Divine judgment

Divine judgment means the judgment of God or other supreme beings within a religion.

Catholic doctrine

Objective and subjective judgment

In Catholic doctrine, divine judgment (Latin judicium divinum), as an imminent act of God, denotes the action of God's retributive justice by which the destiny of rational creatures is decided according to their merits and demerits. This includes:

In the beginning, God pronounced judgment upon the whole race, as a consequence of the fall of its representatives, the first parents (Genesis Genesis). Death and the infirmities and miseries of this were the consequences of that original sentence. Besides this common judgment there have been special judgments on particular individuals and peoples. Such great catastrophes as Noah's flood (Genesis 6:5), the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 28:20), the earthquake that swallowed up Korah and his followers (Numbers 16:30), the plagues of Egypt (Exodus 6:6; Exodus 12:12) and the evil that came upon other oppressors of Israel (Ezekiel 25:11; Ezekiel 28:22) are represented in the Bible as Divine judgments. The fear of God is such a fundamental idea in the Old Testament that it insists mainly on the punitive aspect of the judgment (cf. Proverbs 11:31; Ezekiel 14:21).