if the world could be saved by righthandedness ..

excerpts from Robert Capon "Kingdom, Grace, Judgment"

... the world can't be saved by [our] living ..
... we don't live well enough ..
... our goodness is flawed goodness ..
... we love our kids but still mess them up ..
... i'm nice and so are you ..
... except when my will is crossed
or your convenience is not consulted -
and then we are both so fearful,
that we get mean, in order to seem, tough.
And so on ..

.. it is not badness as opposed to goodness;
it is sin,
the incurable human tendency to put self first ..
[so] there is
no right deed, however
good, noble, lawful, thrifty, brave, clean or reverent -
that cannot be done for the wrong reason,
that cannot be tainted and totally corrupted by sin ..

... neither we nor the world can be saved by efforts at living well.
If the human race could have straightened up its act
by simple pursuit of goodness it would have done so long ago.

if the world could have been saved by (righthanded) bookkeeping,
it would have been saved by Moses, not Jesus.
The law was just fine.
And God gave it a good  thousand years or so
to see if anyone could pass a test like that.

But when nobody did -
when it became perfectly clear that there was
"no one righteous, not one", (R3)
that "both jews and gentiles alike
were all under the power of sin" -
God gave up on salvation by the books.

He cancelled everybody's records, in the death of Jesus,
and rewarded us all, equally and fully,
with a NEW creation in the resurrection of the dead.

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