NOTES for Eze 18:21-28

When it comes to sin and righteousness, what is closest to us humans is the formal, arithmetic approach. We are ready to count scrupulously other people's good and bad deeds, or less often our own, in order to draw up, if not a final, then at least an interim balance and understand what we have achieved and what claim we have before God. And from God's judgment we often expect the same kind of counting and balancing, only final.

The kind in which absolutely everything will be taken into account: after all, nothing can be hidden from God, and there is no reason to doubt the adequacy of His evaluations. It is no accident that the judgment after death, as pagans imagined it, was reduced precisely to such an evaluation, to the drawing up of a final balance. The image of scales, of the weighing of the soul after death, was widespread and well known in antiquity both in the Middle East and in the Greco-Roman world. And many believers in the Lord expected something similar from their God.

Ezekiel destroys all their expectations. He says: there is no balance, no summing up. A righteous person, if he sins once, can die because of that sin. And a sinner, if he once turns to God and repents of the sins he has committed, can remain alive. Humanly speaking, this seemed completely unjust: can one single sin really overshadow all the good deeds the righteous person has done? And one conversion, one repentance, can it outweigh all the evil the sinner has done? But God has different arithmetic.

More precisely, He has none at all. God does not count the evil and good deeds done by people, although, of course, He sees them perfectly and knows about them. But what matters to Him is not rewards and punishments. Not the balance of good and evil deeds. He has known since the days of Noah that every intention of the human heart is evil from his youth. But what matters to Him is to save the person. As he is. And He uses every opportunity for this. And an opportunity appears when at least some relationship arises and is established between Him and the person whom He wants to save. Even if only for a second.

For God, one second is infinitely much. In that one second He can contain the fullness of His Kingdom. And it does not matter what happened yesterday, the day before yesterday, a year ago, or ten years ago. What matters is what is here and now. For God there is no past or future, only the eternal present. Every relationship with Him is always here and now. And so is the absence of such a relationship. Therefore the salvation of the righteous person and the destruction of the sinner also take place here and now. Without any arithmetic. Only by God's love, accepted here and now or rejected here and now.