Why is it that so many in religiondom suppose that God will have to hire a truck load of workers to harvest their crop? They think that they are righteous when it comes to their law keeping. These people who want to think they're obeying the law contract today, they think they’re fulfilling that law contract at least to a degree that God will say that they’re doing the very best they can. The law required much more than that. People today think that if we post that contract, at least as it was boiled down to the big ten on the schoolhouse or the courthouse walls, our children will be able to fulfill it. Why, your children are sinning, and it’s all due to an abandonment of the big ten. The Pharisees, the strictest of the law keepers had the law. How was that working for them? Did it deter sin? Or did it make the sin nature stand out like a Q-beam during a new moon? The law was given to Israel not to deter sin, but to show them their sin. Take away the big ten and people will have a license to sin they tell us. The truth is, those with a sin nature have never needed a license to sin. We do it naturally. 


This will be the issue at the Great White Throne Judgment. People will be standing there not clothed in the Savior’s righteousness because they’ve rejected what Jesus accomplished where their sin debt is concerned. They’ll be standing there in their own righteousness and that righteousness is the righteousness Paul said, I don’t want to be found in that. I won’t measure up. Nobody’s righteousness will measure up. You say, well, there are a lot of good people out there. Yes, from an earthly perspective, certainly they are good, but not when their earthly goodness is measured beside God’s perfect righteousness. It doesn’t cut it. We might think of them as good and they would be good relatively speaking; good citizens, good neighbors, good people from a relative standpoint, but from God’s standpoint, they do not measure up to who he is. And so therefore, we have the dilemma of the human race. Just as religion did not save the Israelites during the time of the law contract, religion could not save the Gentiles during that time either; just as it cannot save Israelite or Gentile today. Religion is an equally inadequate self-defense plea today for people to make as it was in Paul’s day. And we’re not even under the law program today according to Paul, we’re under grace.