Nadia Comaneci rocked the sports world by scoring a perfect 10.0 in gymnastics in the 1976 Summer Olympics. Not just once, but seven times. The world had never seen anything like her incredible performance that raised the level of competition, and our expectations, beyond most gymnasts' ability to perform.

Consider the process of gymnastic events and the profundity of her performance becomes even more unbelievable. For each event she was scored on technical perfection as well as difficulty. So the gymnast has to push to the edge of her ability and perform an intensely complex and difficult exercise. While stumbles can happen even on the simple exercises, the probability of a mistake grows higher with the level of performance needed to score a perfect 10.0

This is a perfect analogy of the curse of the law spelled out in Deuteronomy 27:26. It was at the end of a string of curses placed on certain sins wrapping up as a catch-all curse in that it catches us all. That's why Paul referred to it as the reason all men are under a curse: because no one does them (Galatians 3:10). No matter how hard we try we won't score a perfect 10 on this life exercise. We all stumble at some point (in reality a lot of points) and instead of winning the gold medal we're cursed; disqualified from the contest for heaven entirely.

As good as anyone is at life we don't always score a 10.0, which is why we can't earn our way to heaven under a law system. Think of it like a gymnastics competition where we have to score a 10.0 every time to earn our own right to enter heaven. Zero mistakes, ever, because the first mistake is an automatic permanent disqualification. No amount of effort gets us back in competition. We've lost everything for all time. Thankfully Jesus scored the perfect 10.0 for life, which qualified him to remove our disqualification by taking our punishment on the cross (Galatians 3:13-14).