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in the 2012 movie Batman Returns one of Catwoman's driving motivations was her desire for a clean slate as you might imagine she has a pretty sordid history as an international cat burglar and like all of us in the age of social media every detail of her life is on record somewhere on the worldwide web making it impossible for her to escape the past but word on the streets of Gotham is that someone has developed a powerful computer program called the clean slate which will erase your entire internet record from every database on the planet all with a simple click of a single button and for reasons that are perhaps obvious Catwoman would do anything to get her hands on it in this respect Catwoman is more than just a comic book supervillain she is also a metaphor for us all at least the way data about us accumulates on the Internet until it starts to define us and control us is one of the growing social issues of our day Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain uses the term reputational bankruptcy to talk about all this the web never forgets he reminds us and as more and more of our lives are lived online it becomes increasingly difficult to escape the impact of our digital footprints what we need is a train argues is some way to declare reputational bankruptcy and start over like if the internet allowed you a one time pulling of a lever that would delete your digital identity and you could just start fresh the concept of reputational bankruptcy is a helpful image for something the Bible calls justification by faith the idea is that we are justified before God not by works keeping the Old Testament law or adhering to some human defined moral code but through faith in Jesus Christ strictly speaking the term justification is a legal term that describes a judge rendering a not guilty verdict in a court of law to be justified is to be declared not guilty but what exactly does this mean how does God declare us not guilty on the basis of our faith in Christ and what does this justification actually look like for us in real life well this is where the clean slate comes in handy because in the same way that all the digital data that's accumulated about us on the Internet has all sorts of implications for our present impacting our ability to get a job to secure a bank loan to get a date and so on so much so that our digital identity can come to define us in all sorts of unhealthy ways so - with sin biblically sin is not just about the moral failings of the past that need forgiveness it is also about how these moral failings define us and have all sorts of implications for our present our ability to serve God our ability to commune with him our ability to take our place as one of his people we don't just need forgiveness we need a brand new spiritual identity and justification by faith is for our spiritual identities with the clean slate is to our digital identities on the cross Christ stands in our place as our fully human representative and through his own death he puts to death the entire sin record of our lives he cancelled the accusation that stood against us is how the Bible puts it nailing it to the cross through his own death he wipes the slate clean and then through his resurrection on the other side he offers us a brand new identity to live United with his resurrected life in a very real way putting our faith in Christ is like declaring reputational bankruptcy and so allowing God to justify us to wipe the record clean so that Christ's identity can now define us and like it says in one place having been justified like this through faith we now have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ