Advertisers today are fond of telling us to “get what you deserve”. It doesn’t seem to matter whether it is a new car, a home loan, money or almost anything else they are trying to sell, you should get it because you “deserve” it. To truly deserve something you must work to earn it. The bible is quite plain about what we deserve. In Romans 3:23 the apostle Paul wrote, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”. And in Romans 6:23 Paul says, “For the wages of sin is death…”. In other words, what we deserve, what we have earned, is death. If each one of us truly, “got what we deserve” it would be the spiritual death mentioned in Revelation 20:14.
Fortunately for us we don’t have to “get what we deserve”. At the end of Romans 6:23 Paul tells us that although we have earned death God offers us a gift, something we haven’t earned, eternal life. All we have to do is accept the gift offered by God’s grace. We do this by being obedient to His word, obeying the gospel and living a life of faithful service to Him. if we refuse God’s gift, “I will do to them according to their way, and according to what they deserve I will judge them; then they will know that I am the LORD! (Ezekiel 7:27).