No Triage Needed

 

T

he emergency room at the local hospital was always busy on the weekends and that meant the x-ray department would also have its share of work.  The two seemed to go hand-in-hand.  For every skinned knee, scraped elbow, bruised shoulder, and sore back, the emergency room physicians seemed to order every x-ray offered on the menu. And, just like waiters in a restaurant, we delivered exactly what was ordered. 

 

I always wondered how emergency room physicians determined just whom to see and what tests to order.  So many patients with various ailments, aches, and pains come to the hospital that there simply is no way a doctor can stay abreast of all the patients waiting for treatment.   

 

This is where the job of the triage nurse comes into play.  Just inside the emergency room door, a nurse in a small office welcomes anyone visiting the emergency room.  He/she takes down all the patient’s vital information and reasons for visiting the hospital.  Based on the seriousness of the patient’s problem, the triage nurse decides when the physician will see him/her.  For example, someone with sharp chest pains will be seen before someone with a scraped knee. 

 

Unfortunately, when it comes to sin, we often adopt this model of the triage nurse in an emergency room.  In our view, we treat sin as having different levels of severity.  Taking a paper clip from the office is much less severe than stealing 100,000 dollars.  So, in our view, God would need to see the money thief before his appointment with the wayward office worker who occasionally lifts a paper clip for personal use.  We never take into consideration that both of these people are equally guilty of taking something that does not belong to them for that is the definition of stealing. 

 

The more that is stolen, we believe, the more serious the crime. However, God’s economy is much different from our own.  We look at the external circumstances of a situation while God looks at the internal motive for our actions.  In the case above, both the office worker and the “thief” took something that did not belong to them, and they took it for personal use.  The amount of the money doesn’t weigh any more heavily in God’s view than the one paper clip. 

 

Romans 3:23 reminds us of this fact, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”  Please notice the second word of the passage.  The word all doesn’t mean some of us, or most of us, or a few of us, it means all of us, leaving no one out.  In addition, the word sin means to miss the mark, the mark of God’s glory.  So, all of us have missed the mark regardless of the perceived severity of our actions.   

 

All of us need an appointment with God and He is never too busy to see us and He does not categorize us according to what we have done.  We have all sinned and God meets us, all of us, at the place and at the moment of our need. 

 

God’s emergency room is always open, and He is always ready to treat our sin—no triage needed!