Ben Zornes

Living and Dying to Show the Preciousness of Christ

Home » righteousness » Page 2

righteousness

The Debt We Owe

The Debt We Owe

by ·

[epq-quote align=”align-right”]Every time we sin we are breaking a part of His creation[/epq-quote]He declared His creation “good”, and thus, every time we sin we are breaking a part of His creation. It’s like the fellow who recently went into an Apple store with a rock and smashed up thousands of dollars of merchandise. But imagine him doing this daily, and as a result, the debt he would be racking up in lost merchandise. His income would certainly never allow for him to pay off his obligation to make restitution with Apple!

The only hope for such a debt is for it to be forgiven, but as any good economist would tell you, “Ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Our forgiveness was costly, as someone had to “eat the cost” of our sins. God must judge sin, and the wages of sin is death. This is why Christ’s death is spoken of as a ransom, a payment made on our behalf which satisfies the justice and mercy of God. When we think of Christ’s merit, we must take from our minds the Catholic notion that Mary and the saints have some too which, all told, can get us across the finish line to heaven. Rather, all our human “merit” is itself tainted by evil. Christ alone is able to pay the debt we owe, and by faith in Him He freely applies His righteousness to our account.

Our Old Rag Collection

Our Old Rag Collection

by ·

I’m reading through a book right now called “Essentialism”, and apart from being a really helpful book, it is also full of several anecdotes, illustrations, etc. One of them has really struck me and stuck with me. There is a term called “sunk-cost bias” and the basic idea of it is that once we’ve invested our resources into something, we tend to have an irrational loyalty to it, despite the fact that the continued pursuit or investment isn’t solvent, is a wasted ventured, or is heading towards disaster.

This is why casinos work so well, because they exploit this irrational tendency to continue to invest in Titanic-sinkingsomething, even though we’re losing money and gaining nothing, simply because we’ve invested in it. The classic example of this was the Concord planes that Britain and France built; it became clear very quickly that these planes cost more to build, run, and maintain than they were worth. The market was never there, and never would be there and still the governments continued to prop these planes along, despite continuing and increasing losses. [Read more…] about Our Old Rag Collection

Ben Zornes