Mathematical proof you can’t do it yourself.
Last week I wrote about how we are not “good enough.”
Not close.
Numbers in the Old Testament prescribed sacrifices for sins people committed without even knowing it.
Jesus raised the standard higher.
If you look with lust, you’ve committed adultery in your heart.
If you harbor anger, you’re in danger of judgment.
Paul says in Romans there is none righteous. Not one.
God’s standard is perfection.
One sin disqualifies you.
And we all know, if we’re honest, we can’t go very long without messing up.
But here’s what I did not expect.
Vox Day wrote a working paper called Quantifying the Fall of Man that attempts to test the doctrine of Original Sin against behavioral data.
Day only included sins clearly condemned in the New Testament.
Lying.
Lustful thought.
Sinful anger.
Envy.
Dishonesty.
Gossip.
No ceremonial law.
No disputed edge cases.
No sins of omission.
And he used the lowest available numbers from peer-reviewed studies. Mostly self-reported data, which likely underestimates everything.
The conservative floor?
4.33 sins per person per day.
That’s the minimum.
From age 3 to age 78, using those conservative inputs, that comes out to about 114,000 sins in one lifetime.
That’s the floor.
A more realistic estimate would push past 250,000.
Now here’s where it gets uncomfortable.
What are the odds of going one full day without committing one of those sins?
About 1 in 1,190.
So maybe three sinless days per decade, if you’re average.
Encouraging?
Not really.
Because the probability of stringing together 27,000 of those days in a row is effectively zero.
On the order of 10 to the negative eighty-something power.
In plain English:
Across roughly 112 billion humans who have ever lived, the expected number of naturally sinless lives is zero.
Not “unlikely.”
Zero.
And remember, this excludes sins of omission.
It excludes pride.
It excludes ingratitude.
It excludes the full force of the Sermon on the Mount.
We are not just slightly flawed.
We are mathematically incapable of pulling this off ourselves.
That should end the political fantasies.
Elect the right people.
Pass the right laws.
Fix the system.
It doesn’t solve the core problem.
The problem is upstream.
The distribution never reaches zero.
There has only been one exception.
And if the math is right, that exception cannot be explained by natural human variation.
Which is exactly what Christianity has claimed from the beginning.
Here’s the good news.
Jesus does not require you to fix yourself before coming to Him.
That would defeat the entire point.
You can’t clean yourself up enough.
Just come.
P.S. If you’d like to read through the Bible with us this year, you can join at His Word Together.
Nothing fancy. Just steady time in the Word.
