Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ

by Fleming Rutledge

Judgment seen in this way, as God coming in his righteousness in the last day to reclaim his creation for himself, loses its fearsome aspect for those who trust in the promise of God to redeem humanity and the kosmos despite all appearances to the contrary. The word “justification” is the right one here. In his righteousness, God will justify—he will make right—all that is wrong. This will cost something. Since it is an ultimate promise, it was made at an ultimate cost. Jesus Christ gave his life for it, but not only his life—the Son of God himself underwent the ultimate judgment of God upon the cross. He absorbed God’s eternal rejection of Sin even though, as Paul says, “he knew no sin.” In one of the most astonishing sentences in all Scripture, God “made him to be sin” so that we are “made the righteousness of God” (II Cor. 5:21). This is the way to understand the judgment of God in the ultimate sense. Mysterious as this verse is, it carries the crucial message that the righteousness of God was made manifest in the judgment upon Sin that Jesus bore and carried away from us in the