Scale

Religions sometimes employ the picture of a scale to illustrate the way to heaven: When your good deeds outweigh your bad deeds you go to heaven. And when your bad deeds outweigh your good deeds, you go to hell. In contrast, the Bible teaches that all the good deeds that we perform during our lifetime are never enough to make us acceptable before God. Maybe we live a life that looks pretty good from the outside. But already our spouses can tell you a different story knowing about all our flaws and wrongdoings. How much more does God, who knows our every thought, know about all the evil things and thoughts in our life. We can never outperform the sins in our life. This is the uncomfortable truth of the Bible.

The late German evangelist Wilhelm Busch used the term "minus sign before the bracket." That is, though he had resisted the Nazi regime - he was put in prison several times during the Third Reich for confessing his faith - it did not wash him clean of guilt. All his resistance against the Nazis was not enough. Looking back, he felt he should have spoken more up against their crimes. So, in spite of his resistance against this unjust regime - the good deeds within the bracket, so to say - his performance during the Third Reich was not enough to clear him of guilt, symbolized by the minus sign before the bracket.

The term relates not only to the people who lived in Germany during the Third Reich, but it explains the state of every human being throughout all of history. There will always be this minus sign of not meeting the standards of a holy God as a summary of all our deeds in life. But it doesn't have to stay this way. Realizing this truth leads us to the fact that we need salvation from the outside, not from within ourselves. The son of God offered this salvation on the cross by taking our minus sign on Himself.