paying for sin (Romans 5:6-11)

[jars of clay]

6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— 8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. 9 Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. 10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. 11 More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

God is just, right? He alone is the one being in the universe who has not taken advantage of other creatures. He does not trick us, rob us, or hurt us in any unjust way. He upholds just laws and justly punishes all who break those laws. Rarely do we truly see the horrific nature of our sin. We so often think that we are not that bad, that we are actually doing "okay" compared to others. But what we forget is that we are not so much judged by our many sins as we are judged by our greatest sin. I said, way back in Chapter one in one of the very first studies that I gave on this book, that our first and greatest sin is not that we lie, or cheat, or have pride. Our greatest sin is that we do not Honor God as we should. This alone damns us all well before we can even reach the finger pointing of "this person did such and such," or "did you hear about what he did?"
What Paul is getting at is our sin isn't just the petty things that we can easily mark out, it is the total rebellion from God. It is this that turns all of our "good works" into pieces of trash. When Man fell, he did not just lose the ability to enter the garden, he lost the ability to worship God in the perfection that God has planned for us in Heaven. This is the sin that Saint Augustine saw, that Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk saw, this vile evil that God sees in all of us. There is quite literally nothing in us that would make us of worth. In fact, because of this sin, we are so twisted that God calls us his Enemies (vs. 10). But Paul does not just stop with recognizing that we are enemies with God.
Now, we see God being just as our judge, we see our true sin, now for the crazy part; despite all our sin, all our rebellion, Christ still comes to the earth, and dies for us. If we truly see our sin, our first thought would be "Is God out of his mind?" I mean who the heck in their right mind would even die for a good person, let alone your worst enemy. But this is what God does. He does not forget about our sin, but instead he goes through the very system that He established. God said in the garden after man sinned that to pay for his sin there must be blood shed. Either Adam had to pay for his sin with his life, or an alternate host had to pay. The reason why I tend to say that we are saved at the judgement throne is that we have not answered for our sin yet. We will at the judgement throne either pay for the sin ourselves, or Christ will come up and say "i paid for them. I died for them." What is it going to be like for you? What will you answer when God asks you to pay for your sin. Will you pay them yourself by burning in hell? Or will you have faith that the King of Kings has done himself an injustice, by paying for something he did not do.