Psalm 16:2 – “I say to the Lord, ‘You are my Lord; I have no good apart from You.’”
Ecclesiastes 7:20 – “Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.”
Romans 7:18, 24-25 – “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out…Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Luke 18:19 – “And Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.’”
The Earth has seen everything from men, women, and children being murdered, raped, and enslaved to undeserved thieves being received into paradise. It has seen the greatest injustice to the smallest kindness. It takes in; it remembers. It is as a canvas laid out flat with the doings of humanity painted on it clearly for God to see. The blood of the innocent soaks deep in it’s soil and the voice of the oppressed soars high in it’s atmosphere. To say this simply, what is done (or not done) in this world will not be forgotten. I am not talking about when we get together to remember 9/11 or when we speak of the atrocities of the Holocaust. I am talking about justice, the real kind, that will be experienced at our bodies end. We will all stand before the great Judge. The Lord is God, and He will be the one we answer to in the end. But until that day, we must know how to take all of this in, how to react and how not to react.
In saying that, let me note the Scriptures that I started with. “I have no good apart from You.” – Psalm 16:2, “No one is good except God alone.” – Luke 18:19. This is something we can easily forget. We look at the thief and forget that apart from the Lord he cannot be good. We want him to receive his rightful punishment, and then we want him to learn from his mistakes and act like a moral human being, all the while forgetting the root of the matter, his non-goodness, our non-goodness. So what is the solution to this problem? Should we teach him to help the elderly woman across the street, and not take her purse? Yes, but don’t get the cart before the horse. This would be a worthless thing to teach him if we did not first show him the way to his redemption, the way to the cross and resurrection of the man, Jesus Christ. “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out…Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! – Romans 7:18, 24-25. Paul could not even do what is right, for apart from Jesus Christ our Lord the things we do that seem right are not. Our good works are not good works when they are done outside of Jesus Christ, our life, whom apart from we are dead. Let us continue to show the sinner the only way to Life and Goodness.
Through this the Gospel will spread like a stone growing into a mountain that fills the whole earth. (Daniel 2:35). On the way will still be injustice and grief; there must be. “Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.” Ecclesiastes 7:20. Not even the righteous in Christ Jesus, who are all perfect in Him, will act perfect, and of course not the world, but we as Christians can look forward to the day when wrongs will be made right and what was done in the dark will be brought to the light. Things will be brought into focus and all will be made beautiful. Justice will be served to the slave’s cruel master, and the unborn child’s murderer, them that did not cast their sin upon Jesus Christ, taking the judgement themselves. We, the murderers, thieves, adulterers, liars, and rebellious that have and will cast our sins upon Jesus and take part in Him, have already been judged two-thousand years ago at the cross and raised to new life in Jesus Christ through His resurrection. Amen
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