Stuck

Perhaps the greatest injustices are the ones that cause harm but are somehow still legal. As someone who has a knack for sales, I immediately think of pyramid schemes as a prime example. "Did you know you could be your own boss and make over twenty-five dollars an hour?" and, "Do you want to retire twenty years earlier for half the work?" are typically the trumpets that announce these particular schemes. What you don't realize is that you are signing up to be a paying customer yourself and saving the company the cost of advertising, merchandising, and even the cost of staffing (since you are your own boss)! By the time you realize that no one wants to buy a $300 frying pan it's too late. You signed the paperwork and you are stuck with the whole set yourself.

Sin is like that. It entices us with promises of great riches and easy hours. It intoxicates us with cheap perfume and flaunts the lifestyle that seems to only be available to the privileged. Like love-sick puppies we go to the altar with sin and thoughtlessly commit our lives, until death do us part. We are stuck.  We are without love, money, or anything that was promised to us and cannot escape. The marriage is legal, but we are condemned.

The Law was never meant to be the solution to our sin. The Law is good and so is following it, but what we need is something greater than the Law. We need something deeper. Paul writes in Romans 7:6, "but now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code." There is something deeper than the law that is able to protect us from injustice. Jesus leads us to it, exemplifies it, upholds it. The promises that are made through this new way sound a thousand times better than what was promised to us by sin and, the best part about them is: when we sign on the dotted line we don't feel stuck. We are finally feel free!