The Righteous Will Be Judged

Answering a question on Quora:

Why will the righteous be judged?

The short answer is that, whereas the unrighteous are judged for punishment, the righteous are judged for reward.

The long answer requires starting by defining “the righteous.” The righteous are not people who never sin.

Now we know that whatever the Law [the Ten Commandments and associated commands] says, it speaks to those who are under the Law [ancient Israelites], so that every mouth may be closed and call the world may become accountable to God; because by the works of the Law no flesh [no human] will be justified in His [God’s] sight; for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin. For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God… — Romans 3:19–20, 23

The purpose of passages such as the Ten Commandments is not to show us how we can earn heaven. It is to show us that we cannot earn heaven. It drives us to seek a different way to have positive relationship with God.

Rather, the righteous are people who let go of self-righteousness and instead trust that God paid their penalty through Jesus’s sacrifice and then proved it by raising Jesus from the dead. Scriptures use accounting language to say that God credits their penalty to Jesus and imputes their faith to their account for righteousness. They become, not perfect or sinless, but declared righteous.

Being declared righteous does not automatically make their thoughts and actions righteous; that takes growth over the rest of their lives. Becoming a Christian doesn’t make you perfect, it makes you a student.

Here’s an important distinction: Being declared righteous does not mean you can do whatever you want. There are many reasons for this. First, believers do what they believe, so if they really believe God, then they’ll start learning to do God’s will.

Second, God takes steps to help them grow more holy in what they do. So their belief will produce evidence, that is, good behaviors. Good behavior is not a cause of God’s gift of forgiveness, it is a result. Every false system will reverse that by making good works into requirements for receiving the gift. But when you try to earn a gift, you insult the Giver and miss out on getting the gift.

Third, God tests and chastises His children to instill good behaviors. In extreme cases, chastisement can even lead to taking a severely disobedient believer home to heaven. So it’s laughable to say that being secure in God’s love and not having to persevere in good works means you can get away with anything. A “believer” who does whatever he wants and gets away with it demonstrates that he is a counterfeit Christian.

The judgment of the righteous is different from the judgment of those who reject or fail to accept God’s gift (let’s call them “the lost”). When the lost are judged, their moral crimes determine their degree of punishment. Since we sin against infinite God, even a “small” sin earns a very serious punishment.

The righteous, on the other hand, are not judged for punishment because their sins were already punished. (Remember, they were transferred to Christ.) Instead, their works are judged for reward. Many of their “good” works will be disqualified because they were mixed with error, bad methods, or wrong motives. Those works that survive the test will be rewarded. 1 Corinthians 3:12-13

Copyright 2020, Richard Wheeler. Permission granted for non-remunerated use. Please give credit where credit is due.

Weak God? No, Weak Argument.

Answering a question on Quora:

"Why is the Christian God so weak? He punishes those that don’t worship him for eternity."

The question assumes that punishing people who don’t worship Him shows that God is weak. Not just weak, but so weak. That is not only a non factual and a non sequitur, but it is also counter intuitive.

Suppose a criminal stands before a judge, charged with a lifetime of minor and major offenses. The list of charges might fill several volumes with fine print. One of the charges is contempt of court. Sentence has been pronounced: The criminal will serve a life sentence in prison.

Then the criminal’s lawyer goes to Quora and asks, “Why is the judge so weak? He punishes prisoners for life for contempt of court.”

Can you see how ridiculous the question’s assumptions are? The criminal is not sentenced for just one offense, but for a lifetime of offenses. The lawyer simplistically boils the volumes of charges down to a single charge — the one that happens to be an offense against the court — in order to embarrass the court. The intellectual dishonesty of the argument crosses into propaganda when posted or published. And many people who hate the court will be inclined to believe the lie and turn it into a meme, undermining others’ confidence in the court.

Suppose the judge wants to provide an opportunity for redemption to that criminal. “He cannot bear the punishment,” he reasons, “but I could, so I will take the punishment for him.” He steps down from the bench, removes his robe, and surrenders himself to the warden of the prison. Inside the prison, he is stripped, tortured, and beaten to death.

Fortunately, EMTs resuscitate the judge. (He’s just a human, after all, not both God and human.)

Back at the courthouse, the bailiff tells the prisoner, “The judge has taken your punishment for you. He died but was brought back to life. If you will admit your guilt and trust the judge’s actions on your behalf, you may go free.”

A humble person would follow the bailiff’s advice and spend the rest of his life doing reforming his life out of gratitude.

But this prisoner refuses to admit his guilt. Or he refuses to accept that the judge suffered in his place and was brought back to life. “Yeah, right!” he says. “What a bunch of lies! What I did wasn’t that bad.”

The way of escaping the sentence was provided, and he refuses it — adding yet another offense, this time, an offense against himself.

Having the power to punish is not weakness, and having the character to enforce justice is not weakness. To the contrary, having the character to allow people to make their own choices in life rather than turning them into puppets shows strength. And taking the ultimate burden to rescue others from a fate that they cannot bear, knowing that most will refuse it? That shows unimaginable strength.

No, weakness is refusing to acknowledge one’s moral failings, refusing to set aside pride and false intellectual arrogance, refusing to accept that one is dependent on someone greater for redemption and guidance.

Refraining from accelerated sentencing of enemies who mock you, patiently waiting for them to become more reasonable and honest with themselves, shows quite a bit of strength, too, I think.

Copyright 2020, Richard Wheeler. In the case that posting this on Quora makes copyrighting unenforceable, I ask that users at least give credit where credit is due. I don't mind if somebody uses it for non-commercial use, anyway.

Separation from God, and Reconciliation

How was Adam separated from God?

God is perfectly holy, and His presence is sacred. Think about what it means for something to be sacred. It means that a thing is dedicated to holy purposes and not to be used for an unholy purpose.
We’ve seen Muslim extremists in Iran riot and kill after somebody allegedly defaced a Quran or drew an image of Muhammad. While we can judge the reaction as unacceptable, we can recognize that they respect the concept of sacredness in a way that people in the West no longer recognize.

We can see respect for sacredness in Roman Catholic churches. During communion, the priest allegedly turns the communion wine and wafer into Jesus’s blood and flesh. That makes the wine and wafer sacred to Catholics. To prevent defiling Jesus’s body by letting it fall to the floor, an assistant holds a plate at mid-chest level in front of the person receiving the wafer to catch Jesus in case his alleged flesh falls. This prevents defiling the sacred.

Through Adam and Eve’s disobedience to God, they did, as God had warned, die. It was not a physical death, although it made physical death inevitable. It was a spiritual death. Whereas physical death is separation of a person’s spirit from their soul, spiritual death is separation of a person’s spirit from God.

We inherit that condition from our ancestors. Although we are all born physically alive with functioning spirit and body, we are all born spiritually dead with spirit separated from God.
Separation from God means that fellowship with God is broken and needs to be restored. Sacred, holy God cannot just ignore sin. The Bible describes the situation several ways.

• Sin incurs a debt that we cannot pay. We owe obedience and all good deeds to God, so we cannot pay for sins with what we already owe. That would be like paying the bill from last month with what we saved up to pay for this month’s bill. That is why our good deeds could never cancel or outweigh our sins.
  
• The penalty for sin holds us for a ransom that we cannot pay. (Contrary to myth, Satan does not hold us hostage; God’s justice does.) The penalty is proportional to the importance of the one you offend. If I lie to my wife, I might have to sleep in the doghouse. If I lie to the government, I might go to prison. If I lie to infinite God, the consequences are infinite or everlasting.
  
• Sin defiles me, so if I stood before God without having been redeemed, then I would defile God’s presence, which God will not tolerate.
  
• Sin’s defilement changes my nature such that if I were thrust into God’s presence without having been redeemed and reconciled, I would try to flee from His presence.

This is why Jesus’s time on the cross is so crucial to us. When God created the universe, that included creating time and space. Having created time and space, God chose to experience time and space as three centers of consciousness or “Persons.” Each Person voluntarily took on a distinct role: Father, Son, or Holy Spirit.

The titles Son of Man and The Word: God the Son is called the Word because His role was to be the expression of God to human beings. When the time was right, the Son donned a human body and lived as the man, Jesus of Nazareth. As the Son of Man, Jesus experienced all the temptations and torments of life and death as our representative.

The title Son of God: Being God, Jesus lived a perfect life, never sinning. Thus, He had no sins to pay for. This kept Him free to become our substitute. Like a big brother taking the whoopin’ for his little brother and sister, Jesus took our place and bore sin’s penalty.

The title Savior: Whereas the penalty for sinning against infinite God would have destroyed us, Jesus could not be held by death. He rose from the dead, proving that He was divine, that God was satisfied with the payment, that God would restore us to spiritual life, and that God can one day raise everybody from the dead. Thus, God offers this gift of redemption to all who will receive it as a gift. Those who receive the gift as a gift receive forgiveness and spiritual life, but those who refuse the gift will be sent into separation from God’s presence, forever stuck in their guilt and anger.

You might have been bothered by an apparent redundancy, receive the gift as a gift. The point is important because all the world’s religions depend on achieving or earning something to receive redemption. Within “Christianity,” many denominations swerve off into the world’s religions by teaching that one must do something to earn the gift — which is self-contradictory.

If someone suggests that you have to take part in a ceremony or do good deeds or persevere in the faith to earn or retain grace, their teaching lies outside of explicit biblical teachings. It even lies outside the definition of “grace?”

To receive the gift, you need to do exactly two things:

• Understand in your heart your need for the gift,
• Trust God to endow you with the gift.
• Any more than that turns the gift into something you could never earn in a million lifetimes. And God will not stand for having His generosity insulted.

One of the characteristics of separation from God is a lack of His immediate presence and influence in one’s life. When one is redeemed and restored to relationship with God, God sends the Holy Spirit. Before Jesus’s resurrection, the Holy Spirit came “upon” people to achieve a specific purpose such as prophesying, giving strength and skill in battle, or leading a nation. Since the resurrection, the Holy Spirit has indwelt believers to begin transforming them into holier people, give them insight when reading the scriptures, empower them to serve God and each other, and intercede for them when they don’t know how to pray.

To summarize what “separation from God” means, it means that a person who has not received the gift of redemption as a free gift has none of the blessings of forgiveness or intimate relationship with God. Unless he receives the gift as a gift, he remains forever outside of relationship with God.


I first posted this as an answer to a question on Quora. If quoting, please give credit where credit is due.

How to Get Spotless Garments

From a question on Quora

What did the Bible mean when it said "Only those that their garment was without impurity will see Jesus"?

Our first challenge is to determine what passage in the Bible the question refers to. It has me stumped. It sounds like a paraphrase from memory of a sermon. The closest Bible wording would come from Hebrews 12:14, Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.

However, the quote states biblical principles using the Bible's symbolic language.

Clothes, in this sense, symbolize your history of thoughts and actions. Impurity symbolizes sin. For example, save others, snatching them out of the fire; and on some have mercy with fear, hating even the garment polluted by the flesh (Jude 1:23). The garment polluted by the flesh represents the lifestyle and trappings of a worldly, carnal lifestyle. For example, the “party animal” may seem “cool,” but charisma, popularity, and pleasure can be deadly moral traps.

Another form of polluted garment is the life of self-righteous hypocrites. "But they do all their deeds to be noticed by men; for they broaden their phylacteries and lengthen the tassels of their garments (Matthew 23:5). Phylacteries are small leather boxes containing Hebrew texts, worn by Jewish men. The tassels were white to symbolize purity, with a blue thread symbolizing heaven. Some wore over-sized tassels to draw attention, as though it made them holier than thou, like the priests who wear elegant robes or backwards collars. The point is that they dressed to impress other people when they went to synagogue rather than presenting themselves humbly before God.

Many miss the warning that God is so holy that nobody can defile His presence without being cleansed of their guilt. We think of the Beatitudes as rules for peace and beauty, but the passage includes this razor-edged gem: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God (Matthew 5:8)

People think the Ten Commandments were given so we could make ourselves holy. However, they are just the summary of 613 commandments in the Old Testament. Their most important purpose is to show us that none of us are pure in heart because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin (Romans 3:20).

Obeying the Ten Commandments is profitable, but it cannot make us righteous. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). For all of us have become like one who is unclean [ceremonially defiled or diseased], And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment; And all of us wither like a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, take us away (Isaiah 64:6). If we understand that, then we can understand that the Law has become our tutor unto Christ, so that we may be justified by faith (Galatians 3:24) instead of trying to be justified by deeds or heritage.

The Bible uses two metaphors for how we can have clean clothes, that is, be freed from our guilt.

The first metaphor is being washed in the blood of the Lamb. In Old Testament Israel, animals were sacrificed to temporarily cover sin. The sacrifice of an animal was a substitute for punishment of the sinner. The animals symbolized Messiah Jesus whose sacrifice would permanently remove guilt. He [God the Father] made Him [God the Son] who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him [Christ] (2 Corinthians 5:21). When we place our faith in Christ, God credits our punishment to Jesus’s death on the cross and credits Jesus’s righteousness to us.

You can find this language in the first epistle (letter) of the apostle John: if we walk in the Light as He Himself [Christ] is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:7). Another place is in Revelation: These are the ones who come out of the great tribulation, and they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 7:14).

Whereas the first metaphor focuses on sins being washed away, the second metaphor emphasizes the substitution. I advise you to buy from Me gold refined by fire so that you may become rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and that the shame of your nakedness will not be revealed… (Revelation 3:18).

The command to “buy” in a spiritual sense confuses many. They think the “price” is sacraments and good deeds, but the price of God’s grace is the opposite. It is free. Ho! Every one who thirsts, come to the waters; And you who have no money come, buy and eat. Come, buy wine and milk Without money and without cost (Isaiah 55:1). The price is our pride.

We must come to God in utter, desperate humility. Grace means “gift,” and a gift cannot be earned. To offer God our efforts, the efforts of others, or our heritage as a price of grace is to insult the Giver. Note that the symbolic purchase of gold makes you rich; but if you had something to buy it with, you would already have been rich. Pride is the reason it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man — or a religious man — to enter the kingdom of God (Luke 18:25). When you let go of pride and exchange your need for God’s grace, He makes you spiritually rich.

Also note that the transaction has to actually take place. We cannot simply agree with the exchange intellectually or desire it without understanding. The mind, heart, and soul must motivate an act of the will.

Summary

The quote is not from the Bible. It does summarize biblical principles using biblical symbolism. Clean garments represent the righteousness of God the Son. God credits this righteousness to those who let go of any merit of their own and trust in, and only in, Christ and the price He paid for our sins on the cross.



Since I already posted the bulk of this on Quora, I can't copyright it. But I trust that if you use it, you will give credit where Credit is due.

Christ's Ransom, Bribe, Substitution, or (Irrelevant)?

For over a thousand years, Christians believed that Christ’s sacrifice was a ransom paid to the devil. Much of Christian doctrine has been developed in response to new ideas. This idea did not become an issue, so nobody studied it in depth for a long time.

The word ransom does appear once in the New Testament (Mark 10:45), and Satan is said to be the god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4), but that’s not enough to support the theory. The theory was discredited by Anselm of Canterbury in the twelfth century. Anselm argued that instead, the sacrifice was a gift from God the Son to God the Father that restored God’s honor, which had been insulted by the Fall. In turn, God would simply forgive the sins of Jesus’ followers.

Anselm’s explanation fit the scriptural evidence better than the ransom-to-the-devil theory, but the Protestant Reformers, having been freed from Roman Catholic group-think, modeled scriptural evidence even better. They pointed out that Anselm’s theory created a violation of God’s Justice.

The current theory, held by most Christians, is that God could not simply forgive sins without violating one of His major attributes, Justice. Justice, not God’s ego, had to be satisfied. Therefore, God the Son, like a big brother, stepped in to bear our punishment (2 Corinthians 5:21). The gift of justification is sufficient for all and available to all, but only those who fully recognize their need for the gift and submit to God's free bestowal of His grace receive it. 

• (Tangents: 
• (Submit to God's free bestowal means accepting the gift as a free gift. This excludes thinking that we deserve the gift due to parentage, due to our own efforts such as good deeds (that are already owed to God) or participation in ceremonies, by the efforts of others (such as parents and priests baptizing us or saying prayers for us), or by our own perseverance.
• (Hyper Calvinism disagrees about the order of events in conversion. It claims that the gift is sufficient only for those God chose, and that people do not need to actively receive redemption because God takes the initiative in applying it to His chosen. Afterward, they submit because they have received redemption and enlightenment, not in order to receive it.)

Jesus was uniquely qualified to die on behalf of others.

• Being fully human, He could represent man.
• Being fully God, He could live a sinless life and had no sins of His own for which to be punished.
• Being infinite God, the value of His death was sufficient to pay for the sins of all humans.
• Being fully God, He could survive the punishment.

Unfortunately, we see a massive departure from basing theology on biblical evidence. Theologians who are more Marxist than Christian introduced the idea that Christ’s sacrifice was an example of love and not an act of redemption. Ideas like sin, guilt, sacrifice, and repentance offend their advanced, civilized sensibilities — not to mention their egos. 

That idea shows up in the teaching of many “New Evangelical” and mainline churches. They want to be "current" and "relevant," so they avoid offending people with messages about sin and Jesus's blood. The message focuses instead on how a relationship with God makes life better, safer, healthier, and especially, more prosperous. In this gospel, you don’t need God because your guilt would defile heaven and you could not bear to be in God's fiery presence; you need God because He wants to be your friend and provider.

Some call this recent message “sloppy agape,” wherein agape (ah-GAH-pee) is the Greek word for the highest level of love. In stead of obeying scripture's command to balance truth and judgment against love, they focus on love alone. Whereas the message of redemption portrays Christ's sacrifice as the elixir that cures sin's deadly disease, sloppy agape delivers a mere energy drink.

So we’ve gone from redemption being a ransom to the devil, to the sacrifice being a bribe to God, to a substitution for us in our punishment... and if we don’t correct the trend, to irrelevance.

Copyright 2019, Richard Wheeler. Permission granted for personal and non-compensated use, but please give credit where credit is due.