The lifting of the net marks the end of further opportunity to be reconciled to God. Well before the Day of Judgment our time may come to an end. We may be taken from this life and reserved for the Day of Judgment. Nothing can change our final destiny once that happens. If we die as those who know the Lord, who have repented of their sins and trusted in him, then we are safe forever. But if we have rejected him and continued to live for ourselves, to follow our sinful desires and to break his commandments, then once we die there is no further opportunity to seek and find the Lord. Death is unavoidable, judgment is unavoidable. God decides how long we will live in his world. God decides when any further opportunity to repent is closed to us. Do you think you can choose the day of your death? Even suicide is under the sovereign control of God.
The world goes on in the same way. It seems indifferent to the way we behave and the awful things that men and women do to each other. Extreme evil is done, and great injustice is carried out, and still life goes on and the world does not end, and God does not seem to notice or care. The unbelieving too do evil, and they imagine that they have got away with their sin and that justice can never catch up with them. If God was going to call them to account, then why has he not acted already. Does he not know what goes on in the world, what they have done? Does he not care? Is he unable to do anything about it? Final judgment is out of sight, and so men sin freely. They become more and more bold in bringing their sins out into the open. There was a time when social pressure suppressed many sins; now many grow bolder in their defiance of God. God allows this to take place so that when the net is finally lifted, it will be impossible for man to deny what he is.
The parable tells us that it is easy for God to judge the world. It is like putting a net into the water and lifting out the fish. The net surrounds them and they cannot escape; there is nowhere they can swim to avoid it. This is not a hook which the fish has to bite on in order to be caught, but a net in which scoops it up whether it likes or not. We are passive in the judgment. The Day of Judgment will come upon us as a net. Just as the fish is powerless to prevent itself being lifted out of the sea, so we will be powerless to prevent ourselves being summoned into the presence of God. The fish lies caught in the bottom of the boat; it cannot get back into the water. So we will be brought before the Lord, body and soul, and we will be unable to get away. None who have ever lived will be overlooked. The details of every life are recorded in God’s book.
It is a day that will bring to light everything that has ever taken place in the entire history of the world. That is what the net represents. Paul speaks of, ‘The day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel’ (Romans 2:16). Even those things which we were careful to keep hidden are all known to God. We may hide from men but we cannot hide from God. Nothing will be overlooked, nothing forgotten. Sins which we think we have buried far out of sight and forgotten about will be brought to the surface. It is convenient to us to forget some of the terrible things we have done, for it allows us to build a favourable picture of ourselves. We can maintain the fiction for a time, but we live with that net under us all our lives, ready to draw us up. We are never out of reach of God’s judgment. He reminds us of it during this life by impressing upon us our mortality. We know in our hearts that the wages of sin is death, and that after death comes judgment, but while it delays we manage to tell ourselves that it will never come.
Some interpret the net as the gospel net, as if it describes the activity of preachers and evangelists. Certainly Christ does speak of fishing in this way (Matthew 4:19), but here he makes the net to represent the judgment of God. The sorting of the good and the bad in the parable has no parallel to what the evangelist does. The words ‘so shall it be at the end of the world’ show what aspect of the kingdom is in view. It is the last stage in the kingdom – a stage which justifies what has been allowed to take place before – the final purification of the kingdom by the removal of what does not belong in it. Some apply it to the visible church as if it describes the removal of nominal believers from among the true, but it is about the totality of mankind. Just because it is a parable of the kingdom does not mean that it describes only what goes on in the visible church. Christ’s kingdom will be established as the only kingdom, and its establishment requires the displacement of other opposing kingdoms. This is part of the story of the kingdom of heaven.