God is entitled to judge. People today do not believe in punishment. The concept has gone out of their thinking. People do things that are outrageous and the public will say, ‘Oh, but he is a nice chap’, or, ‘We like him; let it go.’ People do not believe that there should be a penalty, a punishment any more. They think that if God is judging the world that makes him vindictive and unpleasant. Judgment is a negative concept and they are against it. Sin has become so arrogant now that even punishment is turned into something sinful.
Do you want a Day of Judgment, the apostle seems to suggest, where there is no punishment, where God has said, ‘I am not holy after all, I am not just after all. Everything I have ever said in the past is wrong, and actually I am going to let everybody go into heaven’? Is that what we want? So you want heaven to be just like earth. You want all sin to be transported and transferred into heaven? No door of heaven, no judgments, no discrimination. What an absurd concept! Who would be mad enough to want the eternal heavens to be like earth? Full of soap operas, full of gossip, full of slander, full of wretchedness, full of all the things that the apostle is going to describe! Oh no! Anybody – Christian, non Christian – who believes in the possibility of heaven wants it to be a pure place, a wonderful place, a place free from extortion and savagery and war and selfishness and lying and sin. Everybody with any sense wants there to be an entrance gate to heaven, a door and a judgment, and sin dealt with and turned away and brought to an end. God, who will judge the world, has every right to judge sin, and all the power to judge sin, and indeed he must, because it is his holy nature. So the apostle gives this very brief answer to that impertinent idea, ‘God forbid: for then, how shall God judge the world?’