Because the NT does, and it's important. It's the difference between profession of saving faith and actual possession of saving faith. Profession is not necessarily possession.
That isn’t “false faith” to me, it’s “not faith.” It seems like a corruption of the word faith to include both faith and lack of faith by adding qualifiers like true or false but that might just be semantics.
False faith is a profession of faith where in reality there is no new birth. True faith is not the result of good works, nor are good works the substance of faith, good works are only the evidence of faith. True faith is the result of only one thing, the new birth.
I would say that good works are the
fruit of faith because they are what blossoms and is brought forth by the streams of living waters flowing from our hearts. And the fig tree that did not bear fruit at the right time was cursed.
However, "faithlessness" usually refers to failure in commitment, e.g., in marriage, and that makes works the substance of faith, where the substance of faith is belief and trust, the object of faith is the person and work of Jesus Christ for forgiveness of one's sin and reconciliation with God, the practice of faith is obedience, and the evidence of faith is good works. But keeping in mind that not all evidence in court is always true. It's the jury's job to sort out the true from the false.
The marriage is the exact way the Lord described it. We (collectively, as believers) are the Bride of Christ and His body like Eve was the body of Adam. That’s a divine mystery and it’s beautiful. So maybe it’s good to think in terms of “infidelity” as a question of whether what we do betrays the Lord.
Activity neither makes nor proves saving faith, it is only evidence. Now, without that evidence, we know the faith is not saving faith. But there is also false evidence. The difference between them is one is born again, and the evidence of works is true evidence, and the other is not born again, and the evidence of works is false evidence, it is not of the Holy Spirit, it is simply human effort to earn God's favor.
I can’t really imagine a human trying to earn God’s favour if he didn’t want God’s favour in the first place. As a convert, that’s only something I wanted after I converted. But everyone has their own experience.
Under the old covenant, failure to feed your hungry neighbor would not get you in hell. . .that's what the sacrifices were for, to pay for your sin. . .
The Levitical sacrificial system put into place animal sacrifice as atonement for unintentional sin on a regular basis. Yom Kippur, which I believe you might be referring to, was also a day to afflict oneself in repentance. Without repentance, it wouldn’t have done much of anything at all.
What got the rich man in hell was the same thing that would get all six of them in his father's house in hell, failure to believe the testimony of Moses and the Prophets regarding Jesus as the Messiah and Savior. (Six is one short of seven, not a good thing, of an unclean spirit.)
The only way you can explain this is by saying that “Lazarus” is actually symbolic language to mean “Jesus” and presumably that letting the poor in Israel starve is completely irrelevant to anything at all.
It must be, because you are vested in defending it not being about unbelief in Jesus as Messiah and Savior, of which the religious leaders were guilty.
Perhaps because one's reference points are more about good works being our salvation rather than faith, repentance and forgiveness being our salvation.
No, it’s because I think your interpretation is incorrect. I specifically said that I don’t believe works save, and compared faith and works to oxygen and carbon dioxide, so it’s manipulative and misleading to say that “perhaps” my reference points are the polar opposite of what I said. Please don’t do that again. If you disagree with something I say, say it. Playing at trying to “perhaps” your way into imputing to me things I never said is not acceptable in rational discourse and shows you can’t actually dispute what I said, only the straw man that “perhaps” might be your real point of contention.
There is nothing abstract about failure to believe in Jesus Christ. There is absolutely nothing more important in one's life.
Agreed. I don’t dispute the necessity of accepting our Messiah, only your interpretation of the story at hand.
Well first of all, parables are not literal, they are metaphor. Interpreting them literally misses the point every time, which Jesus said is why he spoke in parables in the presence of his enemies--the religious leaders, so they wouldn't understand them and make a case against his teaching.
In this case he was saying that they themselves wouldn’t believe even if someone came from the dead and I don’t know how you can’t see that even this was like one last chance, if they didn’t believe in eternal judgement or life after death (as the Sadducees did not) he would even show them that miracle by raising a man named Lazarus from the dead. And the priests (who were from my understanding mostly Sadducees) literally still did not believe and wanted to put Lazarus to death.
So, the metaphor used by the parable is addressing a much larger and more serious issue than omission of good works, where the sacrifices were the remedy for those failures. Jesus' parabolic teaching is addressing unbelief in him as Messiah and Savior, which unbelief condemns to hell, because there is no sacrifice for unbelief.
But still don’t look over what it actually says and what the Lord actually did!
