Credit and blame

Someone once said to me, "Why do you believe that God gets all the credit if we do something right, but it's all our fault if we do something sinful?  How is that fair?  That isn't fair."

He saw things so strongly from his own perspective, I was at a loss to explain to him how he was missing the point.

I'm going to detour for a minute and tell you about my phone.  Don't worry.  It will come back around and connect in the end.

My phone is called a "Smart Phone."  I'm just saying, but it doesn't seem very smart to me.  Sometimes I literally want to pitch it out through a window, even if were to break the window in the process.  It has the capacity to make me that angry.  (Yes, full disclosure of a sinful heart over here.)

Of the features on my phone, the one that enrages me most is the keyboard.  I feel as though this diabolical keyboard has been programmed especially to get my goat.  It has all kinds of automatic editing functions built into it, to thwart me at every turn.

It has about a 40% accuracy rate for long words.  But it has about a 2% accuracy rate for short words.  Currently, one of the most annoying substitutions I get is "wad," which comes up every time I try to type in "was."  Can we think about this for a moment?  How many times per day does the average person use the word "was"?  I don't know, maybe 7,000?  And how many times per day does the average person use the word "wad"?  I don't know, maybe zero?  So why?  Why would the algorithm default to wad, over was every single time I try to type it?

Here's another baffling one.  My phone loves to present this:  "we'r".  It doesn't give me, "we're," mind you.  It gives me "we'r."  This, every time I type in anything related to "we."  Now, the word we is a word I use quite often in texts, so this is getting really old.  I do not know how it ever came up with we'r in the first place.  I must have made some fatal typo in the past, and it latched onto it to remember forever, regardless of how many times I correct it.  Sigh.

Seriously, when I input a text, it takes me forever, because I often have to correct every single word in the text before I send it.  I am not exaggerating.  I am telling the literal truth.  This is if I use the keyboard.  It is slightly better if I dictate. With the dictate function, among other issues, my phone comes up with random and inexplicable capitalizations in the middle of sentences.  Sometimes I get so fed up, I just leave these, and then I feel crummy about myself.  Getting lax about typos is dangerous.  When I dictate, my phone has around a 50% accuracy rate, so I only need to correct 50% of the words.  However, I always miss some, because my eyes are weakening and the screen is tiny, and I am always sending off texts with ridiculous and sometimes embarrassing mistakes in them.  Yesterday I sent someone a text in which I meant to say, "I thought it was beautiful," but it went out saying, "I thought I was beautiful."  I hang my head in cringing shame.

So anyway, my phone is a frustrating device that thwarts me at every turn.

Now, if a skilled programmer were to develop a better algorithm for texting, I would be in awe of this person, and very grateful.  The current situation is not good.  The current algorithms don't work properly.  They need to be reprogrammed, and the programmer would be a Hero.  Of course he would get credit for what he fixed.

This brings us back to my original subject: whose fault is it, and who gets the credit?  Specifically, remembering where we began, whose fault is sin, and who gets the credit for righteousness?

I think we as humans are very quick to lay blame, mostly because we want to justify ourselves.  I don't think God sees it in terms of faults and blaming.  The world is broken by sin.  We arrive broken, and we continue to deteriorate, unless restorative help is applied.  The natural state of a man is one of rebellion and pride, wanting and often demanding his own way.  This began in the Garden of Eden, a result of Satan's scheme to deceive, and everyone's tendency to grasp for power, even though the power began in the right hands and everything had been good.

God does not "blame " us for this.  God knows our weaknesses and our propensity to reject Him.  God knows that without Him we can do nothing.  God knows we need Him desperately, and we spurn Him relentlessly.  He doesn't blame us, He understands us.  He understands us much better than we understand ourselves, and He pours out compassion on us.  God knows our brokenness, and He knows the remedy for our brokenness.  He patiently works to woo us and heal us.

"I will heal their apostasy and love them freely, for my anger has turned away from them," He says in Hosea 14:4.

I think of animals that need to be tamed.  Some are much easier to tame than others.  A patient handler, however, actually enjoys taming the difficult ones.  The greater the challenge, the greater the sense of accomplishment.  This is why God says, "My power is made perfect in weakness," (2 Corinthians 12:9).  The more messed up a person is upon coming to Jesus, the more striking is the patience and skill God displays through redemption.  Yes, He gets all the glory!  He absolutely gets the glory!  We are broken, and He fixes us.  This is the story of salvation.  We were dead in sin, and He makes us alive in Christ.

If we won't let Him fix us, if we taste His grace and reject it, there comes a point where He gives us what we demand.   This is a very serious and tragic thing, and difficult to understand, but essentially it means that those who refuse to be tamed will be allowed to go wild.  Yet, His patience is unfathomable, His grace is sufficient and His love is unfailing, so there is always hope.  There is always hope for everyone.