This is a story and a teaching about atonement, which is the old idea that you owe God something for the wrong you have done, and that you have to pay it off somehow. Some Christians still practice a version of it today. Other faiths practice their own forms of it. And Jesus revealed something that must have been very hard to hear back then, which is that the real Father never wanted any of it. Not the gold, not the animals on the altar, not the hurting of yourself to make up for something. None of that ever reached him, because he was never keeping score in the first place.
So let us walk through where that shows up in scripture, and how one of his followers tried to explain it to a room full of people who had been paying that bill their whole lives.
Paul was a traveling teacher who wrote letters. He had studied the old law for years, and then he changed his mind about almost all of it, and he spent the rest of his life explaining why. He wrote one of those letters to a small group of believers in a town called Colossae, up in the hills of what we now call Turkey.
Those people had grown up inside a religious world of payment. Every year there was a day set aside to deal with sin. Animals were brought to the temple and killed. Gold and silver and grain were handed over. A priest did the work at the altar, the people went home, and twelve months later the whole thing started again. Their parents had done it. Their grandparents had done it. It was simply what you did if you wanted to be right with God.
Paul wrote to them about a piece of paper.
Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross; (Colossians 2:14)
The word Paul chose was a business word
The Greek word Paul used is cheirographon. It means handwriting, and in the Roman world it meant one specific document.
It was an IOU.
If you borrowed money, you wrote the note out yourself, in your own hand, and you signed it. Your own handwriting was the proof. You could never come back later and say the amount was wrong, or that it was not you, or that you had never agreed to anything. The paper settled the argument before it started.
The lender kept that paper in a box. As long as it existed, you were not a free man. You could be dragged into court over it. In the worst cases a person could be sold into slavery over it, and so could his children.
Every person sitting in that room in Colossae knew what a cheirographon was. Some of them had signed one. That is the paper Paul is talking about.
Paul says God did three things to the bill
Paul does not say the note was reduced. He does not say the payments got smaller or the deadline moved.
He says God blotted it out. That was how a debt was canceled back then. Ink sat on top of the papyrus instead of soaking into it, so a wet sponge took the writing right off and the page came back blank.
He says God took it out of the way. It was carried off. It is not in the box anymore.
Then he says God nailed it up.
Was there a real piece of paper
No. Nobody wrote out your sins on a sheet and hammered it to a wooden beam outside Jerusalem, and Paul is not asking anyone to believe that. He is doing what a good teacher does. He picked up an object his readers handled in ordinary life, and he used it to show them something they could not see.
There was a real board at that cross, though, and every person reading the letter knew the practice. The Romans wrote a man's crime on a board and carried it in front of him, so anyone watching could read what he had done. A Roman historian describes a slave led through the middle of the Forum behind an inscription naming why he was to die, and then crucified.
The man who ordered that board was Pontius Pilate. He was the Roman governor of Judea, sent from Rome to run the place, and he was the only man in the region who could have somebody put to death. John tells us what Pilate had them write.
And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross. And the writing was, JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS. (John 19:19)
So Paul is standing next to a real Roman custom and turning it around. The thing posted over that man's head was not a list of what anyone had done wrong. It was the bill, canceled, held up where the whole road could see it.
Whether you hold the paper as a real object or as a picture Paul drew for people who needed one, the teaching underneath it does not move. And the teaching is what Jesus came to reveal.
What was written on that paper
The debt was never money. Nobody in Colossae thought God was short on silver.
The debt was the running list of everything a person owed and could not pay. The sacrifice that had to be repeated. The guilt that came back around every year on the calendar, right on schedule. And underneath all of it, the belief carried by ordinary people for hundreds of years that God sat somewhere with a book open, keeping score of them.
The writer of Hebrews says something very plain about that old system.
For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins. (Hebrews 10:4)
Not hard. Not partial. Not possible.
The proof is the calendar itself. A debt that has to be paid every single year is a debt that was never settled. A man paying the same bill over and over is not paying it off. He is renting a little peace, twelve months at a time.
God is not just, God is merciful
This is the heart of the whole thing, and it is the part Jesus came to reveal.
People had believed for thousands of years that God was, above all, just. Just means he keeps accounts. You do wrong, he takes something back. He gives you a harder life, or he shuts the door, or he makes it impossible for you to come home to him until the ledger balances.
Jesus revealed the real Father. The truth about God that religions before him got wrong, and that religions after him have gotten wrong too. God is not just. God is merciful.
Here is what that means for you and me. He welcomes his children home when they stumble. He helps you through a hard year. He stands in the doorway with his arms open. He is mercy and grace, and Jesus came to show us what that looks like with a face on it.
Jesus said it out loud at a dinner table. He was eating in the house of a tax collector, and the religious men wanted to know why he would sit with people like that. He answered with a line from the prophet Hosea, written seven hundred years before he was born.
But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. (Matthew 9:13)
He said it twice in Matthew, to two different crowds, in two different arguments. It was not a passing remark. Mercy, not sacrifice. The altar was never the thing the Father was after.
Why it was nailed up in public
Rome had a habit at executions. A board went with the condemned man, naming the crime, so everyone watching could read what he had done and carry the warning home.
Paul takes that picture and turns it the other way around.
The paper nailed over the cross is not a list of what anyone did wrong. It is the canceled bill. The blank page. The note with the writing washed clean off it, raised up high where the whole road can see there is nothing left on it.
A canceled debt could have been burned quietly in a back room, or buried, or dropped in a fire. Instead it went up on a post in daylight on the busiest road in town.
The account is closed
Paul says one more thing about it in his letter to Rome.
For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth. (Romans 10:4)
The Greek word for end there is telos. It means the finish, the place where a thing arrives and stops. The race is over. There is no next lap.
The writer of Hebrews puts it gently.
In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away. (Hebrews 8:13)
Old. Wearing out. Almost gone. That is how the New Testament speaks about the old arrangement. On the cross Jesus said it was finished, and he meant finished.
What Paul was doing for those people
Isn't it a wonderful thing that Paul tried so hard.
He was talking to people who had atoned for their sins every year of their lives with animals and gold. He needed a picture they could actually hold, so he reached for the one document every adult in that room understood. The bill. The nail. The blank paper. Whether the paper was a real object that day or a picture Paul drew for them, what matters is the teaching underneath it, and Paul carried that teaching across safely.
Jesus came to show us that the shrine and the offering and the yearly payment do not bring anyone closer to the Father. God already loves all of his children. The good and the bad. You, and the person you cannot stand.
So now you know one more hidden message in the New Testament, and it stands against thousands of years of the practice of atonement.
Even the early church could not let go of it. Priests and monks whipped their own backs when they sinned, believing the pain counted for something. Centuries later, people in Europe handed money to holy men to have their sins forgiven. Some faiths have kept a kind of ledger where good deeds earn credit against a debt. This human invention has not left us yet. It is even the shape of our courts. You sinned, so you must be punished, and sometimes the punishment is a life.
Jesus freed us from that prison. Sin is real and we are all flawed, and the Father loves us anyway, and we get closer to him by becoming more like his Son. For many people of faith that is a very hard thing to accept. It was hard then and it is hard now.
Some of what he taught gets harder to take, not easier. Loving an enemy is coming. Nobody takes all of it in one morning.
And you are not behind. There is no balance. The paper is blank, and it has been blank a very long time.