White As Snow

https://odb.org/MY/2023/02/17/cleansed-completely

Most religions use the concept of a balancing scale between good deeds and evil acts to adjudicate what happens next in our afterlife. Religions that believe in heaven/paradise and hell will send you to the former if your good deeds outweigh your evil acts, and if it’s the other way, then it’s off you go to hell. For religions that preach reincarnation, then the weighing scale will have you reborn at a minimum as a human and, perhaps, a better status human if your good outweighed your bad.

At first glance, the weighing scale appears to be a fair and reasonable determinant. Who can argue against more good deeds versus bad? Surely, the good should prevail and be accordingly rewarded. Except that we do not have a proper scale for the plusses and the minuses. How much good is good and how much bad is bad? If you donate a million dollars to charity, will that counter weigh your murders? Criminals certainly hope so if they survived the rigours of criminality and grow older, but do we know the scale of destruction brought to countless lives with, for example, pushing drugs? Can our donations outweigh the destruction we had wrought? We do all sorts of evil things as all powerful politicians but turn all religious when we retire to atone for our sins. Is that right if we get to go to heaven? Isn’t that somewhat like a backdoor entry?

For us who follow Jesus Christ, we know that salvation is by grace, not by works. After accepting Christ, we have to have works and become a better person like Christ. No matter what we do, we know we can not outweigh the sins in us as our sins originated from Adam. Humans on their own cannot atone sufficiently for their sins. When the LORD introduced the law through Moses for His first chosen nation Israel, the children of Israel struggled for years to follow. In fact, the Jews have introduced a whole body of interpretive laws to put even more details into the law, and modern-day religious Jews are near drowning from the sheer weight and complexity of such laws.

This leads us to the second problem with the balancing scale concept – it doesn’t really make us a good person in our hearts. It’s possibly all external, and sometimes it could just be a ‘show’ to do good while we are still evil and rotten inside us. We would tend to treat all this mathematically even though we don’t really know how it all adds up. We may want to look at it like we need to meet a certain threshold to qualify for the ticket to get past the Pearly Gates. Unfortunately, we may not have changed much inside. Thus, even as we are doing good deeds to atone for our past evil acts, we may do an evil thing again right now since we may atone for it later. If we are not transformed inside, nothing will stop us from continually being evil even when we are doing good.

The way to heaven is only through Jesus as He is the way, the truth, and the life. He is God in flesh, the creator becoming the created to live among us. The only way to salvation and to one day be a part of Revelation 22 with the new heaven and earth and the new Jerusalem with God living amongst us is believing in Jesus Christ by faith. As we invite Jesus into our lives and allow Him to work within us, we will be transformed to be like Him. And if there is a weighing scale at the end of our life after we knew Christ, our good deeds will surely outnumber and outweigh our evil acts and by many fold, as the latter will be so few and far between!

As a child of God in Christ, we are cleansed free from all sin, white as snow. The work now lies ahead to fulfil His plans and purposes for our lives and to become more like Christ within us with the power of the Holy Spirit living in and amongst us.