Short Take: Why don’t good works cancel out sin?

How about the good works aspect of it? They've sinned, but then there's the other human tendency to say, well, you know, I've done a lot of good in my life, you know, I've gone to church, I've been really kind to people, I'm a good person. The idea being that, well, my good either outweighs the bad I've done or my good cancels out the sin I've done.

How do I explain that? Why doesn't the good that we do, so to speak the good, why doesn't that cancel out the bad we've done? Every human being has a tendency toward self-justification. We want a works righteousness, and every religion in the world except Christianity says that the way you're saved is by doing more good things than bad things or at least enough good things to make yourself worthy of being saved. That's the basic human, most fundamental human religion in the world, and Christianity just says something different. Well, it says a couple of things.

It does say the bare minimum that, like James says, if you've broken the law at one point, that wasn't just a mistake, that was rebellion against the Creator, and no amount of good works that you pile up on top of that take that rebellion away. It just doesn't. It would be like me saying, if I get a traffic ticket for speeding, it's not going to be a winning argument in court. Well, Judge, look at all the times I didn't speed. Doesn't that overwhelm this one time that I did speed? His answer's going to be, no, that's great that you didn't speed all those other times, but you did in this time, and there's consequence for that.

Nobody actually believes that. My kids can't do it in school. If my daughter misses a math problem on her test, she's going to lose some points for that, right?

You can't just say, well, I did better on these other ones. The point, though, more important than that, though, is that sin is not just a thing that's on us that doesn't affect our very being. Sin is in us, and it is of us.

It's not just something you can wipe off. Paul says it in Ephesians, chapter two, we are by nature children of wrath. We deserve what is coming to us. I don't think you have to look very hard into human history to see that we humans are capable of some awful, awful stuff. You can't live on this side of the Holocaust, on this side of World War II, on this side of American chattel slavery, and think that we humans are basically good. We're not. At the first opportunity, we do horrific things to one another, and we often do it in the name of telling somebody that it's for their own good. The human race is not good, and we deserve what's coming to us. I think anybody that's honest about that will admit it.