Blameless in the Law

[bbbbbbb]

God chose Israel for the purpose of being a light to the nations.


The primary goal was to drive them out of the land.


God did not tell anyone to commit murder.

God chose Israel for a number of reasons. Being a light to the nations is infrequently mentioned as being one of them, although it certainly is a reason.

The primary intent for Israel to live in Canaan was to inherit the land promised to Abraham, never minding the fact that it had been owned and inhabited by Gentiles for centuries until Moses was led by God to deliver Israel from Egypt to Canaan, which was a venture that ended up taking forty years to simply get to the border of Canaan. Joshua then led Israel into the land and began exterminating its inhabitants, except the Hivites who tricked him into making a covenant with Israel in which they were to be in perpetual slavery to Israel, which was probably better than getting slaughtered.

One can mince words and redefine genocide as not murder, but ethnic cleansing. In any event, God assuredly commanded the brave men of Israel to kill the Canaanites and other inhabitants of the land. In fact, David, that man after God's own heart, killed every living person in certain towns lest the word get back to his Canaanite commander that he (David) was actually killing folks other than his kinsmen.

The bottom line is that, as a Gentile who has no affiliation with the covenant between God and Israel, I am not inclined to engage in ethnic cleansing.

 

[ladodgers6]

Indeed, God knows that it is impossible for us to have perfect obedience to His law, which is why He never required us to have perfect obedience to it, but rather His law came with instructions for what to do when we sin. Even if someone managed to have perfect obedience to God's law, then they still would not earn their righteousness as a wage (Romans 4:1-5), so that was never the reason why we should obey it. So the reason why we do not earn our salvation as a wage by obeying God's law was never because we can't manage to have perfect obedience to it, but because it was never given as a means of earning our salvation.

Well Soyeong, you have another problem. You are familiar with the Pharisee and the Tax Collector?

The Pharisee and the Tax Collector​

9 He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: 10 “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ 13 But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ 14 I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

So, the Pharisee is doing works, fasting, give tithes, thanking God. But the other is not boasting about anything because he knows he is a wretched sinner before God. He's so ashamed that he cannot even look up to the heavens, feeling so guilty of his sin he beats his chest with disgust. And begs God to have mercy on him, a sinner!

Who went home justified?​

 

[Presbyterian Continuist]

Indeed, God knows that it is impossible for us to have perfect obedience to His law, which is why He never required us to have perfect obedience to it, but rather His law came with instructions for what to do when we sin. Even if someone managed to have perfect obedience to God's law, then they still would not earn their righteousness as a wage (Romans 4:1-5), so that was never the reason why we should obey it. So the reason why we do not earn our salvation as a wage by obeying God's law was never because we can't manage to have perfect obedience to it, but because it was never given as a means of earning our salvation.


Morality is in regard to what ought to be done and every legislator gives laws according to what they think ought to be done, though only God objectively knows what ought to be done, which is why all of the laws that God has given form the basis for morality. For someone to claim that some of God's laws are not moral laws is to claim that when God gave those laws that He made a moral error about what ought to be done when in reality those things ought not to be done, which would be claiming to have greater moral knowledge than God.

The Bible never lists which laws are ceremonial and never even refers to that as being a category of law. If a group of people were to create lists of which of God's laws were moral laws, then there would be a wide variety of lists and those people should not interpret the Bible as referring to a list of laws that they just created.


In Psalms 119:29-30, he wanted to put false ways far from him, for God to be gracious to him by teaching him to obey His law, and he chose the way of faithfulness by setting God's law before him, so this has always been the one and only way of salvation by grace through faith, which is indeed not lawless. In 1 Corinthians 11:31, it does not say anything close to saying that we should judge ourselves as being helpless sinners deserving of hell in order to avoid being judged.

The first step to salvation is acknowledging that we are helpless sinners deserving of hell. If we were anything different, then Jesus need not have had to die on the Cross to take our penalty for sin upon Himself. We don't deserve to be saved, and we are not doing God any favours by receiving Christ as Saviour. There is no merit or goodness in us that would make God want to save us. The Scripture says that all our own righteousness is as filthy rags before God. So there is nothing we can do to save ourselves except to put our trust in Christ crucified.

Subsequent to being saved, following God's moral law as shown in the Ten Commandments is a labour of love toward God. Jesus summed up the whole law by saying that we love God with all our heart, strength and mind, and love our neighbour as we love ourselves. This is what is involved in following the commandments of Christ. If we were able to love God perfectly, we would be able to keep the commandments perfectly, but we can't, therefore we are unable to love God perfectly. This means that we will always fall short of following the commands of Christ in order to make our righteousness superior to that of the Pharisees, who were absolute legalistic about following the law blamelessly.

Therefore, the Levitical Law, involving the Ten Commandments, and Jesus' sermon on the mount are there to show us how sinful we are, because the standard expected of us to have our own righteousness before God is higher than what we can achieve. Therefore if our salvation depended on our ability to follow the Law and the sermon on the mount perfectly, then we would be absolutely lost and would perish in hell.

But our salvation does not depend on our own righteousness. It depends on Jesus suffering and dying on the Cross to take the penalty for our sin and to bestow His own perfect righteousness on us. Therefore we are saved by God's grace through our faith in Christ alone without anything we can add to it.

But we seek to live a holy life because we love the Lord and want to serve Him the best we can, trusting in the indwelling Holy Spirit to lead us in the paths of righteousness. We do this because we are already saved by the grace of God. A person not saved by God's grace has absolutely no interest in living a holy life out of love to God.

 

[ladodgers6]

The first step to salvation is acknowledging that we are helpless sinners deserving of hell. If we were anything different, then Jesus need not have had to die on the Cross to take our penalty for sin upon Himself. We don't deserve to be saved, and we are not doing God any favours by receiving Christ as Saviour. There is no merit or goodness in us that would make God want to save us. The Scripture says that all our own righteousness is as filthy rags before God. So there is nothing we can do to save ourselves except to put our trust in Christ crucified.

Subsequent to being saved, following God's moral law as shown in the Ten Commandments is a labour of love toward God. Jesus summed up the whole law by saying that we love God with all our heart, strength and mind, and love our neighbour as we love ourselves. This is what is involved in following the commandments of Christ. If we were able to love God perfectly, we would be able to keep the commandments perfectly, but we can't, therefore we are unable to love God perfectly. This means that we will always fall short of following the commands of Christ in order to make our righteousness superior to that of the Pharisees, who were absolute legalistic about following the law blamelessly.

Therefore, the Levitical Law, involving the Ten Commandments, and Jesus' sermon on the mount are there to show us how sinful we are, because the standard expected of us to have our own righteousness before God is higher than what we can achieve. Therefore if our salvation depended on our ability to follow the Law and the sermon on the mount perfectly, then we would be absolutely lost and would perish in hell.

But our salvation does not depend on our own righteousness. It depends on Jesus suffering and dying on the Cross to take the penalty for our sin and to bestow His own perfect righteousness on us. Therefore we are saved by God's grace through our faith in Christ alone without anything we can add to it.

But we seek to live a holy life because we love the Lord and want to serve Him the best we can, trusting in the indwelling Holy Spirit to lead us in the paths of righteousness. We do this because we are already saved by the grace of God. A person not saved by God's grace has absolutely no interest in living a holy life out of love to God.

Amen, well said. Another passage that highlights this is in Romans where Paul is heart broken and praying for his countrymen.

Romans 10:1 Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. 2 For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. 3 For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. 4 For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.

Now that Christ has fulfilled the law, those who seek to obtain the inheritance by their own righteousness are actually being lawless, refusing to "submit to God's righteousness" (Rom. 10:3). And it is the Cain disbelief of God that they know more than God and believe they can produce a better offering. Instead of believing and trusting God who justifies the ungodly and gives freely the righteousness of Christ as a gift apart from works of the Law. ​

 

[Soyeong]

Well Soyeong, you have another problem. You are familiar with the Pharisee and the Tax Collector?

The Pharisee and the Tax Collector​

9 He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: 10 “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ 13 But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ 14 I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

So, the Pharisee is doing works, fasting, give tithes, thanking God. But the other is not boasting about anything because he knows he is a wretched sinner before God. He's so ashamed that he cannot even look up to the heavens, feeling so guilty of his sin he beats his chest with disgust. And begs God to have mercy on him, a sinner!

Who went home justified?​

How does that interact with what I said? And how is that problem for me in particular?

Jesus set a sinless example of how to walk in obedience to the Torah, so he was much, much more zealous for obedience to it than the other Pharisees were, and while he criticized some of them for not obeying it or for not obeying it correctly, he never criticized them for doing what God commanded them to do. For example, in Mark 7:6-9, Jesus said that they were hypocrites for setting aside the commands of God in order to establish their own traditions. In Matthew 23:23, Jesus said that tithing was something that they ought to be doing while not neglecting weightier matters of the Torah of justice, mercy, and faith, so he was not opposing their obedience to the Torah, but rather he was calling them to a fuller obedience to it in a manner that is in accordance with its weightier matters.

 

[Soyeong]

The first step to salvation is acknowledging that we are helpless sinners deserving of hell. If we were anything different, then Jesus need not have had to die on the Cross to take our penalty for sin upon Himself. We don't deserve to be saved, and we are not doing God any favours by receiving Christ as Saviour. There is no merit or goodness in us that would make God want to save us. The Scripture says that all our own righteousness is as filthy rags before God. So there is nothing we can do to save ourselves except to put our trust in Christ crucified.

All throughout the Bible, God wanted Hi people to repent and to return to obedience to His law, so He does not then turn around and hold those who do that in contempt by viewing our righteousness as being filthy rags, but rather the righteous deeds of the saints are like fine white linen (Revelation 19:8).

Our salvation is from sin (Matthew 1:21) and sin is the transgression of God's law (1 John 3:4), so having the experience of living in obedience to it through faith in Jesus is intrinsically the content of his gift of saving us from having the experience of not living in obedience to it. In Titus 2:11-14, our salvation is described as being trained by grace to do what is godly, righteous, and good, and to renounce doing what is ungodly, so we do not earn our salvation as the result of having done those works and we do not do those works as the result of having already been saved, but rather God graciously teaching us to experience those works is itself the content of His gift of saving us from not experiencing those works. Furthermore, in Titus 2:14, Jesus gave himself to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people of his own possession who are zealous for doing good works, so becoming zealous for doing good works in obedience to God's law is the way to put our trust in Christ crucified, which has nothing to do with trying to save ourselves.

Subsequent to being saved, following God's moral law as shown in the Ten Commandments is a labour of love toward God. Jesus summed up the whole law by saying that we love God with all our heart, strength and mind, and love our neighbour as we love ourselves. This is what is involved in following the commandments of Christ. If we were able to love God perfectly, we would be able to keep the commandments perfectly, but we can't, therefore we are unable to love God perfectly. This means that we will always fall short of following the commands of Christ in order to make our righteousness superior to that of the Pharisees, who were absolute legalistic about following the law blamelessly.

Nowhere does the Bible refer to the Ten Commandments as being the moral law, nor does it state that it is moral to disobey everything but the Ten Commandments, nor does it lists which laws are the moral law, nor does it even refer to that as being a subcategory of law. Rather, morality is in regard to what we ought to do and we ought to obey God, so all of God's laws are inherently moral laws. Furthermore all of God's laws are a labor of love toward God, which is why Jesus summed up the whole law as being about how to love God and our neighbor. In Deuteronomy 6:4-7, the way to obey the greatest commandment is by having the Torah on our hearts and by speaking about and teaching it throughout the day.

There is no special significance to us having perfect obedience and if someone does not manage to have perfect obedience, then they can repent and return to obedience through faith. In Matthew 23:23, Jesus said that tithing was something that they ought to be doing while not neglecting weightier matters of the law of justice, mercy, and faith, so the problem was that they were neglecting to express aspects of God's nature that God's law was given as a gift to teach us how to express.

Therefore, the Levitical Law, involving the Ten Commandments, and Jesus' sermon on the mount are there to show us how sinful we are, because the standard expected of us to have our own righteousness before God is higher than what we can achieve. Therefore if our salvation depended on our ability to follow the Law and the sermon on the mount perfectly, then we would be absolutely lost and would perish in hell.

God's law was given as a gift to teach us how to testify about His holiness, righteousness, goodness, and other aspects of His nature, but only reveals our sin by contrast, which is the way to know God, and which is the goal of the law (Romans 10:2-4). Even if someone managed to follow God's perfectly, then they still would not earn their salvation as a wage, so that was never the goal of the law.

But our salvation does not depend on our own righteousness. It depends on Jesus suffering and dying on the Cross to take the penalty for our sin and to bestow His own perfect righteousness on us. Therefore we are saved by God's grace through our faith in Christ alone without anything we can add to it.

God's law was never given as a means of establishing our own righteousness, but as a means of teaching us how to testify about God's righteousness. Our good works don't establish our goodness, but rather they testify about God's goodness, which is why they bring glory to Him (Matthew 5:13-16). Jesus expressed his righteousness by loving in obedience to God's law, so that is the way that we also live when we have been bestowed with his righteousness.

Again, according to Psalms 119:29-30, obedience to God's law is the one and only way to be saved by grace through faith. In Romans 3:21-22, it does not say that the Law and the Prophets testify that the righteousness of God comes through perfect obedience, but rather the one and only way to become righteous that is testified about in the Law and the Prophets is through faith in Jesus.

 

[Soyeong]

God chose Israel for a number of reasons. Being a light to the nations is infrequently mentioned as being one of them, although it certainly is a reason.

The main point of God choosing Israel is to be a light to the nations because that's what the promise and the Gospel are all about. But you would rather reject the light because it was given as a gift to them to teach you rather than being directly given to you.

The primary intent for Israel to live in Canaan was to inherit the land promised to Abraham, never minding the fact that it had been owned and inhabited by Gentiles for centuries until Moses was led by God to deliver Israel from Egypt to Canaan, which was a venture that ended up taking forty years to simply get to the border of Canaan. Joshua then led Israel into the land and began exterminating its inhabitants, except the Hivites who tricked him into making a covenant with Israel in which they were to be in perpetual slavery to Israel, which was probably better than getting slaughtered.

One can mince words and redefine genocide as not murder, but ethnic cleansing. In any event, God assuredly commanded the brave men of Israel to kill the Canaanites and other inhabitants of the land. In fact, David, that man after God's own heart, killed every living person in certain towns lest the word get back to his Canaanite commander that he (David) was actually killing folks other than his kinsmen.

Again, it is repeatedly stated that the goal was to drive our the inhabitants of the land, not to exterminate them. God is did not command anyone to commit genocide, murder, or ethnic cleansing, but rather God is righteous and just.

The bottom line is that, as a Gentile who has no affiliation with the covenant between God and Israel, I am not inclined to engage in ethnic cleansing.

The God is Israel has given instructions to teach how to have a relationship with Him, so if you want to have a relationship with the God of Israel, then you can choose to follow those instructions or you can choose not to have a relationship with Him, but I would recommend having a relationship with Him.

 

[bbbbbbb]

The main point of God choosing Israel is to be a light to the nations because that's what the promise and the Gospel are all about. But you would rather reject the light because it was given as a gift to them to teach you rather than being directly given to you.


Again, it is repeatedly stated that the goal was to drive our the inhabitants of the land, not to exterminate them. God is did not command anyone to commit genocide, murder, or ethnic cleansing, but rather God is righteous and just.


The God is Israel has given instructions to teach how to have a relationship with Him, so if you want to have a relationship with the God of Israel, then you can choose to follow those instructions or you can choose not to have a relationship with Him, but I would recommend having a relationship with Him.

You raise the curious conundrum which confronted the Apostles and which resulted in the first council in Jerusalem as described in Acts 15. The conundrum, which still persists within Judaism, is whatever happened to God. God, as an active agent within Judaism proper pretty much disappeared from the scene sometime around the Maccabean period. One could be somewhat more conservative and postulate that God gave up on Israel completed by the time of the Babylonian captivity and everything after that has simply been Jewish efforts to maintain their religious and ethnic identity. With the destruction of the Temple in A. D. 70 the sacrificial system came to a complete end, leaving Jewish theology in the lurch. Thus, we have various rabbinic schools of thought regarding how sinful Jews can have shalom with an angry and distant God.

Enter Jesus Christ and Christianity. The New Testament has a very significant goal of establishing that Jesus is, in fact, Messiah, even though He did not arrive with great power and wrath to consume His enemies and re-establish the Davidic kingdom as an eternal theocracy. To establish the validity of Jesus as the Christ, the writers of the New Testament went to great lengths to mine the Old Testament for prophecies which were literally fulfilled by Jesus and, as a result, presented an extremely convincing case. In fact, the case was so convincing that not only did large number of Jews become believers, but also very large numbers of Gentiles.

Therein lay the seeds of the conundrum - how does a Gentile believer become a member of a Jewish Messianic sect? Traditionally, of course, the Gentile would undergo ritual purification (baptism) and for men, circumcision, in addition to submitting to all of the commandments given by God in the Old Testament. It would have been really quite simple for the Apostles to have taken that route, except for the fact that Christians were excluded from the Temple by the Sanhedrin such that it was not only problematic for Jewish believers to fulfill their duties under the law such as tithing and thank offerings, but impossible for Gentile believers to do so.

The result was the New Covenant. The Old Testament clearly mentions a new covenant that God would make with His people, Israel, but it makes no mention of an inclusiveness of Gentiles in that covenant. Thus, the New Covenant in the New Testament (a play on words here) varies markedly from that prophesied by Ezekiel. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews spells out the differences quite explicitly.

The bottom line is that Gentiles under the New Covenant have no obligations to obey the commandments God gave to His people, Israel, under the Old Covenant.

 

[Presbyterian Continuist]

All throughout the Bible, God wanted Hi people to repent and to return to obedience to His law, so He does not then turn around and hold those who do that in contempt by viewing our righteousness as being filthy rags, but rather the righteous deeds of the saints are like fine white linen (Revelation 19:8).

Our salvation is from sin (Matthew 1:21) and sin is the transgression of God's law (1 John 3:4), so having the experience of living in obedience to it through faith in Jesus is intrinsically the content of his gift of saving us from having the experience of not living in obedience to it. In Titus 2:11-14, our salvation is described as being trained by grace to do what is godly, righteous, and good, and to renounce doing what is ungodly, so we do not earn our salvation as the result of having done those works and we do not do those works as the result of having already been saved, but rather God graciously teaching us to experience those works is itself the content of His gift of saving us from not experiencing those works. Furthermore, in Titus 2:14, Jesus gave himself to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people of his own possession who are zealous for doing good works, so becoming zealous for doing good works in obedience to God's law is the way to put our trust in Christ crucified, which has nothing to do with trying to save ourselves.


Nowhere does the Bible refer to the Ten Commandments as being the moral law, nor does it state that it is moral to disobey everything but the Ten Commandments, nor does it lists which laws are the moral law, nor does it even refer to that as being a subcategory of law. Rather, morality is in regard to what we ought to do and we ought to obey God, so all of God's laws are inherently moral laws. Furthermore all of God's laws are a labor of love toward God, which is why Jesus summed up the whole law as being about how to love God and our neighbor. In Deuteronomy 6:4-7, the way to obey the greatest commandment is by having the Torah on our hearts and by speaking about and teaching it throughout the day.

There is no special significance to us having perfect obedience and if someone does not manage to have perfect obedience, then they can repent and return to obedience through faith. In Matthew 23:23, Jesus said that tithing was something that they ought to be doing while not neglecting weightier matters of the law of justice, mercy, and faith, so the problem was that they were neglecting to express aspects of God's nature that God's law was given as a gift to teach us how to express.


God's law was given as a gift to teach us how to testify about His holiness, righteousness, goodness, and other aspects of His nature, but only reveals our sin by contrast, which is the way to know God, and which is the goal of the law (Romans 10:2-4). Even if someone managed to follow God's perfectly, then they still would not earn their salvation as a wage, so that was never the goal of the law.


God's law was never given as a means of establishing our own righteousness, but as a means of teaching us how to testify about God's righteousness. Our good works don't establish our goodness, but rather they testify about God's goodness, which is why they bring glory to Him (Matthew 5:13-16). Jesus expressed his righteousness by loving in obedience to God's law, so that is the way that we also live when we have been bestowed with his righteousness.

Again, according to Psalms 119:29-30, obedience to God's law is the one and only way to be saved by grace through faith. In Romans 3:21-22, it does not say that the Law and the Prophets testify that the righteousness of God comes through perfect obedience, but rather the one and only way to become righteous that is testified about in the Law and the Prophets is through faith in Jesus.

It seems that you hold to salvation by faith and works.

 

[NBB]

There is a lot of in between but, you are saved by faith to have communion with His Spirit, also, you don't get to enter heaven if you live in sin.

 

[Soyeong]

It seems that you hold to salvation by faith and works.

I don't like that phrase because it can be easy to mistake it as saying that works play a role in producing our salvation or as saying that we need to add our works on top of our faith as though faith by itself were insufficient. Rather, the way to have faith is by our works, such as in Hebrews 11, where every example of faith is an example of works. In Titus 2:14, our salvation is described as being trained by grace to do works, so we don't need to do works in order to produce our salvation, but rather the experience of doing works is itself the content of God's gift of saving us from not having that experience. For example having the experience of obeying honoring our parents through faith is the way that we are being saved from having the experience of not honoring our parents. In Proverbs 3:5-7, we have a choice between leaning on our own understanding of right and wrong by doing what is right in our own eyes or trusting God with all of our heart to correctly divide between right and wrong through obeying what He has instructed, and He will make our paths straight, and that is what it means to have saving faith.

 

[Presbyterian Continuist]

There is a lot of in between but, you are saved by faith to have communion with His Spirit, also, you don't get to enter heaven if you live in sin.

A person who is genuinely converted to Christ doesn't live in sin. He is alive in the Spirit and therefore walks in the light with Christ. If a person professes Christianity and lives according to the works of the flesh as defined in Galatians 5, then his profession is false, and Christ does not know him.

 

[bbbbbbb]

There is a lot of in between but, you are saved by faith to have communion with His Spirit, also, you don't get to enter heaven if you live in sin.

How much sin does it take for a sheep to revert to a goat?

 

[ladodgers6]

How does that interact with what I said? And how is that problem for me in particular?

Jesus set a sinless example of how to walk in obedience to the Torah, so he was much, much more zealous for obedience to it than the other Pharisees were, and while he criticized some of them for not obeying it or for not obeying it correctly, he never criticized them for doing what God commanded them to do. For example, in Mark 7:6-9, Jesus said that they were hypocrites for setting aside the commands of God in order to establish their own traditions. In Matthew 23:23, Jesus said that tithing was something that they ought to be doing while not neglecting weightier matters of the Torah of justice, mercy, and faith, so he was not opposing their obedience to the Torah, but rather he was calling them to a fuller obedience to it in a manner that is in accordance with its weightier matters.

Well, you have two people here. One that highlights his "works"; fasting, tithing, praying. He thinks he's holy and is not like the others filth of sinners; extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even this tax collector. He believes and trusts in his works that he can justified through them. That he is better and holy over the others. He doesn't think Grace is needed in his case, because he's not like them.

But the Tax Collector knows that he's a wretched sinners and stands before a Holy God deserving only righteous judgment against him. He knows the consequences of his sins. So, in shame beating his chest not able to look up the heaven and look God in the eyes because of his disgust of himself begs God for Mercy proclaiming his sinfulness before Almighty God. And goes home justified and not the other one. This sinner relied on God's sheer Grace and Mercy for this is the only place for a sinner.​

 

[Presbyterian Continuist]

How much sin does it take for a sheep to revert to a goat?

It's a non issue for anyone who is genuinely converted to Christ.

 

[Soyeong]

Well, you have two people here. One that highlights his "works"; fasting, tithing, praying. He thinks he's holy and is not like the others filth of sinners; extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even this tax collector. He believes and trusts in his works that he can justified through them. That he is better and holy over the others. He doesn't think Grace is needed in his case, because he's not like them.

But the Tax Collector knows that he's a wretched sinners and stands before a Holy God deserving only righteous judgment against him. He knows the consequences of his sins. So, in shame beating his chest not able to look up the heaven and look God in the eyes because of his disgust of himself begs God for Mercy proclaiming his sinfulness before Almighty God. And goes home justified and not the other one. This sinner relied on God's sheer Grace and Mercy for this is the only place for a sinner.​

The difference is between pride and humility. In Psalms 119:29, he wanted God to be gracious to him by teaching him to obey law, and in Matthew 23:23, Jesus said that mercy is one of the weightier matters of the law, so being a doer of the law is the way rely on God's sheer grace and mercy. It is contradictory to think that we should rely on God, but not rely on what He has instructed.

 

[bbbbbbb]

It's a non issue for anyone who is genuinely converted to Christ.

Absolutely.

 

[NBB]

How much sin does it take for a sheep to revert to a goat?

Its like the bible says, 'don't be fooled' neither who do this and that will enter the kingdom of God. The list may be longer than just what it says there obviously i think. I don't know if its possible that someone who is born again can do this and get lost maybe not idk, but there are clear warnings in place....

 

[bbbbbbb]

Its like the bible says, 'don't be fooled' neither who do this and that will enter the kingdom of God. The list may be longer than just what it says there obviously i think. I don't know if its possible that someone who is born again can do this and get lost maybe not idk, but there are clear warnings in place....

To put it another way, does a sheep ever even consider the possibility of becoming a goat?

 

[NBB]

To put it another way, does a sheep ever even consider the possibility of becoming a goat?

idk. Supposedly 'neither life can separates us from God' also 'i will give them eternal life' and 'none will perish', but on the other hand you have scriptures like galatians with falling away things, if you fell is because you were standing before right??? i don't understand very well that scripture.