All your children (you're married/with kids in this scenario) – who you actually like – and your spouse – who's not too bad either – were shot dead in your living room. As you open the door you see the guy starting to cut up their bodies. Your jaw and grocery bags hit the floor and police rush in from behind you to arrest the murderer.
As they're exiting the room you say "Wait!" and have them uncuff the criminal, cuff you, and bring you to prison in the back of the cop car. Then you sit in the electric chair and are waiting to be shocked to death.
Phew! That's a picture of what God did for us:
Sin & the Gospel
Baptism, Church, and the names of God
The End
P.S. A little information is left in the public Google Doc that I didn't carry over into this blog. (This blog is an expansion of what I typed there.) It includes stuff on Manuscript Veracity and a hand-full of really good links (articles and podcasts).
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| The field of Textual Criticism helps get to the original writings and the original claims of the writers. |
Followed you here from one of your comments on my blog.
ReplyDeleteThat's a fairly fitting analogy, although most people won't recognise themselves as being that bad, and when they're not busy defending their notions of how good they are, their other reaction will be to get stumped over Christ's reaction (or our reaction, in this analogy). Hopefully people reading this will click the Sin & the Gospel link (and have the patience to read through it) to fill in some of the blanks.
I think a good way to look at it is to go back to the very biblical language of kingdoms. God is a personal king, and the King above all kings. When we don't put Him in the place of our personal king (which is His rightful place over everyone), we commit treason. Consequently, even if we live very moral lives, we are still doing "good" things in the context of treason, because every second of the day we are committing treason. If we can get to that level of understanding, then it becomes much clearer about why we're in the wrong with God, which (hopefully) then frees us up to come to terms with God's mercy and forgiveness.
I really like the table on Manuscript Veracity. It puts things into context as far as historical significance and accuracy of today's translations with regards to the original texts.
Thanks for coming by and leaving a comment! I guess a small handful of illustrations would be useful when talking or sharing with people -- not just one single type of analogy.
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