Growing Debt

Anne Strickland asks on CAPX: Who has the courage to fix Britain’s debt crisis? She states:

Britain’s national debt is now rising by more than £500 million a day. Every single day. It’s the kind of figure that should prompt a national emergency, but instead it’s been met with the kind of collective shrug that suggests we’ve all decided it’s someone else’s problem. Future Chancellor, future Parliament, future generation. Someone will sort it eventually, surely?

This sounds terrifying and bespeaks successive governments’ appalling financial management. It is really the voters who might be blamed, as we keep demanding the state provides this and spends on that, while none of us want to cough up any extra to pay for it.

A debt more terrifying than one which rises by half a billion each day is the dreadful one that sinners owe a Righteous God whose world they have wrecked and whose laws they have broken. The Lord Jesus spoke in Luke 7: 41-2:

“There was a certain creditor who had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. And when they had nothing with which to repay, he freely forgave them both. Tell Me, therefore, which of them will love him more?” (NKJV)

If the debt of sin is great, how great is the grace that remits it!

A debtor to mercy alone,
Of covenant mercy I sing,
Nor fear, with God’s righteousness on,
My person and off’rings to bring.
The terrors of law and of God
With me can have nothing to do;
My Savior’s obedience and blood
Hide all my transgressions from view.

-Augustus Toplady

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