One of the main assumptions that we confront is the idea that God only expects you to be “good enough.” He doesn’t expect perfection. All that He needs from you, in order to accept you, is for your good deeds to outweigh your bad deeds. The assumption is that on the judgment day He will weigh all your deeds out and as long as you have 51% good versus 49% bad He will accept you. We have tried to show that this view is an enormous insult to God. God doesn’t accept any bad, not even .00000001% bad. The idea that He would accept any bad is an insult to His holiness. This whole idea of God’s complete and utter holiness is a new concept that God’s Word has introduced and we are continually reinforcing through the teaching. The teaching of the Law is a good place to reinforce it.
We taught that God’s balance doesn’t work the way that they have been taught. God’s balance works by Him putting His attributes on one side (His holiness, perfection, goodness, etc.) and weighing each one of us against that standard. The issue isn’t if my good outweighs my bad, the issue before God is am I as holy and perfect and good as God is? He accepts nothing less than His own perfection. We illustrated that with a simple skit. We made a bowl of soup in front of the crowd. Right before we served it we sent someone into the woods (a.k.a. the outhouse) with a hoe to collect some of what the people habitually leave there. We scraped a little bit of into our soup, stirred it well, and served it to the clan leaders sitting in the front row of the audience. We invited them to partake. Naturally they refused. We insisted (after all, it isn’t good manners to reject food that is offered). Still they refused. When we asked them why they said it was and insult to offer them food that had been contaminated in that way. Even after we told them not to worry about that, after all, it was only a very little bit, they remained strong in their conviction! 🙂
At that point they got the message. It didn’t matter if it was only a little bit, the fact that it was in there ruined the whole soup. We pointed out that it is the same way with God and sin. He won’t accept any bad in us, even if it is only a little. Just like it was an insult to the clan leaders to offer them soup with a tiny little bit of yuck mixed in, in the same way it is an insult to God to think that He will accept us when we are contaminated by any bit of sin. Imagine how much more of an insult it is when we say that God will eat the soup as long as the contamination is less than 50%! God is completely holy and is even more picky about our sin than we are about our soup.