The Debt

Benjamin Franklin is famous for saying, among many other things, that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes. If he were writing today, I suspect he might want to alter one of those terms—not so much death and taxes, but debt and taxes. Debt has become as much a part of our way of living, as death has always been the means of not living. We hear about this most often when people talk about public debt, and that’s pretty unnerving on its own terms. National borrowing now sits at over $28 trillion, a sum so gargantuan that most of us can’t even conceptualize it. Just the debt run-up over 2020 amounted to $3.3 billion.[1] And in case that’s too abstract to be easily grasped, it works out to an indebtedness of $81,390 for each living American.[2]

But that’s only public debt. The American way of living floats on bubbles of personal debt as well. On average, every credit card owner in America is toting over $8,000 in debt.[3] Two-thirds of the graduates who marched to commencement in May have loans to pay off that, on average, come in at over $37,500.[4]

If you’ve been sagging deeper into your chair as I’ve recited this unhappy little litany, maybe the only useful consolation I can offer is that it could be worse. In Roman times, a borrower who couldn’t pay up was sold into slavery; that way, the lender could be sure of getting his money’s worth out of you. (Actually, a Roman who was being pursued for debt could sell one of his children into slavery as a way of dealing with the problem, which offers up a whole new vista of modern opportunities.) As slavery was abo­lished, we became kinder: we merely threw you into prison if you missed payments. In England, imprisonment for debt continued as late as the twentieth century.[5]

A More Forbidding Debt

But now, let us suppose for a moment that without any warning, someone stepped in and offered to pay off all your credit-card debt at once and on the spot. How would that brighten your face? And suppose this same person added that all of your student loans (or your children’s loans) are now fully paid. My guess is that there would be a mix of even more delight, with a slight entering touch of incredulity. And when your benefactor announced that the entire national debt would be considered dissolved, I think it’s pretty likely that you would shift into disbelief and begin dialing 911 to report something. And yet, as the apostle Paul tells us in Colossians 2:13–14, this is the equivalent of what has happened:

And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.

Paul here is talking about debt. Not debt with dollar signs, but something even more forbidding in its consequences, and even more hopeless of ever being paid off: a moral debt. Not just an obligation, not just a responsibility, but a debt of moral failure calculated down to the last moral penny: there is a “record that stood against us with its legal demands which has made us dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh” (v. 14).

The actual word debt doesn’t look like it’s there, but it is. It’s hidden inside that opaque English word record. Taken back to Paul’s Greek, it simply means handwriting (χειρόγραφον). But those Greeks also knew that handwriting was a colloquial way of speaking about any legal document, especially a bond or a debt.[6] So what Paul is saying here, and with all the precision of a mortgage lender, is that we are in debt. To God. And what’s more, that debt is so deep it might as well be our grave, because we’re so far down in it that we’re as good as dead in trespasses. So, you see, debt doesn’t get any more cheerful in the Bible than it does at the bank.

In fact, the Bible as a whole has a pretty dim view about debt, which can be summed up fairly simply by saying don’t borrow and don’t lend. “Do not be one who shakes hands in pledge,” says Proverbs 22:26, “or puts up security for debts.” By the same token, borrowing is just as questionable as lending. At best, “the borrower is slave to the lender” (Prov. 22:7). At worst, it becomes larceny. “The wicked borrow and do not repay,” says King David in Psalm 37. And Paul sums it up sharply in Romans 13:8 when he writes, “Owe no man anything, but to love one another.” That may not make for a very dynamic economic outlook, but it’s bound to make sense to those 4.2 million Americans whose mortgages were in delinquency in the second quarter of 2020, or the 20 percent of student-loan borrowers who are in default.[7]

It also made sense to the ancient rabbis when they talked about their relationship with God. The great Rabbi Akiba spoke of God as being like a storekeeper who lent out money and goods, recording each borrowing in a ledger; but just as that ledger would furnish the proof whenever the shopkeeper came to collect, so God demands of men and women some compensation for what he has lent them, in terms of life or health or blessing. Hence, the great liturgy at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Avinu Malkenu (אָבִינוּ מַלְכֵּנוּ‎), includes the prayer “Our Father, our king, in your great mercy cancel all our debts.”[8]

This same understanding is at the center of Jesus’ direction to us to pray “forgive us our trespasses” or our debts because the debts we owe to God are formidable. Do we live and breathe? We do so because God gives us the means to do so. “In him we live and move and have our being,” says Paul in Acts 17. Do we enjoy health and prosperity? We do so because God gives these things to us. “Except the Lord build the house,” warns King David, “they labor in vain who build it” (Ps. 127:1). Number up every aspect of your life from your first day until this one, and what do you have that has not been borrowed from the bank of God?

Knowing this, it would be nice to say that we should behave as God’s good borrowers and repay our debts promptly and fully. That would make for a very tidy world, in which God provides the start-up capital for our lives and we faithfully make payments until we can finally say that we own that life, and that God should be remarkably satisfied with us as a good investment.

But that would be telling one of the biggest, fattest lies that has ever been told. The truth is that we haven’t done anything even close to paying off our debts to God.

• Because we were overconfident and thought we were masters of the universe and could do anything we wanted.

• Because we thought we were entitled to things and took them, or put the entire focus of our lives on acquiring them.

• Because we thought other people were less intelligent or less deserving or more vulnerable and could therefore be used, manipulated, and taken advantage of to suit our pleasure.

Each of these attitudes brings us into moral as well as fiscal debt. In fact, the ways in which we routinely mismanage our finances so closely parallel the ways we mismanage our relationship to God that it should be no surprise when Paul tells us that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”

And it’s not just that we have sinned—that ominous, overhanging word. Yes, we’ll admit to having sinned; in fact, I doubt whether there’s anyone, even at their most self-confident, who would claim never to have sinned. What we fail to reckon with is the God we have sinned against, a very particular God, an infinite God. So that sinning—even only once—is a sin against an infinite being, and with infinite consequences that stretch away, beyond the rim of the universe, to infinite dimensions. The old medieval theologians had a savagely neat way of putting this: Every sin is like an attempt to murder God (omne peccatum contra conscientiam est quasi deicidium).[9]

No wonder James writes in the second chapter of his epistle, “Whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it” (v. 10). So, when we cast our eye down the length of God’s ledger, we find that we’re not only in debt, but we’re also like so many mortgages: underwater. Worse, we’re not only underwater; we have drowned. That’s what Paul means in Colossians 2: “You were dead in trespasses.”

A Most Forgiving God

But Paul’s purpose is not to have us reaching for the deject button. Read on: “When you were dead in trespasses . . . God made you alive together with him.” In fact, he “forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands.” After we traced our fingers down the long, fearful columns of God’s moral ledger, God did something that never happened with Bernie Madoff, Enron, Bear Stearns, and the other failures from the Great Recession: he stamped it Paid in Full.

This is not because God suddenly experienced a fit of generosity. It was because someone else stepped in and paid the moral account in full, and that was our Savior, Jesus Christ. All the debts that appeared in our moral ledger of indebtedness disappeared and were transferred to the moral ledger of Christ, where he paid the penalty for them on the cross. (This is what we like to call the passive obedience of Christ—his submission to the penalty demanded by God for sin.)

But that was not all. As the superb theologian J. Gresham Machen once wrote, “The passive sufferings of Christ discharged the enormous debt we owe,” but that only brought us “back to a zero balance.” That alone “does not get us into heaven; it simply returns us to the starting point.”[10] We needed more if we expected to appear before God at the day of judgment—and we got it, in the form of the active obedience of Christ. All the moral credits of Jesus’ perfect life and truth and resurrection are now transferred to us, allowing us to stand before God, not only debt free but with the full value of Jesus Christ’s active obedience in the place of those debts. This gives the Christian, as another great theologian, Charles Hodge, declared, “a right to the full pardon of all his sins and a claim in justice to eternal life.”[11] And just to show how very satisfying this entire arrangement is to God, he took the old “record” and “set this aside, nailing it to the cross.”[12]

Remember, if you can, how it felt that day on the expressway when a car careened through the lane barrier and came within an inch of smashing you into a twist of metal. You pulled over, got out of your car; the shock and adrenaline almost made you dizzy, and it suddenly seemed inexpressibly good to be alive. We experience something very close to that when we finally understand just what kind of a spiritual debt has been cancelled out by Jesus Christ and what merits have been put in its place.

On whatever day you looked into yourself, looked hard and looked real, and saw yourself for the first time for what you were—when you saw the moral deficits and behavioral debts, and wondered how on earth or in heaven you were ever going to get around them—on whatever day you were “raised with him through faith in the power of God,” that’s when you knew what it was to be really free, to be inexpressibly alive. That’s what Paul means when he says that “God made you alive together with him.”[13] Alive, in every vibrant, vigorous sense of the word. Alive, because the debts that were smothering you have dissipated and you can now go free into God’s presence.

Let the markets fizzle. Let the bankers and brokers droop. There is no debt so towering, or so deadly, as the debt Paul describes here. But that debt has been paid in Jesus Christ, paid in full, and the ledger nailed with a spike to the cross. Now, go and live:

Continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. (Col. 2:6–7)

Allen C. Guelzo is senior research scholar in the Council of the Humanities and director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Prince­ton University.