Necessary Blood 4

By R.C. Sproul

If you had the opportunity yet to see Ben Stein's movie "Expelled" and you come to the final scene of that movie where he's interviewing a famous British atheist, Richard Dawkins, and turns Dawkins upside down, and he finally just looks at him and says, Richard, what are you going to see if when you die, you wake up and God is standing there?  What are you going to say to him?     Dawkins says, Well, I'm going to say to Him the same thing Bertram Russell would say to Him.  Why didn't You let us know You were there?

That's the one excuse no person has, and this inherent enmity and hostility that we have towards God is alienation and necessarily requires reconciliation.  It requires some way of mediation that will end the estrangement. 

The second reason why sin is so serious is because it involves a debt that the creator of the universe has the sovereign right and authority to impose obligations upon us.  He has the right, dear ones, to say to you and to say to me, thou shalt not or thou shalt.  His law imposes an obligation for us.  We are required to pay it, and sin leads us in such a dreadful state of indebtedness that we're told that we are debtors who cannot pay their debts.

I'd like to make an illustration to describe the difference between a monetary or a peculiarly debt and a moral debt with the following story.  A little boy goes into an ice cream store.  He orders an ice cream cone with two scoops, and the waitress comes with the two scoops in the ice cream cone and hands it to the little boy and says, that will be $2.00, and you see this crestfallen look that comes across the face of the child as he reaches into his pocket and already beginning to have his lip quiver and says to the lady, but I only have $1.00.  My mother only gave me $1.00.  Well, if you see that, what do you do?  What everybody would do.  You'd reach in your pocket and say to the lady, here's the other $1.00.  Let the boy have his ice cream cone.  That's a simple monetary debt.   I give $1.00 and its legal currency, legal tender, and the waitress has to accept that payment.

So let's change the story a little bit.  Let's suppose the little boy goes in the store and says I'd like to have an ice cream cone with two scoops.  The waitress give the boy the ice cream cone and he grabs it and takes off out into the street, and the lady behind the counter is saying stop, thief.  Well, the little boy runs right into the arms of a policeman.  He grabs the boy by the scruff of the neck, and brings him back into the store and says what's the problem here?  The boy just stole that ice cream.  I'm standing there and I say, it's OK, officer; I'll pay the boy's debt.  Well, in this case, the ice cream store owner is not required to take that money because now we don't just have a punitory debt, a monetary debt, but what we have now is a moral debt because the boy has broken the law.