Removing the scales of life

Here's a story for you from the fifth chapter of the book of Daniel:

1 King Belshazzar gave a great banquet for a thousand of his nobles and drank wine with them. 2 While Belshazzar was drinking his wine, he gave orders to bring in the gold and silver goblets that Nebuchadnezzar his father [a] had taken from the temple in Jerusalem, so that the king and his nobles, his wives and his concubines might drink from them. 3 So they brought in the gold goblets that had been taken from the temple of God in Jerusalem, and the king and his nobles, his wives and his concubines drank from them. 4 As they drank the wine, they praised the gods of gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood and stone.
5 Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace. The king watched the hand as it wrote. 6 His face turned pale and he was so frightened that his knees knocked together and his legs gave way."

The prop0het Daniel, a man of about 80 at the time who had spent most of his adult life serving the kings of Babylon, is called in. He interprets the message as this:

25 "This is the inscription that was written:
Mene , Mene , Tekel , Parsin [e]

26 "This is what these words mean:
Mene [f] : God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end.

27 Tekel [g] : You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.

28 Peres [h] : Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians."

Now, this seems to indicate that the good that the king had done was placed on a scale and it was not counterbalanced by the bad. In other words, the bad the king had done out-weighed the good.

But does that mean, therefore, that if the good outweighed the bad, King Belshazzar would have been okay? His salvation would have been secured? If that's true, then wouldn't ours be as well? If that's true, then why did Jesus have to die?

The answers are no, no, no and because of all the above nos.

The problem with the scales of justice, if you will, is that one sin is equal to a million good deeds. Paul tells us point-blank in the book of Romans that "We have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Notice the tense change there? It goes from past-tense "sinned" to present tense "fall." In other words, the falling keeps on keeping on. We all sin. We are saved from it by the shed blood of Jesus Christ. But we continue to fall short, making the sacrifice of Jesus all the more pertinent.

See the problem is what we're weighing the good against. We're weighing our good against, not our bad, but against God's good. The prophet Isaiah tells us, "All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away." Compared to a perfect God, we are incapable of doing any good at all. The only human who ever compared favorably was Jesus himself.

So the scales can never be equal, never be balanced.

What does this matter?

We're talking about living a life filled with guilt and remorse or a life filled with truth about ourselves and a love of this Jesus who died so that we could have the balance of those scales.

Even Paul admitted he understood the guilt that comes with trying to keep the law, every bit of the law, ever word and ever sentence of the law. "18 And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature.[d] I want to do what is right, but I can’t. 19 I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway. 20 But if I do what I don’t want to do, I am not really the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it.

21 I have discovered this principle of life—that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. 22 I love God’s law with all my heart. 23 But there is another power[e] within me that is at war with my mind. This power makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. 24 Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death? 25 Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord. So you see how it is: In my mind I really want to obey God’s law, but because of my sinful nature I am a slave to sin," Paul writes in the seventh chapter of his letter to the church in Rome.

What I want to do, I do not do.

That is the falling short Paul writes about.

If there is anyone out there that thinks they are not falling short, their pride won't let them admit it and consequently they are falling short.

See, the problem with King Belshazzar was that he knew all the things that had happened to his grandfather King Nebuchadnezzar and yet he continued arrogantly to sort of rub God's nose in his own ego. He had gold goblets that were stolent from the Temple of Soloman brought to his palace and the Babylonians drank wine out of them.

There comes a time, for all of us, when the falling short will end. That doesn't mean we won't stop falling short. We always will do that without Jesus. It simply means there comes a time when God stops waiting on us. It's called by many, death. For some in the future it will be called, the resurrection of the dead when Jesus comes again. In either case, there comes an end even to the glorious patience and amazing grace of our God.

The scales on Paul's eyes were removed.
The scales of justice are balanced.
We are given a gift we didn't earn, a prize we didn't pay for, a mercy we couldn't demand.

The night King Belshazzar called Daniel in to read the hand writing on the wall (see, that's where we get the phrase), the king died. We never know when our time will come. So why wouldn't we turn to the one who does?

I know it's a difficult thing to apply logic to the spiritual, reasoning to the supernatural, but surely that makes sense, doesn't it?