When the View Gets Big Enough
1 Corinthians 6:1-3 - “When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life!”
In December of 1968, the three men aboard Apollo 8 became the first human beings to orbit another world. And when they looked back, they saw Earth from lunar distance: a blue-and-white sphere hanging in the black, small enough for Jim Lovell to hide behind a raised thumb. Something shifted in them, and in many of the astronauts who followed. A writer named Frank White eventually gave it a name: the overview effect. From far enough out, national borders vanish from view. The conflicts that consume whole nations begin to look impossibly small. Edgar Mitchell, who walked on the moon, later said that from out there, international politics looked petty.
Paul reaches for the same kind of lens here. He just turns it on us.
The Corinthians had been taking each other to court, brother dragging brother in front of pagan judges to settle private grievances. Before Paul weighs a single piece of evidence, he lifts their eyes. Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? Do you not know that we are to judge angels? We might expect him to calm them down by shrinking the dispute or telling them to let it go. Instead he enlarges the people standing in the courtroom, reminding them who they are and where all of this is finally headed.
You are a saint, set apart by God, and your future is bigger than you’ve let yourself imagine. When Paul says the saints will judge the world, the word leans toward rule and reign, the way the judges of Israel once governed and delivered God’s people. It is the authority Daniel glimpsed when he watched an everlasting kingdom handed over to the people of the Most High, the share in Christ’s own throne that Scripture promises to everyone who endures with him. And the angels Paul has in mind are most likely the fallen ones, the very powers waging war against us now; at the end they will stand under the jurisdiction of the redeemed. If this is who you are becoming, a quarrel between brothers is well within your reach, and the wisdom to settle it is already in you, waiting to be used.
Sit with how strange that is. The people who cannot seem to settle an argument over money are the ones God has appointed to help judge the cosmos. Held up against a future like that, the thing that has been eating at you all week quietly settles into its real size. The hurt is still real. But now it’s simply being seen from altitude now.
And all of this dignity is a pure gift of the gospel. We have been seated with Christ in the heavenly places because he raised us there, made heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, handed an authority over angels we could never have reached on our own. The wonder of it is that the Lord who will give us that authority is the same Lord who knelt on a dirt floor and washed his friends’ feet. Our standing was bought for us at tremendous cost. That is why the view lifts us into worship; the higher He takes us, the more clearly we see the grace that carried us up. This is where a Joyful Worshipper is born, in seeing what grace has done and being unable to stay quiet about it.
So the grievance keeps its real weight. But we are the ones who have grown. And from up there, holding the offense in one hand and the destiny in the other, we start to feel how far apart the two of them really sit.
Today: Take a few quiet minutes and bring one current conflict to mind: the person, the offense, the thing you keep replaying. Hold it there honestly, without softening it. Ask God to let the size of your future loosen the grip of your present.
Prayer: “Father, You lifted me to a height I could never have climbed, and you did it through a Son who humbled Himself to the point of death on a cross. Steady me with that view when small things feel enormous, and let the wonder of my future make me gentler on the way there. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
-PK