After This, the Judgment (Part 7)
What About Rewards?
Author’s note: Let me say from the outset that I am deeply indebted to the work of J. V. Fesko in helping me understand the reward of the believer. For that reason, his work will be quoted and leaned on throughout this article. His work can be found here.
For many Christians, reward has been imagined almost entirely in terms of positions in the coming kingdom, crowns, mansions, etc., that will be distributed after believers have their lives evaluated.
In that framework, the reward becomes something added on top of salvation, something distinct from the inheritance itself, something assigned according to the quality of the believer’s Christian life.
That way of thinking can sound spiritual, but it often reveals something much deeper in us, because the law-bent heart does not merely want Christ to be enough, but wants the final day to be a place where our sacrifice and legitimacy are finally displayed.
The legalistic heart within all of us does not simply want to be saved by grace, but wants to be rewarded in a way that proves he was more legitimate than the weak, weary, struggling Christian next to him.
This is the real reason why a reward system is so attractive to the flesh.
However, reward is not something detached from salvation, but salvation brought to its appointed fullness in the resurrection.
The Inheritance Is the Reward
Peter begins his first epistle by blessing God, not because believers might one day receive more rewards than other believers, but because God “hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” and unto “an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you” (1 Pet. 1:3–4).
Here, Peter ties the believer’s future hope directly to the resurrection of Jesus Christ and then describes that hope as an inheritance. This means the reward is not presented as a wage calculated according to performance, but as the family estate belonging to those who have been born again through the risen Christ.
The inheritance is incorruptible, undefiled, unfading, and reserved, and Peter does not present this inheritance as the possession of an elite class of unusually productive Christians, but as the common hope of all who are “kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Pet. 1:5).
That means the inheritance is the same in kind for every believer because it belongs to all who belong to Christ, and although that may make the skin of the legalist crawl, it is exactly how inheritance works.
Servants earn wages, but sons receive an inheritance, and the son does not receive the family estate because he has outperformed the other children at the family business, but because he belongs to the family.
Peter’s point is not that suffering Christians should endure because some of them may receive better heavenly real estate than others, but that every believer has been begotten again through Christ’s resurrection into a living hope that will not perish, will not be defiled, and will not fade.
The reward is the inheritance, and the inheritance is life with God in the age to come, secured by Christ’s resurrection.
The Final Judgment Is the Resurrection
This is where J. V. Fesko’s work on justification and the final judgment is especially helpful because he presses the question at the exact place where much of the confusion begins, namely, in the assumption that Christ’s return, the resurrection, and the final judgment must be treated as separable moments in a sequence.
Fesko argues that the final judgment should not be isolated from resurrection, but should be understood as part of the “single organic event” of Christ’s appearing, resurrection, and judgment, and he summarizes the point with the claim that “the final judgment is the resurrection.”
That sentence reframes the whole discussion, because if the final judgment is the resurrection, then the believer’s reward is resurrection unto life itself.
Jesus says this in John 5:28–29 when He declares that the hour is coming when all who are in the graves will hear His voice and come forth, “they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.”
We would again do well to notice the structure. There is one voice of the Son of God, one resurrection summons, and two outcomes, with those who are in Christ raised unto life, and those who remain outside of Him raised unto condemnation.
The resurrection itself is revelatory because it publicly manifests who belongs to Christ and who does not. Fesko makes the same point by arguing that the resurrection and final judgment are one event, with the righteous raised and transformed while the wicked are raised unto condemnation, so that the resurrection itself visibly manifests the justified status of the righteous and the condemned status of the wicked.
In other words, the resurrection does what so many have tried to make the so-called believer-only judgment seat do, because it reveals, vindicates, distinguishes, and publicly manifests the verdict already true in Christ.
Christ’s Resurrection and the Believer’s Resurrection
Just as the resurrection of Jesus was the vindication of His obedience, His work, His word, and His person before the Father and before the world, so the resurrection of the believer functions as the public vindication of those who are united to Him by faith.
This is why Paul speaks of Christ as “the firstborn from the dead” (Col. 1:18), “the firstborn among many brethren” (Rom. 8:29), and “the firstfruits of them that slept” (1 Cor. 15:20), because the resurrection of Christ is not merely one isolated miracle among many, but the representative beginning, pledge, and guarantee of the resurrection harvest that will follow.
This distinction matters because Christ was not the first person ever raised from the dead in a chronological sense.
Scripture records others being raised before His resurrection, including the widow’s son (1 Kings 17:17–24), the Shunammite’s son (2 Kings 4:32–37), the man who revived after touching Elisha’s bones (2 Kings 13:20–21), Jairus’s daughter (Mark 5:35–43), the widow’s son at Nain (Luke 7:11–17), and Lazarus (John 11:38–44).
So when Paul calls Christ the “firstborn from the dead” and the “firstfruits” of those who sleep, he cannot mean that Jesus was the first person ever to come back from death in any historical sense.
Rather, Christ is first in a different and far greater sense. He is the first to be raised in resurrection glory, never to die again. He is the first to be raised as the public declaration that His work was accepted.
That is why Romans 1:4 says that He was “declared to be the Son of God with power… by the resurrection from the dead.” The resurrection did not make Jesus the Son of God, because He was eternally the Son, but it publicly declared, manifested, and vindicated Him as the Son in power after His humiliation, suffering, obedience, and death.
That same logic carries into the believer’s resurrection.
If Christ is the firstfruits, then those who belong to Him are the harvest of the same kind.
Firstfruits are not disconnected from the harvest, nor are they of a different nature than what follows. The firstfruits are the beginning and guarantee of the full crop, which means Christ’s resurrection is not merely an example placed in front of us, but the pledge of the same resurrection life that will be given to all who are united to Him.
This is Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 15. Christ has been raised as “the firstfruits of them that slept,” and then Paul immediately adds, “afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming” (1 Cor. 15:20, 23). In other words, Christ’s resurrection and the believer’s resurrection belong to the same eschatological harvest, with Christ raised first as the representative head and His people raised after Him as those who share in His life.
That is why Fesko’s point is so helpful, because if Christ was declared to be the Son of God by resurrection, then those who are in Him will likewise be declared to be sons of God at their resurrection.
This helps make sense of Romans 8:23, where Paul says that believers, who already have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as they wait for “the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.”
Paul is not saying that believers are not adopted now, because the whole argument of Romans 8 depends upon the present reality that believers have already received the Spirit of adoption, by whom they cry, “Abba, Father” (Rom. 8:15).
Rather, Paul is saying that adoption has a future bodily manifestation, because what is already true by grace will be publicly revealed in glory when the body itself is redeemed.
The believer is already justified, but the resurrection will publicly vindicate him as justified.
The believer is already united to Christ, but the resurrection will openly display that union in glory.
The believer is already adopted, but the resurrection will manifest that adoption before all creation.
The believer already has life in Christ, but the resurrection will bring that life into full bodily, visible, incorruptible reality.
The resurrection is salvation reaching its appointed end.
The resurrection is the believer being conformed to the image of the risen Christ, sharing in the harvest of which Christ Himself is the firstfruits, and being publicly declared to be what he already was in Him: justified, adopted, beloved, and alive forevermore.
The Already and the Not Yet
This also fits the larger New Testament pattern of the already and the not yet, because believers have already been raised with Christ in one sense, while still awaiting the resurrection of the body.
Romans 6:4 speaks of believers walking in newness of life because they have been united to Christ in His death and resurrection, while Ephesians 2:6 says that God has “raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”
And yet 2 Corinthians 4:16–5:5 makes clear that the outer man is wasting away while believers groan, longing not to be unclothed but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up by life.
That means the believer’s salvation is already real, but not yet publicly complete in bodily glory. The inner man has already been raised with Christ, and the outer man will be raised at Christ’s coming.
Fesko describes the resurrection of believers as the visible manifestation of those who are already raised with Christ, because the resurrection of the body publicly displays what has already become true of the believer in union with Christ.
That is exactly why the final judgment can be called revelation rather than re-justification, because what is already true in union with Christ will finally be displayed openly in the body.
The Wicked Are Raised, But Not Unto Life
The resurrection-as-reward argument also helps explain why one final judgment has different outcomes, because Scripture does not teach that only believers are raised, but that all are raised while only those in Christ are raised unto life.
Jesus says in John 5:28–29 that all who are in the graves will hear His voice and come forth, but He distinguishes between those who rise unto life and those who rise unto condemnation.
Daniel 12:2 speaks in the same pattern, saying that many who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
The resurrection is therefore a judgment event because it publicly manifests two different destinies.
Those in Adam are raised unto condemnation, while those in Christ are raised unto life. Those who rejected Christ are exposed in shame, while those united to Christ are revealed in glory.
Conclusion
The reward of Scripture is not less than we imagined, but far more, because it is not a list of heavenly crowns added to Christ, but the fullness of life in Christ brought into the open through resurrection.
This means that the believer does not approach the final judgment wondering whether his works have earned enough reward to make eternity worthwhile, because the believer’s reward is Christ Himself, resurrection in Him, and the incorruptible inheritance prepared for all who are born again through His resurrection.
While our legalistic hearts want the last day to display our works as the ground of distinction, the gospel says the last day will display Christ’s work as the ground of resurrection glory.
And this brings us to the final movement of the series, because if the reward is resurrection, then the final judgment is not merely about the vindication of believers, but about the vindication of Christ Himself in the people He has redeemed.