erebus-cross “What a folly it is to think that our good deeds may one day outweigh our bad deeds. It is folly for two reasons.  First, it is not true. Even our good deeds are defective, because we don’t honor God in the way we do them. Do we do our good deeds in joyful dependence on God with a view to making known his supreme worth? Do we fulfill the overarching command to serve people “by the strength that God supplies— in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 4:11)?   The second reason it is folly to hope in good deeds is that this is not the way God saves. If we are saved from the consequences of our bad deeds, it will not be because they weighed less than our good deeds. It will be because the “record of [our] debt” in (Colossians 2:13) heaven has been nailed to the cross of Christ. God has a totally different way of saving sinners than by weighing their deeds. There is no hope in our deeds. There is only hope in the suffering and death of Christ.  There is no salvation by balancing the records. There is only salvation by canceling records. The record of our bad deeds (including our defective good deeds), along with the just penalties that each deserves, must be blotted out—not balanced. This is what Christ suffered and died to accomplish.”

Reflecting on this reminds me of the way I used to think of how God viewed me.  There was a time when I thought of myself as a good person, most of the time and believed that God will focus on my “most of the time” and ignore my “occasional” [sic]  failings.  Yet, throughout the Bible, God never talks of weighing scales, yet  He does talk frequently about atonement.    This word “atonement”  is grounded in the idea of cancelling, wiping out or satisfying a debt.   God’s judgment of us is not based on what we can offer but on our account balance.  Our problem is that our debt can’t be cancelled by us, only by the one whom we owe it to.  We can faithfully attempt to pay it off but in the end, no matter how hard we try, we will always owe God something.  It is in this fact that the death of Jesus becomes real.  It is the only remedy.  For it was through His death and its effectual application of the debt-cancelling work (atonement) that God has the basis to stamp our accounts are debt-free. 

Questions.  Have you ever been in a situation where you owed so much that you couldn’t pay?  Did you go to an intermediary who helped you cancel your debt?  Jesus is our mediator and through him our debt to God can be cancelled.   

Quote from “The 50 Reasons Jesus Came to Die”.

Picture – The cross at Mount Erebus, Antarctica, commemorating the 1979 Air New Zealand Crash near Mount Erebus.

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