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AN AVALANCHE OF AFGHANIS

Let’s say you become a Christian. Obviously, here at the Voice of Prophecy, we’d be in favor of that. You’ve taken Bible studies from your pastor, or you’ve completed our Discover Bible Course, and you make a decision for Jesus Christ. Immediately, a lifetime of sins that you’ve committed are washed away. That’s very good news, and again, Voice of Prophecy is a “sins washed away” kind of ministry. As a believer now, you still do slip and fall. Sometimes you sin accidently, sometimes on purpose. There are times your faith is strong; other days it’s weak. And today we want to ask this question: doesn’t it diminish the holiness of God if a sinner’s extremely spotty performance is eventually allowed into heaven? Is God’s pure goodness compromised if the “security of salvation” teaching of Christianity allows sinners — who don’t get to some level of spiritual performance — to still receive a mansion, a harp, and a crown?

We mentioned a few days ago a little theological brush fire that erupted, of all places, in Newsweek magazine. According to some polls, about 75% of people surveyed think that a certain level of goodness is required before a person can get into heaven. Others, mostly from strongly evangelical Christian circles, take the exact opposite view. “No!” they protest. “Calvary pays it all. Your good deeds, your obedience, has no bearing — it carries no weight whatsoever — in determining your salvation.” And immediately, that concept sounds very, well, cheap. It devalues the holiness of God, some say. How can a holy God tolerate men and women in heaven who didn’t even seem to try very hard to obey? A “license to sin” is how it’s sometimes described.

We were glancing through a book that, frankly, was filled with descriptions of the importance of obedience. “Our lives count,” the author asserted. “It matters how we live. We all have to give God an answer for the hours and days we either spent wisely . . . or wasted. The needy people we helped . . . or ignored. The laws of heaven’s kingdom which we either honored . . . or carelessly compromised.”

But then this same writer went out of his way to embrace the concept I just mentioned: that our salvation rests ENTIRELY on the strength of Calvary. Our obedience, our goodness — is ZERO. It carries ZERO weight in getting us into God’s eternal kingdom. ZERO! And then he addresses this very concern: that somehow this high view of grace actually detracts from the holiness of God. But notice what he writes:

“The doctrine of eternal security is SUPPORTED” — as opposed to contradicted — “by the belief that God is so infinitely holy and good that there is nothing — not one thing — we can do to attain OR maintain our salvation. Salvation in every facet is by grace. It is a gift from start to finish. God’s holiness is so far out of our league that even the best of our good deeds carries no weight in matters of salvation.”

Think back, the writer is essentially suggesting, over your life. Or let’s make it easy. Think back over your last month. Is your goodness, your obedience, your nice character really going to be a major building block in sustaining God’s eternal kingdom? The kingdom where HE dwells? The kingdom where Jesus our Redeemer and holy Savior reigns on a throne of majesty? Is all of that so ordinary and achievable that our goodness will be a big pillar there?

There was an interesting story in the Los Angeles Times back in November of 2002 about money in Afghanistan. As you can imagine, after the war with the Taliban and all the conflict, money and inflation and HYPER-inflation and feuding warlords, etc., have wreaked havoc on their primitive economic system. Things actually got so out of hand that Hamid Karzai and the new rulers there had to simply introduce new currency. The government printed up 28 billion new afghanis to replace the old notes. The new notes would be in denominations of “10,” with a ten-afghani bill being worth about 20 cents U.S.

Here’s the problem. The OLD notes were just so creamed by inflation that ten THOUSAND of the old afghanis were 20 cents. In other words, the money was worthless. A whole suitcase of the stuff might be worth a buck. It literally took a full grocery bag OF MONEY to go out and buy yourself a kebab lunch, reporters noticed. Your lunch fit in a smaller bag than the money it took to buy that lunch. And so the governor of the Central Bank, a Mr. Anwar-ul-Haq Ahady, announced that Afghanistan was simply going to destroy the old money. It wasn’t worth the space it was taking up.

What happened next? This is a true story — people began lugging in these huge bins of money, or bundles of the stuff, trading it in for the appropriate amount of the new cash, and then they began shredding the “junk money.” The Central Bank had 13 shredding machines, and soon they were spitting out afghani confetti. But the 13 machines couldn’t keep up, because people were bringing in the trash cash from all over Afghanistan. Everyone erroneously thought they could only trade up in Kabul, and soon the capital city was awash with people toting piles of this Monopoly money to the Central Bank. So they began burning the stuff. But with 13 TRILLION old afghanis to be incinerated or shredded or used to line bird cages . . . they just couldn’t handle the paper flow. A guy named Shir Mohammed, with a life savings of $2,400 — that’s 120 million old afghanis — dragged it into the bank in four huge grain bags. It took him an eight-hour taxi ride from his home province of Kapisa, and he brought along his cousin to protect his four mountains of nearly worthless currency.

Now right here, you might protest — spiritually — “Well, $2,400 worth of obedience and good deeds is something!” True enough. But friend, when we consider the currency of heaven, which is the holiness of God and the love of Jesus expressed on the cross, I really think we need to understand that our own characters and our list of accomplishments are expressed in terms of those old afghanis. Yes, we could drag them to the front gate of the New Jerusalem, but really, why bother? They don’t count for anything; the Bible SAYS they don’t count for anything. Here’s Isaiah 64:6:

“All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our RIGHTEOUS acts are like filthy rags.”

Over in the New Testament, Paul has an afghani view of our good deeds too. Galatians 2:16:
“Know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ.”

Notice that he doesn’t say we’re not justified completely, or even partially, by law-keeping. We’re not justified . . . PERIOD! And again, we have to find ourselves in agreement with the Bible when it tells us that obedience and good deeds and sanctification are important, helpful, wonderful, Christ-mandated things. It’s good to obey; it uplifts God’s kingdom and glorifies heaven. IT . . . JUST . . . ISN’T . . . MONEY.

And if we think that our goodness has to count somewhere in heaven’s currency system, friend, we’re really doing two things. We’re promoting our good works, and we’re DEMOTING God’s holiness. That’s right. If what I achieve in commandment-keeping is really an important part of the fabric of heaven, then I subconsciously have a rather low view of the purity of my Heavenly Father. I think I’m within hailing distance of it myself, in my own doing. It reminds me of the little boy who was told that the sun was 93 million miles away from earth, and he asked: “Is that from the upstairs window or the downstairs?”

Let me share just another line or two from this book, Eternal Security:
“Once good works are introduced,” the author writes, “in any fashion as a part of the salvation process, we are assuming a similarity in the moral goodness of man and God. In doing so, God becomes LESS separate or holy than in the salvation model where man’s works had nothing to do with salvation. To introduce man’s holiness is to deemphasize the holiness of God. To speak of man’s moral efforts in conjunction with God’s moral perfection is to lessen the contrast and thus downgrade God’s holiness.” Then he adds: “The doctrine of eternal security does not detract from or reduce the holiness of God. ON THE CONTRARY, [it] allows God’s holiness to stand in its purest form, free from the feeble attempts of man to merit divine acceptance.”

This is a mind-blowing paradigm, really, and it reminds me of a classic paragraph in C. S. Lewis’ book, Mere Christianity, where he writes:

“If there was any idea that God had set us a sort of exam, and that we might get good marks by deserving them, THAT HAS TO BE WIPED OUT. If there was any idea of a sort of bargain — any idea that we could perform our side of the contract and thus put God in our debt so that it was up to Him, in mere justice, to perform His side — THAT has to be wiped out.” Then he soberly concludes, and how eternally true: “I think every one who has some vague belief in God, until he becomes a Christian” — and maybe for decades afterward, we might add — “has the idea of an exam, or of a bargain in his mind. THE FIRST RESULT OF REAL CHRISTIANITY IS TO BLOW THAT IDEA INTO BITS.”

It sounds like one thing Christianity needs a lot of . . . is dynamite. And shredding machines.