One Honest Man

I didn't have to read far to find the verse that spoke to me today, which is Jeremiah 5:1:

Go up and down the streets of Jerusalem,
   look around and consider,
   search through her squares.
If you can find but one person
   who deals honestly and seeks the truth,
   I will forgive this city. 

I immediately thought of Diogenes, who you can read about in this Wikipedia entry and how legend has it he wandered the streets of Athens looking for an honest man. Consider the truly low bar that the Lord has set for Judah--one honest man, just ONE, and as we read further, apparently even that was too high.

This verse should also jog your memory regarding Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18-19, pp 72-76 in our Chronological Bibles), where Abraham begins by asking God to spare the cities if even 50 righteous people can be found, working his way back all the way to 10 righteous people. As we know, even this low standard wasn't met, and the rest is history.

It's the same way today. Even those of us who bear the name Christian and do what we can to live up to that name implicitly understand that we fall short. We understand that no matter what we do, it's not enough, simply because there isn't ANYTHING we can do to earn or guarantee our salvation. To think otherwise would be to commit one of the two sins I discussed in yesterday's post, the sin of thinking that we can do things our own way. The people of Judah couldn't then, and we can't today. In our world of 6 billion+ people, that one honest person is still missing.

Lucky for us, we don't have to rely on ourselves. Through Christ's death and resurrection, we don't have to rely on something we can't do anyway, which alone should give us all the confidence and assurance we'll ever need in this life. Also included in this verse is a small reminder for us as we go through life--since NONE of us meet this standard, NONE of us have any right to accuse someone else of falling short of it. Christ will describe this clearly in Matthew 7:1-3 when we're asked how we can look at the "speck" in someone else's eye and ignore the "plank" in our own. But keep in mind the audience for Jeremiah--a people who had been instructed that their righteousness was obtained through the observance of the law. God is telling us two things:

1. No one can meet this standard

2. Since no one can meet the standard, who are we to point out the shortcomings of others?

It's something we constantly have to remind ourselves of as we go through this world. We're saved not because of anything we did or will do, but because of what God did for us. As long as we keep that humbling thought close to our hearts, we'll do a much better job of spreading the message to others, because, as we all know, we're not better than non-Christians, we're just saved.

Scott