Extenuating Circumstances

Yesterday Kat and I spent the day in Durango. I needed to get some work done on the church car, aka "The Pastormobile," and she needed to get her braces off.  We knew the car appointment would take several hours, and also that the orthodontist involved a morning and afternoon visit, and so we left early and returned late.

If you are my friend on Facebook you may have seen some of the posts that gave a snapshot of our day. Unseen were the two hours of travel each way and several long periods of time with not a lot going on, such as the time we spent hanging out at the library before going to the orthodontist.

All-in-all it was a pretty good day for both of us, until we got home.  Then things got a bit complicated, for both the parents and the daughter. In a nutshell the problem involved the expectation that Kat gets in a certain amount of reading each weekday.  Suffice to say that the reading didn’t happen and as we "discussed" this our daughter presented many extenuating circumstances and side arguments.

The logic of her arguments was at times tortuous, and in some cases the relevance to the issue at hand was completely non-existent.  As parents we struggled in having her understand, and acknowledge one simple fact. That fact was that she knew she was supposed to read, and her failure to do so, in the presence of more than adequate amount of time, was entirely her fault.  "I'm sorry, I made a mistake."  It was as simple as that, or at least it should have been.

Eventually I came to see in our daughter's reasoning the same thing that we often try do to with our sin, which is to find and apply every possible attempt under the sun to evade our responsibility for it.

I didn't know. I thought no one was looking. Everyone else was doing it. The devil made me do it. 

The Bible shows a time of future judgment, when all people will come before God and the record of their life will be plainly visible. At that time there will be no end to the pleading of extenuating circumstances.

Unless…

Unless in this life on earth one has come to know Jesus as their Savior. To know Jesus as the one who took away their sin and gave them peace with God.

The Hebrews 7:25 the author writes this in speaking of the role of Jesus as the last high priest:

"Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them."

Judgment is coming and our choice, now, is to trust in our own ability to defend each sin we have committed against God, or to trust in Jesus, who will faithfully and with perfect effectiveness intercede on our behalf. 

I can’t make up enough excuses or fabricate enough extenuating circumstances to explain away even a single sin, but by faith in Jesus I won’t need to. In the great exchange of my sin for his righteousness the finding in my appearance at the final court will be "not guilty." May this be true for you too. Amen.

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.