two of the passages use it in quite a different manner than the third one.

We have all heard about beating ‘swords into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks’. Both Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:3 have this. And the larger context of the two is nearly identical (Is. 2:1-5 and Mic. 4:1-5). Both of course refer to the coming day of the Lord when weapons of warfare will no longer be needed.

However, consider an interesting reversal of all this as found in Joel 3:9-10:

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