A Study in Job

I have talked to many people about how we can be righteous before God, and I have learned that when we are confronted by the Ten Commandments, we either ask what we should do to be made right with God, or we try to justify (excuse) ourselves. We normally do that in three ways:

1. We trivializing that nature of our sins (“My lies were white, and the things I stole were small”)

2. We say that what we did wrong was in the past,

3. We insist that our good deeds outweigh our bad deeds.

Each of these attempts to declare that we are innocent has obvious flaws. We may trivialize sin, but God doesn’t. He is perfect and utterly holy. A lie is a lie no matter how we may color it, and the Scriptures warn, “Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord” (Proverbs 12:22). We may not understand what it means to be utterly holy, but we can get a glimpse of the standard of the judge by the sentence he hands down for a crime. We are warned that all liars will have their part in the lake of fire (see Revelation 21:8). The crime of lying is extremely serious in God’s eyes.

When we attempt to justify our guilt by saying that what we did was in the past, we forget that everything we do is in the past. The inferences are, 1. My sin was so far in the past that it should be forgotten by God. Or, 2. I did those things when I was young and I didn’t understand right from wrong. I have matured and I now live a good life.

In 2012 a Nazi name Laszlo Csatary-- accused of complicity in the killings of 15,700 Jews was and found to be hiding in Budapest, the capital of Hungary. A statement released by those who found him said, "last week submitted new evidence to the prosecutor in Budapest regarding crimes committed during World War II by its No 1 Most Wanted suspect Laszlo Csatary."[1] The centre said it had fresh evidence of crimes "related to Csatary's key role in the deportation of approximately 300 Jews from Kosice to Kamenetz-Podolsk, Ukraine, where almost all were murdered in the summer of 1941….This new evidence strengthens the already very strong case against Csatary and reinforces our insistence that he be held accountable for his crimes. The passage of time in no way diminishes his guilt and old age should not afford protection for Holocaust perpetrators."[2] During World War II he served as a senior Hungarian police officer in the Slovakian city of Kosice, then under Hungarian rule. He was complicit in the deportations of thousands of Jews from Kosice and its environs to the Auschwitz death camp in the spring of 1944. Csatary had treated the Jews in the ghetto with cruelty, whipping women and forcing them to dig holes with their bare hands. In 1943, a Czech court condemned him to death after a trial held in his absence. He had fled to Canada and had worked as an art dealer using a false identity, before being unmasked in 1995 and forced to flee. The fact that his crimes were in the past is irrelevant.

Continued tomorrow...

[1] http://www.afp.com/en/news/topstories...
[2] Idem

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