“The Lord has looked down from heaven on all mankind to see if there are any who understand, any who seek after God. All have turned away, all have become corrupt. There is no one who does good, not even one.” - Psalm 14:2

“Why do you call me good?” Jesus asked the rich young ruler. And in that question was another logical question. Are there people around us that God counts as good, that merit God’s favor? ‘Certainly, there must be people that God looks down on and says they are good’, most people reason. Mother Teresa, Ghandi, the Dalai Lama, your grandmother?

But the Bible is clear on the subject - all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory.

And we all like sheep have turned away, each has gone to his own way; and there are none who are righteous - no, not one.

In Genesis there is a story where Abraham is trying to save the city of Sodom from God’s wrath to save his nephew Lot. He says, ‘If there are 50 righteous men in the city, will you refrain from destroying it?’ God says He will not destroy it if there are 50 righteous men. But Abraham, knowing the city and the people in it, hedges his bet and asks for 45. Then 40, then 20. And finally, 10. If God just finds 10 good people in the city, will He refrain from destroying it? God says ok. But you know the end of the story. Sodom was destroyed. God could not even find 10 righteous men in the city.

So, how would our city fair? We all know lots of ‘good’ people around us. How our city would fair in our minds probably depends on our definition of righteousness.

An illustration might help. Most people like to compartmentalize things in their lives. And they do this with sin. They understand they certainly have some small areas of sin in their lives - whatever their definition of sin is. But they probably think they are pretty good people in general, better than many. (After all, it’s not like they are an axe murderer or something...)

The problem with this is compartmentalization. They view sin like a black marble in a glass of pure water. It’s in there but it doesn’t affect the water really. You can drink the water carefully and not end up with a marble in your mouth.

But perhaps it’s better to view sin more like cyanide. It permeates all areas of our life and poisons us. Maybe Adolph Hitler has mostly cyanide and very little pure water and your grandmother has mostly pure water, but all of us have within us the deadly poison of sin.

So, refer back to the passage we read earlier. Perhaps it would help to say that there are none who are truly pure? We all have deadly poison inside of us. There is not one who is pure and good, without poison.

We are not slightly soiled creatures who just need to be cleaned up a little - we are sin-poisoned, and, left on our own, we will not merely be poisoned and die ourselves – we will bring harm to others as well.

You and I don’t just need the black marble of sin scooped out of our lives - we need the roaring waters of salvation to come into our lives and purify us from the inside out – to flush out the poison and give us forgiveness and new life.

What is powerful to do that? What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

Questions for Thought:

1. How do we most often define good?

2. What is God’s definition of good?

3. How can we have right standing before God?