Episode Details

Well, we finished off last year with a merry little Christmas post about sin, and we start the New Year full of zip and optimism with 2000 words about judgement!

Here’s the next chapter in the ‘Two ways to live’ evangelistic book. It’s based on box 3 of the outline, and tries to do that difficult thing of speaking plainly, persuasively and winsomely about the most awful subject—that we’re all facing death and judgement because of our rebellion against God.

Three things I’ve been particularly aware of as I’ve been drafting:

* I don’t want to write in a mealy-mouth, backpedalling fashion about the subject, as if I’m embarrassed about it;

* And yet I’m aware it will be a topic that many readers will be unfamiliar with and potentially offended by—so no need to put them off unnecessarily by how I approach it;

* But most significantly, unless the reader understands why death (and eternal destruction/death) is the punishment for our rebellion, it’s impossible to understand why the death of Christ takes our punishment for us.

Looking forward to your feedback about it. (Send me an email at tonyjpayne@me.com)

A bit of housekeeping: some of you have been having difficulty downloading the PDF of the chapter. I’ve been back and forth with the substack platform about it, and we haven’t got a complete solution yet. In the meantime:

* If you log in to the substack website itself, you’ll be able to download the pdf from the website. That seems to be working for everyone.

* As a fall back, I’ve also pasted the text of the chapter below (something I maybe should have done from the outset).

The justice of God

One of the many strange decisions I have made in my life is to be an Arsenal supporter. I live on the other side of the world from England, and so could have really chosen any football team to go for. But Arsenal it is, and will remain.

It’s a burden, of course, Arsenal’s form in recent years being what it is.

But the worst of it is that Arsenal suffers the most blatant refereeing injustice in the entire Premier League. It’s unbelievable. I can’t remember ever seeing an Arsenal match in which the referee was not against us. When a referee arrives at Arsenal, a switch flips in what passes for his brain. Not only will he call every 50/50 decision against us, but he will perpetrate the most blatant howlers and inconsistencies. We are always getting robbed, and I am constantly left shouting at the TV about the injustice of it all.

Strange thing, though. My brother, the Liverpool supporter, says exactly the same thing about how the refs treat his team. And so does my Spurs mate, and the poor sap I know who goes for Watford.

Every football fan is a one-eyed judge. When a decision goes our way, it was absolutely reasonable and just. When a decision goes against us, it is an obvious injustice by a criminally biased referee.

It’s not just in sport, of course. When some idiot roars past me driving dangerously fast, and then I come across him a few minutes later, parked on the side of the road getting a speeding ticket, I give a little satisfied grunt. Serves him right.

When I am the idiot driving too fast in a hurry to get somewhere, and a police car looms up behind me and flashes its lights, I also make a noise, but not a satisfied grunt.

We are like this as humans. We have a profound sense that there is such a thing as ‘justice’—that certain things should be the case, and that when they are not, it’s just not right or fair, and there should be some kind of reckoning. And yet we are self-centred and inconsistent about it. Sometimes we rush to judgement in our anger and get it wrong. Very often, we want justice to apply to thee