Roymond

Remember first that what we translate as "Law" is better translated as "instruction". "Law" has the connotation of being unchanging while "instruction" suggests that once a certain lesson is learned there will be progression. We know this is what the Torah was for because that's what the prophets do with it, pointing out over and over that the people were supposed to have learned mercy and compassion and faithfulness but failed to do so. So "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" is a change from earlier law which let someone put out both eyes of the guy who ruined one of theirs, and knock out a whole row of teeth in punishment for just one: it was a limitation that said, "Don't be cruel; a punishment must not be worse than the crime". And there are hints of a better way still, that an injury can be compensated for in goods or money, so people don't go around harming others just because they got harmed. Another aspect here is that the statement is guidance for judges: they weren't to go beyond that limit, but they were also to enforce that limit as deterrence against people beating others up. But again in the background is the hint at a more merciful way -- and "be more merciful" was the real lesson all along.

I haven't read all the present answers (made it to page 5, then just skimmed) but there's an idea that hasn't been mentioned that comes, amazingly enough, from a few centuries back, and starts with the assertion that we are confusing time and eternity when we discuss this topic. Imagine people on a train. they've been moving along the track, some ahead and some behind depending on which cars they're in. In terms of being on the train, there is a definite order to their presence, such that when the conductor comes to collect tickets he starts with the first and moves to the last. But when they come into the station and get off, they are no longer moving along the track, and no longer in that linear order from inside the train; instead they all step off at an angle to that path, leaving the train and all standing on the platform. Before, they'd all been in different places on their journey, but now they are all on the same place. Now consider time as a line, with everyone loving along it in the same direction (yes, this is the first place eternity intrudes; we're thinking of the whole line of time as existing at once), from the distant past on into the future. Time is thus somewhat like the train, everyone moving in the same direction but in a definite order that separates people by years and lifetimes and centuries. When someone dies, it's like getting to the station and stepping onto the platform -- and from the view from outside the line, from outside of time, everyone steps off at once (there's the second place where eternity intrudes; from the eternal perspective, everyone dies at the same time because dying means leaving the line and stepping onto the "platform"). Thus when Ebernicus dies in 53 A.D. and Havram dies in 286 and Pepin dies in 638 and James dies in 1104, and all the rest of us who die whenever it may be, we all realize that we have all just stepped off the timeline at what would now be for us the same moment. In this view there is no soul sleep, no waiting around for centuries to go by, there's just one moment in which we all step out of life and into... well, the Hebrew calls it "Sheol", place of the dead. We all go from life into the shadows. This solves the issue with the declaration that a person dies once and then there's the judgment: it's a literal "and then the judgment" because all step off the line of life and onto the platform of Sheol at the same moment. But it doesn't end there: the speculative and somewhat mystic theologian who came up with this view took note of the verse that says that Jesus went and preached to the "spirits in prison". This has traditionally been taken to mean all the people who had already died and were hanging around waiting, but taking the above as our foundation it turns out that the spirits to whom Jesus preached are those of every human who ever lived -- past right on into the future! It is the Light coming into the place of shadows, and those who love the Light are drawn to Him and the rest cringe away. Then that becomes the moment when the lovers of the Light join Him and pop into the skies above Earth to confront the only ones who weren't on the "platform", the ones who are still alive when the calendar runs out. So all deaths drop us into Sheol at the same moment, Jesus preaches to all of us, those who are His because they love the Light are joined to Him while the rest remain in darkness, and God the Father announces, "Party over!" and Jesus comes in the vast clouds of witnesses. . addendum: you know the "thousand years are like a day" idea? in this understanding that would be obviously true because God isn't on the timeline in the first place! sure, God the Son joined us on that line, but He stepped back off and into eternity. so not only are a thousand years like a day, a million years are like an hour and a billion years are like a minute, because from the perspective of eternity they're all just bits on the line..

Are you aware that the article you linked says there was and is no such gate? It's just tourist-bait to make tourists think they've seen something special. Something "going through the eye of a needle" was a rabbinic trope; going by memory there was "a cable through the eye of a needle", used to describe arguing a point with a weak argument; "a book through the eye of a needle", an obvious take-off of the cable image, referring to claims to understand someone's writings and meaning the claimant doesn't have a clue; and a famous "elephant through the eye of a needle" referring to how hard it was to get a certain rabbi to stop talking and let someone else speak. So Jesus' audiences were familiar with the "eye of the needle" illustration, and there's good reason to think that He's making a dual word-play, since the word for "cable" and "camel" sound almost identical and the idea of an animal going through the eye of a needle involved an elephant, so it could be a side comment on the obtuseness of some of the scribes and others always hanging around the edges of His audience trying to catch Him in something.

In the beginning we were made in the image of God. That image got kind of trashed when Adam decide to eat the fruit. Since human nature is based on the image of God, that made human nature broken, unable to rise above sin. And so human down through history have sinned, including all of us. But sinning isn't the issue, it's a symptom. Think of human nature as infected with a disease called "sin" -- sins are the symptoms of being stuck in the realm of sin. The problem was that human nature was broken, infected. The solution to being broken is repair, and the solution to infection is cure. So God set Himself the task of curing us and mending our brokenness. How to do that? Well, first He needed a copy of human nature that wasn't broken, that didn't have the disease. But every human in existence was broken, was infected, so there was only one way to go about this: make a new human! We have to be careful at this point because this is where some ancient heretics jumped in; they claimed that in order to be a human free of the flaw, free of sin, God had to make a totally new human out of nothing. There was one trouble with that, though, and God saw it as clearly as those poor heretics didn't: if He just made anew human from nothing, that wouldn't fix the human nature that was broken because it would be a totally new human nature. What God needed was a new human being who was born of the broken human nature yet not broken, born with the infection but not diseased. There was an obvious way to do that: since sin cannot survive in the presence of God, then God would have to be one of the parents for this new human -- and in order for this new human to make the repairs and achieve the cure this new human had to be born from a human stuck on the broken, infected human nature. Since God is Father, that meant a human mother. So something like 2,022 years ago God's chief messenger angel, Gabriel, got a special mission: he would carry the living Word of God and would speak it to a young virgin, and just as when God said, "Let there be light!:, light was, when Gabriel announced, "Listen, Mary: You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will call His name 'Jesus'. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High", then she conceived: as a wise Lutheran priest I once worked with put it, "The one woman in history to get pregnant through her ear". That's where the cure started! Jesus' task wasn't to mark time for thirty years as a contractor like His stepdad, and then to wander around gathering a dozen disciples and teaching them, waiting for the years to go by until He could get crucified; no, His task began the moment He was a cell in a womb. How did the cure start? In several ways: First in order was that His mother's womb became the first sin-free womb in history (indeed some in the early church asserted that it wasn't just her womb, but Mary's soul, that was made free from at least outward sin). Mary became what Eve had been meant to be, mother of a pure image of God, fully repaired, fully cured. Second was that by becoming human, Jesus got slapped with all the issues that plague humanity, yet without compromising the pure human nature He was born with. All that stuff that we suffer from because of the disease called sin was right there as it is with every human child, a disease of the soul that passes down the generations, all of it tried to latch onto Him, and not just latch on but get right down inside and make things foul. And it latched on, all right, but it didn't get any farther than the surface, just outside His body and soul and spirit. Right there the inheritance of sin hit an eternal barrier: no longer were humans automatically its victims. And as Jesus lived His life all that corruption clinging to Him sought a way in, and it didn't just fail -- something that had never happened! -- it learned the meaning of failure. Our first human parents failed and gave birth to this corruption that makes us all fail, but the new human being called Jesus threw failure back on failure, and failure failed. The great Foe knew this, of course; he didn't miss the tremor that ran through Creation when God the Son became flesh. He knew that this would somehow bring about the end of his natural dominance of these poor creatures that God meant to set higher than him! And so He watched, and waited. As long as Jesus remained in his mother's house with his stepfather, Satan knew there was no way to get to Him, but then came the day when this Jesus put down the tools of carpenter and builder and set off on His path. That's when Satan pounced, knowing that Jesus the man would be dreading taking on this path, and thinking to tease Him off the path and thereby ruin everything for God. And right there the healing of human nature took a huge leap; in the flesh, a human had faced not just temptation but the Tempter himself, and had come away clean. So Why did God have to sacrifice Jesus at the hands of the Roman in order to allow believers to enter heaven? Because the healing of human nature wasn't complete. In Jesus, our nature had stood against every bit of corruption and temptation and even against the Tempter, and they were defeated, but that was not enough to complete the cure: there were still enemies left, and their names were condemnation, death, and corruption. To defeat condemnation, Jesus had to undergo the worst punishment humans had invented, condemned to die as not just a criminal but as a rebel, and He had to survive that condemnation and punishment and by surviving defeat them. The path to defeat death and corruption was the same: the one whose human nature was not subject to death had to meet death and die, breaking the power of death forever, and then have the corruption that comes with death join all the corruption that had stuck to Him in His life, plus all the corruption of all of the sin of us all, and try to beat Him. Well, it didn't work. Death grabbed Jesus, but the Savior slipped away; corruption lunged for Him, but His body was already re-energized, energy from above and energy from within, and corruption, scorched and singed by the glory of resurrected Life, fled. That's why: it wasn't just the Cross, it was what the Cross was the final move for in a challenge that lasted His entire life, at every moment redeeming, buying back, human nature, and so, having finished it and emerged victorious even from the grave, He took the renewed human nature to the right hand of God the Father in Heaven, making that renewedness available also to us.