You can’t clean up a mess with a dirty rag

Imagine if you were tasked with cleaning up a mess and were handed nothing but a dirty rag. Say, you had a dirty, oily, greasy mess and someone handed you a dirty, oily, greasy rag to clean it up with. You would quickly realize the futility of it all. About all you would accomplish would be to move the dirt, oil, and grease around in different directions. And you wouldn’t be very thankful for the rag, either.

This illustration sums up what most religions accomplish in their attempt at salvation. By and large, their answer to the absolving of a person’s sins amounts to each person trying to save themselves. It’s a working to be good enough, so that, hopefully, you might gain Heaven. Admittedly, this sounds compelling at first. And it has a certain admirability to it, in that it means we have to take our future into our own hands, to which there’s a certain element of truth. We do have to take moral responsibility for our behavior. But if we are left in such a destitute situation to begin with that saving ourselves is impossible, it’s natural to conclude that we would require some outside intervention. A person stranded in the middle of the Atlantic has little chance of being saved by a passing ship unless someone tosses him a lifeline, so that he can make it up over the edge of the ship. Even if he could locate a safety ring floating in the middle of the ocean, he could pull on the rope tied to it all he wants, but he would eventually get to the end to find there’s nothing there.
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Again, we return to the person with the dirty rag. This is what religion does. The sins of the individual are never cleansed. They are just moved around, but never truly dealt with, so that each person can make a clean start. Since our sin couldn’t be cleansed by us, it makes sense that our sin needed to be cleansed by someone without sin. We couldn’t reach Heaven, so someone had to reach down to us. This is the Gospel message, and it’s what makes Christianity wholly unique. This is what the entirety of the Old Testament alludes to—a sacrificial lamb—a lamb without spot or wrinkle. The Jews were required to sacrifice a spotless lamb for the covering of sins. This was a type and shadow of Christ, the Messiah to come.

Once Christ’s death, burial and resurrection had taken place, these sacrifices were no longer required. He had fulfilled the obligation for our sin debt to be paid in full. We were handed that lifeline—that clean rag—we needed that bridged the gap, caused by sin, between God and us. This is available to all who will grab and take hold of it. Through works, some will continue attempting to use the dirty rag, to no avail. But this is the religious mindset still holding on. This gift is granted, not through works, but by grace.

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