Central Abbotsford

This week, I had the privilege of spending my Wednesday morning watching my son participate in a Grade 6 boys’ volleyball tournament. If you’ve ever had to be a part of something similar, you know the chaos: a dozen or so teams of a dozen or so kids who are about a dozen or so years old, doing their best to master a sport that they have varying degrees of familiarity with, while also trying to navigate games being played on multiple courts in multiple gyms in a school you’ve never been to before. It’s as peaceful as it sounds.

Because this is middle school sports, the officials and scorekeepers for the games are usually high school students. High schoolers, being high schoolers, do not always pay full attention to the world immediately around them. I do not mean to generalize here or treat high schoolers unfairly. I used to be one. They are learning just as the middle schoolers are learning volleyball.

When you combine newly-competitive middle school athletes with semi-attentive high school scorekeepers, however, some problems can arise. At the end of one of the games (which our team narrowly lost), I heard some of the boys complaining that the scorekeepers had allocated some of the points that rightfully belonged to them to the other team, thus swinging the balance of the result. Complaints abounded.

Whether or not this is accurate, I do not know. But in the next game, I vowed to pay close attention to the score.

And, sure enough, there were errors. In the first 10 points of the match, in fact, the scorekeepers, looking in the wrong direction, credited two points incorrectly. However, both went in our team’s favour. So instead of the score rightfully being tied at 5, we were up 7-3. 

At the end of this game, our team won (handily enough that the scoring discrepancy likely would not have mattered). When I pointed out my observations to my son after the game, he was a lot less affected by it than he had been about the previous game’s mistakes.

I do not mean to impugn the character of my son and his friends here. They did nothing but play the game and trust the people bigger than them to play their roles correctly. But their reactions to these two different scenarios reveals something profound about the human condition in a fallen world.

We believe in a just God who does justice, because that is who He says He is, and who He has revealed Himself to be in His Scriptures. When He reveals His character in Exodus 34, He says that He “will by no means clear the guilty”. When Moses proclaimed the attributes of God as he neared the end of his life, he made sure to note, in Deuteronomy 32:4, “The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he.”

And so, when an injustice is done to us, we feel it. It seems like a betrayal of some kind. Has God forgotten about us in those moments? Is He (to be intentionally sacrilegious for a moment) asleep at the switch? 

But! When there is a seeming failure of justice that benefits us, do we feel this pain? Maybe sometimes, especially when people are looking, we will “do what’s right” in such a circumstance. More often than not, though, we are quite content to quietly take whatever little advantage that we can gain in a difficult world. Few people decline the “Bank Error In Your Favour” card in Monopoly.

Yet, in Christianity, we are faced with a conundrum. The centrepoint of our faith, the cross of Christ, is a seeming injustice. The central claim of the cross is that through it, Christ takes the penalty rightly due sinners, and all those who proclaim Him as Lord and Saviour are fully atoned for, receiving the benefit of His saving work. The scoreboard flips in our favour despite us doing nothing to have earned it; indeed, our score should be well in the negative. How do we accept this with a clear conscience?

The answer to that is in the character of our God. He is a God who “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). He desires this so much so that He was willing to take on flesh and take on punishment to make salvation possible. The cross was a great human injustice, for sure – but it was not a theological injustice, both because it was a part of God’s grand plan for salvation, and because He, the only One with authority to cancel the debt of sin, settled it definitively.

And so, we can accept the gift of salvation with a clear conscience, taking it as gospel motivation to live a life in grateful response to the great reversal that took place at the cross, honouring God and loving Him and others in all that we do. Not because it will change the scoreboard, but because the game has already been won.