Last Judgment

The Last Judgment refers to an event that, according to religious tradition, will occur after the world has ended and God pronounces his final verdict on the human race. For Christians, the Last Judgment is the stage in which all people are judged according to their behavior when they were still alive. The righteous will receive their reward and will spend an eternity in fellowship with God; however, the evil will spend an eternity in hell, acknowledging they had the opportunity for heaven but chose otherwise.

Some Christians believe that there will be only one judgment, because one's soul is asleep or unconscious between its demise and the Last Judgment (a view held by the religious reformer Martin Luther and others). Most Christians believe, however, that souls are not asleep and that they receive their punishment or reward after death. This first judgment is called the particular judgment, and it is different from the Last Judgment, where individuals are sentenced for their belief or lack thereof. This acceptance regarding one's final judgment is considered dogma by Roman Catholic believers, but the Church feels that the Last Judgment is not an actual trial, because the individuals already deceased are either residing in heaven or hell or working off their sins in purgatoryall resulting from their particular judgment at the moment of their death. Protestant believers in millennialism regard the two judgments as describing separate events, one at the moment of death and one after the end of the world.

According to this belief, the Last Judgment will take place after the deceased have been resurrected and undergone a complete reunion of the body and soul, where their evil acts are judged and their eternal sentence will be known to all before their fate before the resurrection is continued. At that specific moment, the joys of heaven and the sorrows of hell will be evident, because everyone present will be able to feel both pleasure and pain. This scenario appears most directly in “the sheep and the goats” section in the Book of Matthew. This belief regarding the afterlife can also be found in the books of Daniel, Isaiah, and Revelation.

Christianity is not the only religion that deals with the end-times. In Islam, there is Yawtn al-Qtyämak (the day of the resurrection). At a time preordained by Allah but unknown to humanity (at a time when people least expect it), Allah will consent for the Qiymah to commence. The archangel Israfel, named “the caller” in the Qur'an, will puff mightily into his horn, and out will come a “blast of truth.” This specific occasion can also be seen in Jewish eschatology, where it is called “the day of the blowing of the shofar,” found in Ezekiel 33:6. The Qur'an states that the Qiymah will last 50,000 years. Some Islamic scholars believe that this period refers to the vastness of man's spiritual advancement (one day is equal to 50,000 years), or that the day may signify the final triumph of Truth in the world, from the time when revelation was first granted to man.

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