What does God's judgement look like?

The death or the punishment that sin brings is as much a means of grace, on his view, as the death that being crucified with Christ brings, and in both cases death is a process whereby the old person or the false self is destroyed. The difference between the two kinds of death, in other words, is essentially a difference of perspective. From the perspective of those already crucified in Christ, the destruction of the false self is clearly a good thing; it is liberation or salvation itself. But from the perspective of those who continue to cling to the false self, its destruction will be a fearsome thing; it will seem like the very destruction of themselves. For how else could those who cling to the false self experience God’s opposition to it except as opposition to themselves? They will encounter their God as a consuming fire, and they will experience his opposition to the false self as wrath and fury. For one way or another, God will destroy the false self and will destroy it forever. Nor should Christians blithely suppose, on account of their supposedly “correct doctrine,” that they will be exempt from such suffering. For as Paul explained in 1 Cor 3: 10–15, “the Day” is coming when fire will test the works of even Christian leaders and will consume some of their works as if they were wood, hay, or straw (v. 12). But even as those whose “work is burned up . . . will suffer loss,” so also will they “be saved, but only as through fire” (v. 15). All of which suggests the following picture. Once the consuming fire of God’s love has destroyed, whether in this life, or in hell itself, everything that is false within us, once nothing of the false self remains for us to cling to, then nothing of our opposition to God will remain either. For then we shall see through all of the illusions that made such opposition possible in the first place. And then we shall discover the most glorious truth of all: everything that sinners fear most about God—the wrath and the fearsome punishment associated with his righteous ordinances—was never anything more than a schoolmaster to bring them to Christ and thus to save them from themselves. That picture, which accords so well with Paul’s universalism, also accords very well, I have suggested, with his understanding of God’s wrath and judgment of sin. For in Pauline thought, God has one and only one motive for all of his actions towards us, and that motive is love; hence, even his severity towards sin is itself an expression of mercy (as the eleventh chapter of Romans makes so abundantly clear).
 
God knows from the outset that, beyond a certain limit, libertarian freedom cannot survive further separation from the divine nature. Accordingly, no matter how tenaciously some sinners might pursue a life apart from God and resist his loving purpose for their lives, God has, as a sort of last resort, a sure-fire way of shattering the illusions that make their rebellion possible in the first place. To do so, he need only honour their own free choices and permit them to experience the very life they have confusedly chosen. When, as a last resort, God allows a sinner to live without even an implicit experience of the divine nature, the resulting horror will at last shatter any illusion that some good is achievable apart from God; it will finally elicit, therefore, a cry for help of a kind that, however faint, is just what God needs in order to begin and eventually to complete the process of reconciliation.
 
Note then,” he wrote in Rom 11: 22, “the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness toward you, provided you continue in his kindness; otherwise, you also will be cut off.” As this text illustrates, Paul held that our own actions, particularly our free choices, determine how God will respond to us in the immediate future; they determine, in particular, the form that God’s perfecting love will take. If we continue in disobedience, then God will continue to shut us up to our disobedience, thereby forcing us to experience the consequences of our choices and the very life we have chosen to live; in that way, we will experience God’s perfecting love as severity. But if we repent and enter into communion with God, then we will experience his perfecting love as kindness. So given the assumption that we have libertarian freedom, our free choices will have very real consequences in our lives and will determine how we encounter God’s grace in the future. But whichever way we choose, God’s perfecting love will meet our true spiritual needs perfectly. For Paul’s whole point in Romans 11 was that God’s severity, no less than his kindness, is a means of his saving grace; God’s severity towards part of Israel was but one of the means whereby he will save all of Israel in the end.
 
My overall argument in this essay has been that the God of the Bible, whose very essence is perfect love, has both the intention and the power to bring every human being, whether male or female, Jew or Gentile, rich or poor, saint or sinner, to a glorious end. When Jesus declared: “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible” (Matt 19: 25), he was speaking of salvation in a context where a person’s own choices had made it seem utterly impossible, like a camel passing through the eye of a needle. And his meaning was clear: there are no obstacles to salvation in anyone, not even in the most recalcitrant will or the hardest of hearts, that God cannot eventually overcome, and do so without interfering with the person’s freedom and without bypassing the person’s own reasoning powers.