All Have Sinned...

             for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. (Romans 3:23-24)

            Falling short of the glory of God is irksome. It’s an impersonal, personal reaction. The first temptation was to be “like the Most High” and the fact that we can’t measure up aggravates us. Even those it doesn’t seem to bother may have lowered their standards because that’s less painful. “No one is perfect,” they proclaim, not because it’s true, but because they are superior to those to whom they proclaim it. It lets them off the hook.

            The interesting thing is that we don’t compare our level of perfection with the ocean, or the stars. Few of us really want to emulate those. We may feel small, or powerless as we meditate on them, but we don’t tend to take the metaphor very far with them. That might be because we see ourselves in them in a limited way, if at all. Ultimately, we know we wouldn’t want to give up our personhood to be a massive, powerful body of water, or a giant nuclear furnace.

            The alternative is to discover or to invent a person – a being. The problem is that the ones we invent have all the same flaws we do. It’s easy to be like them because they are so like us. This isn’t the sort of being described in Scripture. There’s something in us that knows that if such a being actually exists, it must be different from us – better than us, and not just accidentally or a little bit. Unless our god is orders of magnitude better than we are, we sense the lie. We know we’re cheating.

            God is God, and there is no other. He is perfect. Because we are not God, and cannot be God, we chafe. Why would we not seek to be perfect? But, if we can’t be perfect, why should we try. We fall short of God’s glory, just as we fall short of the glory of the ocean or the star, but while we marvel at the oversized puddle and bonfire and feel awe toward them, we rage against the closer parallel – the personal parallel of God. Better to go our own way, even if it fails us miserably. We fall short of the glory of God because nothing else is possible, and therefore we sin, which leads us to fall short of the glory of God.

            Knowing this, God sent Jesus, who provided redemption. He brought us back into right relationship with Him – the relationship of a creature with its Creator, a child with its Parent, a steward with its Lord. It requires that we accept, not earn, and we chafe at this, also because earning gives us power and control. We think it brings us closer to godhood – and in a sense, we’re correct. The problem is that what we think earns something for us is incorrect. It is not enough. The only hope is that what we need, and ultimately desire, can only be freely given. If we were to earn it, it would be something other than what we need and ultimately desire. It would not be love.