Soyeong
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- Mar 10, 2015
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Would you consider the following statement true or false:
"That whatever God commands implies the ability of the one who receives the command to obey it.
God is not an unloving Father or some sort of tyrant who gave the Law in order to curse His children for failing to meet and impossible standard, but rather He said that the Law was given for our own good in order to bless us (Deuteronomy 6:24, 10:12-13). In Deuteronomy 30:11-20, God said that His Law is not too difficult for us to obey and that the one who obeys it will obtain life and blessing while disobedience brings death and a curse, so choose life! So it is presented both as a choice and as a possibility, and if it were impossible for us to obey, then I do not see how we could be held responsible failing to obey it, so yes, God giving a command to us implies the ability to obey it. In Deuteronomy 11:26-32, the distinction between being under God's blessing or His curse was in regard to whether we choose to serve God or to chase after other gods, which is a choice that we can all make.
If we needed to have perfect obedience, then there would be no point in repentance because it would already be too late to have that, so the fact that repentance has value means that obedience that is less than perfect has value. The consistent message of the prophets up to and including Jesus was to repent from our sins and turn back to obedience to God's Law, so the need to continue to practice repentance when we sin has always been the key division between whether we are choosing to continue to serve God or to chase after other gods. While everyone in the OT sinned and fell short of perfect obedience, it is not the case that everyone in the OT was under God's curse, but just those that chased after other gods.
Man should not have to ask for grace in order to be obedient."
In Matthew 23:23, Jesus said that faith is one of the weightier matters of the Law, so obedience to God's instructions has always been about depending on Him to guide us in how to rightly live, and has never been about how much we can accomplish through our own efforts apart from God. When we have a character trait, then we will express it through our actions, so when God imputes His righteousness to us and declares us to be righteous, He is also declaring us to be someone who therefore expresses His righteousness through our actions in obedience to His instructions for how to do that found in His Law. In other words, the reason why we have received the righteousness of God is not in order to hide it under a bushel, but in order to let it shine through our actions. We have been given the righteousness of God, so we have the ability to do what is righteous in obedience to God's Law.
In Psalm 119:29, David wanted God to be gracious to him by teaching him to obey His Law and in Titus 2:11-14, our salvation is describe as being trained by grace to obey God, so that is how God shows His grace to us, and we are declared righteous when we obey through faith. In other words, God is gracious to us by teaching us to obey His Law and by the same grace we are able to obey His Law through faith. The statement that man should not have to ask for grace in order to be obedient is misguided because we would not have been given laws to be obedient to apart from God's grace.
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