Friday, May 30, 2008

The Super Blue Crayon

I was listening to the radio and a speaker said something about Jesus dying to bear the punishment of our sins. So I asked myself if it was true that God has this scale of justice that must be balanced. I thought for a bit and came to the decision that, yes, Jesus died and rose again to right a sort of balance. Here's what I wrote in my journal:

"See, when God gave us free will, the greatest gift ever--the gift of trusting us to keep the world perfect--then we were forced to choose. If a decision is made then out of all the possible choices there must be at least one right option and at least one wrong option. I call the right option(s) obedience and the wrong option(s) disobedience, or sin. There are probably very few choices that are so simple as to only have these two options, but every moment does have at least one option in each of these categories. I thought of it this way: if God offers us a box of crayons and asks us to pick the blue one and not the red one then we can still pick any of the, let's say, 24 crayons, but every time blue and red will be an option. There may even be multiple shades of blue and red, but blue and red will both be there.

"So, if each decision can have a bad choice, if at every moment we can sin, then there must be a penalty for picking that one. Same thing for the good, obedient choices except with rewards. Basically, choosing must matter or there wouldn't be a point to ever making a decision. God won't choose for us, so we have to pick a crayon. Only the blue and red and shades of each must have penalty/rewards, but all must have results.

"God loves his creation and would rather not punish us for picking red, but must have a payment for the red otherwise there would be no reason not to pick red and it would no longer be a wrong option. For a while the payment God chose was a sacrifice of goods--products of the self. But his beloved creation still kept choosing red and he still had to punish them. So he made it easier.

"Jesus came and died and rose again. It was God giving his own sacrifice--a product of his self--as a payment covering all the penalties. This does not mean that picking red is suddenly OK, not deserving a penalty. No, a penalty is still required, but there is an ever-present prepaid blue choice. The payment has been made for all of our red choices, but we still must make that one last choice of blue forgiveness to free ourselves from the penalty. At all times this super blue crayon is beside the box waiting for our hand to grab it. We can pick that option whenever we want as often as we want. And it is only possible because Jesus--God's self--came, lived, taught, died, and rose again defeating the penalty for sin: death."


Yep, that's what I wrote. Tell me what you think and where my thinking is flawed.

1 comment:

  1. cool idea, bro! one thing i wonder, though, is what to make of those "other crayons" there, the ones that aren't blue or red. are you saying there are morally neutral choices all the time? i'm not sure about that. can you elaborate on that aspect a bit?

    also, i think you should remind people that you'll still post here sometimes, even though your trip is done. i only checked because it's still on my bookmarks bar here in VA, otherwise i wouldn't have thought to check either. :) just a thought.

    see ya later today!

    ReplyDelete