Was it law that people died for their own sin?

[Behold]

1 hour ago, David1701 said:

Feeling guilty is an emotion; but objective guilt, before God, is real, whether you feel it or not. 

Being guilty before God, is to be under the dominion of the Law, as its the authority of the Law that proves that an unbeliever is guilty before God.

Christ has "redeemed us from the Curse of the Law", and now we are "not under the law, but under Grace".

Grace has freed us from all GUILT, because Christ having obtained eternal redemption for us,  = produces this...

 For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.

 And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.

Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water.

If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.

So, if a believer is feeling guilty, then they are walking in their flesh, and this is where the guilt is coming from.... as there is no condemnation in Christ.

If we walk in the flesh, we will commit deeds of the flesh, and our mind will react accordingly..

"if we walk in the Spirit we will not commit deeds of the flesh", = no guilt.

Edited May 24, 2020 by Behold

[Eddy Crocker]

1 hour ago, Blood Bought 1953 said:

I don’t have a dog in this fight......it just that some stuff popped into my head that I thought I would throw out there to see if anybody wanted to comment about....

 “ It was in sin that I was conceived....”

  “ We were born dead in sins and iniquities....”

 We are not Sinners because we sin....We sin because we are Sinners

 

Romans 3:23

²³ for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

This is a past tense statement in Christ. But outside of Christ it is a present tense because we are in the law. The law is for the lawless that are in sin but are not in Christ yet. 
 

Galatians 3:24 

²⁴ Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.

In the law we are still being brought unto Christ. 

Romans 6:1-2

Dead to Sin, Alive in Christ

6 What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? ² By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? ³ 

 

Ephesians 2:1-3 

2 And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins;

² Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience:

³ Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.

This also is past tense in Christ as well. Outside of him yes we are sinners but in him we are not. 
 

1 John 3:9,

Anyone born of God refuses to practice sin, because God’s seed abides in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God.

[Justin Adams]

Augustine. An excerpt. (he did not know Greek, so relied on others interpretations - sometimes faulty)

Another problem with Augustine is where he got much of his theology from. Before becoming a Christian, Augustine studied two different religions/philosophies, that he allowed to influence him, and brought their doctrines with him into the Church.

For nine years, Augustine was a Manichean, a devotee of of the teachings of Mani, founder of a Persian moral cult. Like the Gnostics of the first century, Mani and his followers were dualistic, teaching that the flesh was sinful and impure, while the spirit was light and life. As a Manichean, this teaching was a comfort to Augustine, as it let him blame his continued sexual sin on his lower fleshy nature, but still be moral by emphasizing the separateness of flesh and spirit.

Augustine's years with the Manicheans left its impact on the Church, as he brought this teaching into the the Church through his teaching on Original Sin. A. T. Overstreet, in his on-line book, "Are Men Born Sinners?, The Myth of Original Sin," notes:

Augustine's nine years with them [the Maniceans] accustomed him to regard human nature as essentially evil and human freedom as a delusion. Augustine next fell under the influence of Neo-Platonism, and his theological views were strongly influenced by this philosophy as well. However, his doctrine of sin shows the obvious influence of the Gnostic teachings of Manichaeism, in which he assumes the most ridiculous teaching of all the heathen philosophies the teaching that matter can be sinful. And this is the source of his doctrine that sin can be passed on physically from one person to another.

Harnack says:

We have, finally, in Augustine's doctrine of sin a strong Manichaean and Gnostic element; for Augustine never wholly surmounted Manichaeism.

and...

Augustine's doctrine of sin, with his belief in the inherent sinfulness of the physical constitution, is wholly Manichaean. His idea that sin is propagated through the marriage union, that sexual desire is sin and that sexual lust in procreation transmits sin is also Manichaean. Augustine built his doctrine of original sin upon this premise that sexual lust in procreation transmits sin.

As mentioned in the quote above, Augustine studied the teachings of pagan Greek philosophers, the Neo-Platonists. In fact, Augustine was " converted " to Christianity through Neo-Platonist philosophy! "World Book Encyclopedia" had these two comments to make about the influence of pagan philosophy on Augustine:

"The writings of the Neo-Platonists and sermons of Saint Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, convinced Augustine to accept Christianity. "

and

"Augustine's study of neoplatonism convinced him that God existed in the soul of every human being."

The following is from the "Concise Columbia Encyclopedia" article on Neoplatonism:

"Neoplatonism, ancient mystical philosophy based on the later doctrines of Plato, especially those in the Timaus.... Neoplatonism, widespread until the 7th cent., was an influence on early Christian thinkers (e.g., Origen) and medieval Jewish and Arab philosophers. It was FIRMLY JOINED WITH CHRISTIANITY BY AUGUSTINE, who was a Neoplatonist before his conversion." (emphasis mine)

Did you get that last line? Augustine brought the pagan philosophies, learned before his conversion, into the church and much of our doctrine today is based on this.

What is generally not known about Augustine is that he favored his philosophers more than the Old Testament revelation. Bishop Ambrose, who was instrumental in converting Augustine, had to help him overcome his problem with the Old Testament : it seems that Augustine felt that the God of the Old Testament was capricious and vindictive, and at odds with the God of the New testament.

So how did Ambrose and Augustine overcome the apparent contradiction ? By using a method of interpretation called allegory. The teachings of the Old Testament, according to Augustine, could only be understood by taking the Old Testament as allegory. Augustine spiritualized the Old Testament, teaching that the histories of the Old Testament had nothing to do with God, in reality, that the stories about God in the Old Testament only taught about God in pictures, like parables. According to Augustine, the Old Testament was not a perfect revelation of God and his character, but contained bits and pieces about God that we had to figure out with allegorical interpretation. Augustine's influence was so great that, for a thousand years, his method of interpreting the Bible was the official method of interpretation used by the Church.

Here is what James J. O'Donnell wrote in his online article, "Augustine the African"

Here Christianity began to appear to him in a new, intellectually respectable light. As before, his most pressing personal problem was his sense of evil and his responsibility for the wickedness of his life; with the help of technical vocabulary borrowed from Platonic philosophy Ambrose proposed a convincing solution for Augustine's oldest dilemma. Augustine had besides a specific objection to Christianity that only a professor of belles-lettres could have: he could not love the scriptures because their style was inelegant and barbaric. Here again Ambrose, elegant and far from barbaric, showed Augustine how Christian exegesis could give life and meaning to the sacred texts.

How did Augustine's philosophical background affect Christian doctrine ? His neo-platonic views affected his view of God, which is passed on to the Church, at large.

Augustine bought into the Platonic beliefs about the Perfect Ideal. Plato taught that everything that existed was merely a mirror of the one true thing that was perfection, and this Perfect Ideal was unchangeable. If it could change, it wouldn't be perfect. With that as his philosophical presupposition, Augustine brought in an un-biblical definition about God's immutability that survives as orthodoxy to this day. This is from Chapter Two of Bob Moore's online book, "Calvinism -- Ten Little Caveats":

From Plato comes the concept of "the forms" or perfect ideals. This gave students of philosophy (one being Augustine) the notion that God does not change in any way because he is perfect. What is perfect, it is argued, does not change because by definition "perfect" means the level beyond which nothing can exceed. Nothing is more perfect than flawless, A+, or 100%. For a Platonist, things which change are inferior to things which do not change.

The Bible presents God as changeless, but the Christian tradition being shaped by Augustine and others, had to interpret what that meant. They had to decide if it meant that God did not change in character or if it meant that he did not change in some stronger sense.

Don't believe that our Christian orthodox doctrine relies on Greek philosophy? Then read these quotes from "The Providence of God," by Benjamin Writ Farley, as cited in Bob Moore's book:

the rudiments of a reformed doctrine of the providence of God lie deeply embedded in the western philosophical tradition. There is little point in debating this. Wisdom and truth consist in acknowledging the fact and in showing how Christian and later Reformed doctrines differ significantly from the older, inherited, philosophical views.

Also..

Has Reformed theology wed itself too closely to the classical world's concepts of God's perfection, omnipotence, omniscience, and immutability in its attempts to witness to the God of Scripture? To be certain, such concepts have their place in guiding the church's reflection on the biblical God of providential activity. They enable the church to avoid the pitfalls of defining God in ways that make him subservient to other factors in the universe; they call the church's attention to glaring inconsistencies in its assertions about deity. But they need not 'control' our understanding of God's interaction with his world.

A third problem with Augustine that is not discussed often is his tendency to develop doctrine based on his experience rather than scripture. I have heard it said, "A man's philosophy is dictated by his morals." The same is true for his theology. Augustine wrote an autobiography, considered to be a classic, Confessions, and in it, he discusses his problems with sin. He spends a great deal of time dealing with an incident (as a young teenager ) in which he stole pears from a neighbor's tree, and uses this event to develop and teach the doctrine of Original Sin.

Because Augustine had a problem with promiscuity and lust, and even as a churchman and bishop, had problems with his thought-life, he concluded that no one is able to choose to do good. His problem with the settings and formed the basis for the doctrine of the other depravity of man. This experiential theology, based on his own moral failures, caused him to attack the Biblical theology of Pelagius and Celestius and Julian of Eclanum, who taught man's responsibility to choose to follow God.

A fourth problem area with Augustine is an area that, while well-known among scholars, is not widely discussed, but is absolutely critical in evaluating the truth of the doctrines that he developed and foisted on the Church. This last area deals with Augustine's method of dealing with those who disagreed with his teachings. Since Augustine's teachings became the touchstone for church doctrine, both Catholic and Protestant, it is vital that we examine the process by which Christian doctrine became settled, and was handed down to us.

More at: https://www.gospeltruth.net/aug/sinsofaug.htm

Edited May 24, 2020 by Justin Adams

[Behold]

11 minutes ago, Justin Adams said:

. Since Augustine's teachings became the touchstone for church doctrine, both Catholic and Protestant,

Umm, no.

They are related to the CC.

The idea of "Original sin" is a CC idea fostered by Augustine.

The Pauline idea is "sin nature", derived from the Fallen Adamic nature.  This is why Christ has to give us a "New Creation", which is a new nature, that is separated from the 'old man" the Flesh, by Colossians 2:11.. "the circumcision made without hands". This is our born again Spirit, that is Joined as "ONE" with God, "in Christ".

[Open7]

Thankyou all so much for the responses this has been super helpful

[David1701]

5 hours ago, Behold said:

Being guilty before God, is to be under the dominion of the Law, as its the authority of the Law that proves that an unbeliever is guilty before God.

Christ has "redeemed us from the Curse of the Law", and now we are "not under the law, but under Grace".

Grace has freed us from all GUILT, because Christ having obtained eternal redemption for us,  = produces this...

 For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.

 And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.

Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water.

If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.

So, if a believer is feeling guilty, then they are walking in their flesh, and this is where the guilt is coming from.... as there is no condemnation in Christ.

If we walk in the flesh, we will commit deeds of the flesh, and our mind will react accordingly..

"if we walk in the Spirit we will not commit deeds of the flesh", = no guilt.

Objective guilt only applies to unbelievers; but believers can sometimes feel guilty.

[Behold]

33 minutes ago, David1701 said:

Objective guilt only applies to unbelievers; but believers can sometimes feel guilty.

They feel guilty, then they repent and confess of that which they have thought about or committed, that to them is a "sin", , to try to resolve their guilt.

Most think that by doing this they are restoring relationship or fellowship with God., which is of course, impossible.

Edited May 24, 2020 by Behold

[LonerAndy]

On 5/24/2020 at 6:26 AM, Open7 said:

Was it a law that people died for their own sin?

I figure that it wasn’t, because Jesus died for the sins of others.

The reason I am asking is because when David sinned for taking the census, 70,000 men were killed by the angel of the lord. Also, David’s son died because of David’s sin.

In 1 Chronicles 21:17 David questions God why they 70,000 had to die and not him.

Can anyone help me on this?

 

Great question.  Hard to answer for me.  But here's my shot at it, and this might be lacking, and I wouldn't blame you if you thought you need a better answer.

The laws says that each man dies for his own sin.

It's talking about human judgement.  When you go to court, and you are found guilty of murder, they don't drag your son, or your mother and father, to the electric chair.

Many Kings of old, would slaughter all the blood relatives of the previous King, in order to solidify their authority.

In 2 Kings 11, Athaliah had killed all the other members of the royal family.  But the priests hid Joash (in the line of David) in the temple, and then made him King when he was old enough.

It is merely my opinion, but I believe this law that a man should only be punished for his own sins, was directed squarely at this idea that your daddy king did some horrible thing, so we can wipe out the rest of the family.

Specifically in regards to the 2 Sam 24, there is an interesting aspect to this....

The chapters opening verse is "Again the anger of the Lord burned against Israel", but it doesn't say why.

After that, David is incited by Satan to take an illegal census.

And the bottom line is... I don't know.   It would appear that the people of Israel were doing evil, and G-d brought about a method of judgement for that evil.

At least that is what it appears to me.

So I don't know if that helps... but it's something to think about.

 

[Wesley L]

On 5/24/2020 at 4:52 PM, Justin Adams said:

We were not made guilty by Adam's sin. We inherited a tendency to fall into sin, and we inevitably do fall into sin, but we did not participate in the original sin of Adam.

Hi Justin Adams,

I'd like to know more. I am still trying to figure out this issue for myself.

• We are not guilty because of Adam's sin. Clear.
• We have inherited a sinful nature, correct?
• We die because of our own sins.

But we know that babies die by accidents. This lead me to thinking:

• Death came into the world because of Adam's sin. (we die anyway, no matter we have sinned or not)
• We have inherited a sinful nature and are responsible for our own sins.
• Babies who die by accident/abortion are innocent, and will be counted as righteous?

But then... the wages of sin is death... what does that mean in conjunction with the above?

[Justin Adams]

You have it correct. All are resurrected on the last day, babies etc come under the heading 'no one dies/is judged for another's sins'. That means they are not judged.

Looking at church history and especially the influential Augustinian crap, you can see why Calvin and Luther like the inherited guilt idea. It gave them control over the masses that could not readily read scriptures for themselves. Add to that Jerome's ideas and translation errors in the Vulgate and we have a nice demonic train of perpetual guilt trips from the pulpit. They still teach some of this in seminaries today. Sad.

Edited June 6, 2020 by Justin Adams