(Continued from yesterday)
The wages of sin is indeed death. That is what our sin stores up for us. When we sin we are borrowing from hell while on earth, that is, we are living outside of fellowship with a Holy God. In our sin we have absolutely no fellowship with Holy God. From birth, no, in fact, from conception our souls are fallen and naturally disinclined to love God with heart, soul, mind and strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves. The default mode of our sinful hearts is to try and make ourselves God and to put ourselves above our neighbors at any cost. The infinite sinful capability of the human heart means that we have an infinite balance that we owe hell. God created a debt collector named death who bears His wrath upon us for our disobedience. Death is the collector, the one who lays claim on our souls. Because of the fall, we are born with a debt that has compound interest, a debt that has been passed on to every generation and is ever increasing. Just one millisecond of not loving God with our heart, soul mind and strength disqualifies us from heaven and puts us in debt to death. We our born into a fallen world where we are incapable in ourselves to even love God for a millisecond with our heart, soul, mind and strength. All the laws that follow the greatest commandment just put us in more debt cause we can’t keep them from the heart. In the end, death and hell has claim on our lives because we can’t pay them back. We are completely bankrupt and in such eternal debt that all we can do is give ourselves over as eternal slaves to death and hell.
But the aggressive grace of our savior is shown at the cross, where in an instant all sin debt to death for the children of God was paid in full. The balance in Hell’s ledger was completely wiped clean. The wrath of God stored up for sinful man in hell and by death was completely satisfied.
The light of Christ bears with it the fullness of God’s wrath and the fullness of His mercy. As that light of God’s Love shines into our hearts, or as Romans 5:5 says, is poured into our hearts, by the Holy Spirit (Galatians 4:6) it shows us that our sin was placed on another and that His righteousness is placed on us. It shows us that even the darkest sins of our heart, the ones we know about and the ones that we don’t even know about; the ones we have said we are sorry for, and the ones we have yet to repent of or haven’t even actualized, were placed on Christ.
He infinitely bore the punishment for every sin that could ever overflow from our infinitely sinful hearts. His sacrifice and death on the cross completely paid the debt we owed to death.
This is good news for sinners such as me. It is joy inflicting news for the person like the tax collector in Luke 18 who comes before God begging for mercy. For those that ignore the letters from the collection agency, those that can’t and won’t admit that they are in debt to hell and that their lives will be claimed by eternal spiritual death; for them the gospel is foolishness and a waste of time.
(Ok, more on his thought. I still feel it isn’t complete all the way. I’ll blog some more next week on this same passage.