“There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” We’ve probably all heard that at one time or another, even though many of us have been the beneficiaries of a lunch that we didn’t have to pay for. So why do they insist there’s no such thing as a free lunch?
It's similar with “free postage” that’s offered when we buy something online. We might not have to pay the additional cost of getting merchandise shipped to us, but somebody has to pay it. Maybe it’s the retailer or the shipping company. The shipping cost might even be a hidden add-on included in the price we paid for the items we wanted. The U.S. Postal Service, which seems to be always losing money, certainly isn’t going to absorb the cost – and even if it did, it still must pay workers who sort, process and then deliver what we buy.
We seem to hear a lot about free stuff these days: “free” college educations; “free” health care; “free” unemployment benefits. The costs for these things might not be assessed to us directly, but someone has to pay for them. The “money tree” of legend still hasn’t been discovered, although we might have reason to believe it’s hidden somewhere in Washington, D.C., the way politicians like to throw money around.
This matters because of something available free to each of us, something that’s of far greater value than any of the things cited above. It’s described in Romans 6:23, “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” This gift of eternal life truly is free – offered to each of us – but it still comes because of an extremely high cost that has already been paid.
This cost, of inestimable value, was paid 2,000 years ago by Jesus on a lonely cross outside of Jerusalem. As someone has said, He paid a price we could not pay to satisfy a debt He did not owe. Or as Romans 5:8 declares, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Question: How many sins had you personally committed when Jesus Christ willingly gave His life on that cross centuries and centuries ago? Not a single one, right? Because you weren’t born yet; not even a tiny glimmer is someone’s eye. And yet Jesus paid it forward, we might say, covering the sin debt you had yet to start accumulating. As it says in the Greek, “tetelestai” – “it is finished.”
Why was that even necessary? Why didn’t the Lord just wait for us to earn our way to heaven and eternal life by doing good things? Because He is perfect, holy, all-righteous, and even a slightly imperfect life is totally unacceptable to Him. “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one” (Romans 3:10-12). Countless biblical scholars have studied this passage, and no one has yet to uncover a single exception to this dismal assessment.
So as we think about all the free stuff that tantalizes us in this world – “buy this and we’ll throw in that, absolutely free” – we must remember that it’s not really free. Someone is taking responsibility for the cost. And in a far more profound, enduring way, each one of us is offered the greatest free gift of all, the gift of everlasting life.
There’s just one catch: As John 1:12 states,“Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God – children born not of natural descent, not of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God” (John 1:12-13). Just as a free lunch is of no worth if we don’t accept it when it’s offered, the Lord’s gift of eternal life also must be received. Refusing to accept it is a cost no one can afford.
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