So turn with me in your Bibles, please, to John chapter 3, beginning at verse 19.
And this is the Judgment: the light has come into the world, and people love the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.
From there, we turn back to Genesis chapter 1.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray.
Lord, we thank you for your life, the light of your word. Help it to illuminate our hearts, our minds, and our lives so that we may be drawn to you, to love you in faith. We pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen.
Throughout his nighttime visit with Nicodemus, Jesus has explained the means by which we are saved by looking up to the Lord in faith, pisto, through an objective reminder of our need for salvation. An earlier type being the bronze serpent to remind Israel of God’s discipline, and the antitype of the Cross, which the Son of Man was lifted up on to remind us of the discipline and condemnation we deserve for our sin, but which Jesus took upon himself to give us his righteousness.
He explained the why of our salvation, because God so loved the world—to not condemn the world, but to save the world through him; the how of our salvation, that God gave His only begotten Son to be lifted up and suffer just condemnation in our place. Finally, he explains what we are saved from: the judgment of the Lord and its righteous consequence.
But really, what is it? What is the judgment and its consequence? Jesus tells us here, and it’s probably not what you expect because it’s not how popular American Christian culture often teaches about hell.
If you ask the average American Evangelical, ‘What is Hell?’ the common answer you will likely hear is ‘separation from God.’ And although that might sound right and good from our Christian perspective, it is not the biblical perspective. Unfortunately, it is an incomplete definition, and that makes it completely wrong. Hell cannot be separation from God since the reprobate, the pagan, and the unbelieving atheist, each of them, all spend their entire lives denying or opposing God and trying to get away from him and his holy law because they hate and fear him.
So, their ultimate punishment will not be giving them what they have always said they wanted.
So, what is Hell? Jesus says, ‘And this is the Judgment: the light has come into the world, and people love the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.’
We need to pause here and look at the word ‘judgment’ because what it means, what it is, and how we use the word today are not quite the same. Following a declaration of condemnation against all those who do not have faith in Jesus Christ, we would expect that what follows here—and this is the judgment—would be an expression of God’s wrath against the condemned. However, that’s not what this sounds like.
The Greek word translated here as ‘judgment’ is the word ‘Cris,’ and it’s a word we’ve carried over into English along with the original meaning. You’ll probably recognize the word better by its common pronunciation as “crisis.” Its proper meaning is a point or moment of decision, a judicial decision, as in needing to make a judgment call.
Usually, we think of a crisis as something negative—that it’s problematic and distressing—and while those are included elements, they do not define it. Whereas we often use the word ‘judgment’ for what we really intend to mean as the consequence of a judgment. A judge faces a crisis at the end of every trial when a judge enters their judgment; they’re rendering a verdict, making a decision of guilty or not guilty, making then their pronounced sentence, the consequence of their judgment.
A murderer is judged guilty and is thus condemned to death or life in prison. If you try swapping the words ‘crisis’ and ‘judgment,’ using them as synonyms, you’ll find that the negative sense of ‘crisis’ is reduced while the importance of ‘judgment,’ its gravitas, is increased.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a critical time of decision when good judgment, wise and prudent judgment, needed to be—and evidently was—exercised by President Kennedy. The financial and housing crisis of earlier this century were times of decision for our government whether or not to bail out the banks and the lenders. And there were also moments of decision of crisis for us as individuals concerning our general spending habits. Or even more simply, ‘I’m hungry, what do you want to eat?’ is another simpler example of a crisis—one that can still be quite distressing.
So, Jesus tells Nicodemus here, ‘And this is the Judgment; this is the crisis; this is the point of decision.’ But what decision needed to be made, and who was needing to make it?
Jesus says, ‘No one is ascended to heaven except he who is descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And as Moses lifted up the serpent of the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.’
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.
Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
And this is the Judgment; the decision was whether or not to save us, and the decision was the Lord’s. It was a Trinitarian decision. God the Father had to decide whether or not to give his only begotten Son; to send the Son into the world that the world might be saved through him.
God the Son had to decide whether or not he would go, whether or not he would descend from heaven to be lifted up upon a Roman cross so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. And God the Holy Spirit had to decide whether or not he would bring Jesus, God the Son, into the world by conceiving him with his mother Mary.
The Father willed the Son to go; the Son went in perfect obedience, and the Holy Spirit brought him and supported him. The Triune God was working together through this crisis in perfect unity. Thus, the judgment is that God would save his elect, and the Lord decided to save us.
Then the light has come into the world, and people love the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. See, God sent the Fos, who is Logos, Andros, and Theos, into the cosmos in order to do what needed to be done to save us.
However, people—humanity—agape the darkness rather than the fal, the light, because all of our works are evil ever since our nature was corrupted by having sin.
So, first, there was the Judgment, the crisis, the decision, and now we come to its consequences: for everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light lest his works should be exposed.
Sinful humanity does not like the light; it prefers the dark. Sinful humanity always prefers Satan to Jesus Christ. The unregenerate always prefer to try and hide themselves under the cover of darkness, forgetting—or maybe hoping and wishing—that Scripture is a lie when it says that God is omniscient, that he sees and knows all things, including all of our petty little secrets, that there is no hiding from him, and that everything will one day be revealed and judged.
Everyone who remains trapped and consumed by and in their sinfulness hates and fears God. They try to flee from his holy presence, running away from his light, seeking the deepest darkness possible. But Job warns us: ‘For his eyes are on the ways of a man, and he sees all of his steps.’ There is no gloom or deep darkness where evildoers may hide themselves.
Isaiah declared concerning these wicked: ‘Enter into the rock and hide in the dust from before the terror of the Lord and from the splendor of his majesty.’ And people shall enter the caves of the rocks and the holes of the ground from before the terror of the Lord and from the splendor of his majesty when he rises to terrify the Earth.
John will describe that fulfillment for us in his Revelation: ‘When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, and the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale. The sky vanished like a scroll that is being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place.’
Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to them, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?’
You see, the wicked always try to hide from the true God. They even try to cloak their sin beneath the veneer of self-righteousness and respectability. They call evil good and good evil, repeating their lies often and loud enough in the vain hope that everyone will begin to believe and trust it. Thus, they try to redefine absolute truth. They offer the innocent something that seems sweet and true but is in reality poison and false.
You’re starting to see the problem with that popular definition of hell and why it’s not biblical. The wicked do not fear separation from God; they want it. The wicked crave space between them and God; they seek to put as much distance between themselves and the Lord as possible. But it’s never enough for them and can never be, because they cannot escape him.
What they fear and hate most is his presence, being trapped beneath his all-seeing and all-knowing gaze, rightfully feeling shame for all their wickedness as their secrets and sins are exposed in his purifying light. They feel convicted and suffer reproof in his presence because when they’re forcibly compared against his matchless perfect righteousness and holiness, they cannot deny the truth. They must convict themselves, and they must declare the rightness and justness of their punishment. Truly, they are without excuse, and they will suffer his burning wrath eternally, being consumed yet never utterly destroyed.
But when will this consequence begin to happen? When the light came into the world, whenever and wherever the Lord’s presence comes into proximity with sinfulness, because he cannot even look upon sin without it experiencing his wrath.
Remember Isaiah’s reaction and response when he found himself standing before the Lord? He cried out, ‘Woe is me! For I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.’
Isaiah feared his own destruction until a seraph touched his lips with a burning coal brought forth from the heavenly altar, sanctifying him through an application of Christ’s atonement. Isaiah’s experience reminds us that while our sanctification by the Holy Spirit is often painful for us, it’s only a temporary pain and far less painful than the alternative.
So truly, we and all the wicked are without excuse. We have known and have been able to see the truth of this reality from the very beginning of our existence. We can see the very real effect of God’s judgment whenever we look up towards the sky. God has been telling us and warning us about the very real penalty due our sin since the six days of creation.
Look back to Genesis 1. You’ll begin to see it: ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.’ God created the heavens, and God created the earth, but God did not create the darkness. Darkness is not a created thing; it is the absence of a thing. It is a lack or a negative impression; it is a vacuum. It is uncreation.
Darkness is not like darkness; sin is also something not created by the Lord. Sin is unfaithfulness, not faithfulness to his word, which is why Scripture uses darkness as a metaphor for sin. Remember when John wrote in his first epistle: ‘This is the message we have heard from him and proclaimed to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin.’
Darkness is not light; darkness is the absence and opposite of light, just as sin is disobedience or a lack of faithfulness. Sin is cosmic treason because it’s not fidelity to the sovereign Creator King. Sin is not righteous, and God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw that the light was good.
Then God created light. God established righteousness and goodness; he established them absolutely. Light was created, possessing and illuminating the moral standard for creation. Then God separated the light from the darkness. God separated the light from the dark; he divided them. He placed a barrier between. He established the initial either/or binary. Everything became either light or either dark; there could be no possible mixing of the two. Where the light would remain light, gray is not light; it can only be dark.
The light is moral good while the dark is a moral evil. Both darkness and sin are defined by the nature of their not. So too, God separated the righteous from the wicked; he separated the living from the dead, the spiritually alive from the spiritually dead.
While still affirming the reality of the creation narrative, we can also understand this as an illustration of his work in election, metaphorically predestining some to the light while predestining others to the dark. As John wrote about the logos, Jesus, ‘In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.’
Therefore, if the Spirit of Christ dwells within you, then you are carrying the light of life with you wherever you are, and the Holy Spirit is shining inside you, driving away the darkness of your sinful nature, burning it away in the same purifying fire of sanctification that Isaiah experienced.
Whereas whoever does what is true comes to the light so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God. Those who are born again, those who have been regenerated by the Holy Spirit, are drawn to Christ, drawn to the Lord in faith, like moths to a flame.
And we gladly come to him because like attracts to light. Because by being filled with and possessing his light, we want to unite with him, unite in him, joining the light we carry with his primary light and increasing his glory in its brilliance.
Whoever does what is true are those who do what is right, who follow the way of the righteous, followers of the way of Jesus Christ. They are those who obey the Lord out of their love for him. His love draws the righteous to God in the light, while fear drives the wicked away from him out towards the dark.
Truth is good; it is a morally pure absolute of substance. Truth is unchanging and unchangeable; truth is universal, meaning that which is true is always true for everyone, always. Truth is reliable and unassailable; truth is inarguable.
But lies and falsehood are evil, a moral absolute devoid of substance. Lies constantly change and are intimately personal. Lies are never true, even for those deceived into believing them. Lies are undependable, crumbling with the most minor of opposition and are easily disprovable. God is good, and Satan is the father of lies.
Their children, their followers, and all who belong to them echo their respective fathers by walking their same path, walking either in the darkness or in the light.
But why? Why do those who love and follow the path come to the light? So that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God. They come to God because, as his chosen children of adoption, we possess assurance in our faith.
We know because the Holy Spirit within tells us that we are approved of by the Lord because of Christ’s work for us. Therefore, we want to be in his presence; we are glad and joyful to be invited in. We come to the light because God takes pleasure in the good works we do in his name and for his sake, and although the works are not good in themselves, his Spirit redeems and sanctifies them, perfecting them for Christ’s sake and for God’s glory.
When we do them out of our love for Christ and when we desire to please him and be like him, we do good things for him to earn his approval or favor—but because we already have it. We bring our works to him because he takes pleasure in our desire to please him.
As we do these things to increase his glory, we are confident that Jesus will share his glory with us before all the world. So we joyfully bring our works to God’s light because we want to see him see them and to see him take joy in us and our efforts.
We may not want to admit it, but really, when it comes down to it, all of our good works are like a child’s piece of artwork or report card that we bring to our parents to hang on the refrigerator.
So, to summarize, as we conclude Nicodemus’s nighttime visit: the Judgment was God’s crisis, his decision to enter into creation and save the elect—the elect whom God separated from the wicked, as light from dark, imputing the righteousness of Jesus Christ to them. He divided them one from the other so that there could be no mixing or mingling, predestining them to either be righteous or wicked, giving the righteous a living, loving heart of flesh but giving the wicked hard, hateful, and dead hearts of stone.
The consequence of that decision was that when God entered into his creation, when the logos, who is Theos, Andros, and Fos appeared, the wicked and sinful humanity tried to flee from his presence. But when they could not escape, they tried to destroy him instead.
The righteous, the elect—those called by the Lord—are drawn to him in love and devotion, faith and obedience. And the ultimate spiritual truth of reality is that God is very present. God is omnipresent; he is everywhere, in every time and place. Therefore, hell cannot be separation from God, because there is nowhere, no when, that God is not.
However, since it is impossible for us to escape his presence, what matters is how we respond to it.
Do we want to flee from him in fear, or do we want to approach closer to him in love? Those whom the Lord loves and who love God back bask in his presence experiencing joy, peace, satisfaction, love, gladness, and life eternal.
While those whom God still loves but who hate God back suffer in his presence, experience fear, hatred, pain, sorrow, and wrath, eternally dying in torment.
And since we will all be forever in the Lord’s presence, it is far better to say that heaven is union into the love of God and that hell is separation from the love of God.
Knowing and believing that we are each faced with our own crisis, our own moment of decision, our own judgment, Jesus Christ came into the world to call all his righteous elect to himself, and one day soon, he will return.
Therefore, each of us must still decide how we will respond to his light. Will you respond to him with love and desire? Will you go to him and let him burn out and drive away all the darkness that hides within you? Will you worship, praise, and glorify him and enjoy him forever?
Or will you respond to him with hatred and fear? Will you seek to flee from his presence in futility? Will you suffer the penalty of your sin, a moral debt that you can never repay or satisfy? Will you wail, curse, gnash your teeth, and suffer in torment forever?
Remember, the grace and mercy found within the Gospel of Jesus Christ is freely offered to everyone, but each of us are still obligated to respond to him one way or the other according to our true heart’s desire.
The Lord predestines, but we must still respond accordingly. So if you hear him calling, do not harden your heart; instead, heed his word and call upon the name of Jesus Christ in faith and know that you will be, that you are saved.
Because 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.
Jesus saves, and he will save you by faith in him alone, and he will save you for God’s glory alone because he loves you, and it pleases him to save you. So be joyful and glad. Rejoice because Christ has come and will come again. Christ has come to save in the love of God. Amen.
Please stand.