The Law Kills

The Imam once told me that we shall be held responsible for every penny and every second we spend.  “Consider,” he said, “the noble recorders” (sura 82:10-12).  But to be held accountable for every penny and every second is to live hopelessly, for there is no human accounting that can defend hope.  Who can blame us then if we are temped to deny the Law?  For the law kills, yet I am alive, and I cannot even choose to die.  Therefore the Law must die.

And so there must be grace.  We may wonder if it is arbitrary grace, if it is universal and unquestioning grace, or if it is costly grace.  Perhaps there are other kinds of grace to promise freedom.  We needn’t move — yet — to the assertion of Christian grace, but sooner or later we must find grace.  As inevitably as Descartes, in all his doubt, found he could not deny his own mind, so the pondering of uncertainty returns me certainly to grace.  Grace and freedom.

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