Let’s be honest, people are nasty. We’re mean to each other on a regular basis, we lie to each other, we bully each other, we steal physical and intellectual property from each other, we cheat on each other, we fantasize about hurting each other, and the list goes on and on. Anyone who is willing to take a few honest seconds of self-examination will admit to sharing at least one of the aforementioned flaws or something similar yet most people, immediately after this admission, will feel an overwhelming impulse arise within them to prove to themselves and everyone else that they aren’t bad people; we try to convince everyone that there is some special circumstance which made our behavior acceptable, but we don’t even manage to fully convince ourselves through these excuses.

There’s a common idea circulating through both religious and nonreligious circles today that goes something like this:

“If we do more good than bad then we deserve to go to heaven”

or

“If our good deeds outweigh our bad deeds then we’re really good people”

Let’s be honest…do any of us really believe this?

Pretend you are married for 25 years and one day you find out that your husband had an affair with one of his coworkers…Do the 25 years of faithfulness outweigh the 25 minutes of infidelity or does the betrayal still cut you to the core?

Imagine your friend, whom you’ve known your whole life, hacks your computer and drains your bank account… Do the years of friendship outweigh the seconds it took the funds to transfer or is your trust in that person forever destroyed?

Picture a man who has been bullied his whole life finally reaching his breaking point. He turns to a firearm to deal with his agitator… Do the thousands of days he didn’t commit murder outweigh the split second it took him to pull the trigger or does he still deserve to be locked away?

Finally, envision a man who has fought in wars and seen his friends die for his country. Imagine that he is offered a large sum of money by a foreign government to help end the war and suffering more expediently… Do his years of faithful service outweigh his one instance of treason or has he still double-crossed his countrymen?

In our most honest moments, I think we must admit that no matter how badly we wish our good deeds counted for more than our bad, we know this will never be the case. When we’re honest we realize that if this was the source of our hope, we really have none.

The only prayer we have left is that the One we’ve offended forgive us and pretend it never happened…and this is exactly what He does.