He Keeps a Running Total of What He Owes God

Nobody gave it to him and nobody checks it, and it runs constantly.

A good stretch and the number goes down a bit and he relaxes without noticing he has relaxed. A bad week and it goes up, and he starts bracing for something, and the bracing is so old he does not experience it as bracing. He experiences it as being realistic about how things go.

If you put it to him directly he would deny it. He would say, and mean, that it does not work like that.

Then a car makes a noise on the freeway and a sentence arrives before he has decided to think it, and the sentence is about the number.

He has never written it down. He has never once tried to say what the units are, or who set the exchange rate, or what a payment would look like. It just runs, and it has been running since he was small, and he has never had a relationship with anybody that was not running one.

Paul separates a wage from a gift

There is a sentence in Romans that takes two things apart with a word most people skip.

Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. (Romans 4:4, King James Version)

Reckoned. That is an accounting word.

He is describing two completely different transactions. In one, a man works and is owed. In the other, something is given, and the moment it is earned it stops being that thing and becomes the first one.

And he is not saying one is better. He is saying they are different categories, and that a person can only be in one of them at a time.

Which means a running total is not a small mistake inside the right arrangement. It is a different arrangement.

You are not in the transaction you have been keeping books for. Romans 4 separates the wage and the gift by name, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old accounting distinction reach a man on a freeway.

Colossians says what happened to the ledger

There is a picture in Colossians that is startlingly physical about paperwork.

Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross. (Colossians 2:14)

The handwriting.

The word behind it means a document written in somebody's own hand, an acknowledgment of debt. A note. What a man signs when he owes.

And three verbs happen to it. Blotted out. Taken out of the way. Nailed up.

It does not say the debt was reduced. It says the document was dealt with, and then it says where it was put.

You are not carrying a document that is still in force. Colossians 2 uses three verbs on the note itself, and it is His Spirit who makes an old legal image reach a total nobody ever wrote down.

The number in the parable was deliberately absurd

There is a story Jesus tells about a servant who owes his king, and the sum is chosen to be impossible.

Ten thousand talents. A talent was about twenty years of wages for a working man. It is not a large debt. It is a joke about a debt, and the first crowd would have laughed at the number.

The servant asks for time and promises to pay it all.

Then the lord of that servant was moved with compassion, and loosed him, and forgave him the debt. (Matthew 18:27)

He does not extend the terms. He does not set up a payment plan.

And notice that the servant's offer, like the son's in the other story, is never accepted. He asked for time. He got the whole thing canceled, which was not on the table as far as he knew.

You are not going to be granted the extension you have been asking for. Matthew 18 has the man ask for time and receive cancellation instead, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old absurd number land on a real ledger.

And Paul says why it is built that way

There is a reason the arrangement is not a payment plan, and Paul gives it in one clause.

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

Lest any man should boast.

The design goal is that nobody has anything to say about himself afterwards. That is the reason, stated plainly.

Which also means the running total is not humility. A man keeping score is holding on to a version where the numbers are partly his, and that is the version the design specifically rules out.

You are inside something built so that nobody has a figure to point to. Ephesians 2 gives the design reason in the same sentence, and it is His Spirit who makes an old purpose clause do something to a habit of thirty years.

Micah says where it went

There is a picture at the end of Micah about disposal, and it is worth reading for how final it is.

He will turn again, he will have compassion upon us; he will subdue our iniquities; and thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea. (Micah 7:19)

The depths of the sea.

Not the shallows. Not somewhere retrievable. A man writing that had no way of getting anything back from there, and that is the whole point of the image.

There is no ledger at the bottom of the sea to be consulted.

You have a total that was disposed of rather than carried forward. Micah 7 picks the least recoverable place available, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old image feel like an answer to arithmetic.