rhutchin

Yep. We can let people decide what is moral and not God. However, the law is not about doing that which is moral or even doing that which makes sense. The law is about obedience to God. If people would, or even could, love others in the true Biblical sense of the term, you would not need the law to show them when they got out of line. A person can murder another person out of “love” simply because he determined that the person would be “better off” dead than alive. After a while, “love” becomes a joke even if it even was true love in the first place.

I agree that things done out of love are never wrong. The law merely tells us when we are not acting out of love.

The message of the gospel is for people who have sinned against God. It says that a person who has disobeyed God can ask for forgiveness. So, how does a person know if he has disobeyed God. Paul says that it is through the law -- The law is our schoolmaster, our instructor in right and wrong, whose purpose is to bring us to Christ where we would, in love, do that which is right. If we divorce the “gospel” message from the law, what need is there for a gospel?

rhutchin

Without the law, why would a person need the gospel? If a person is not under law and cannot be said to have sinned and be in need of forgiveness, what purpose does the gospel serve? If a person needs forgiveness, for what does he need to be forgiven?

If Paul had not said, "Flee fornication," would anyone know that it was a selfish sexual relationship that was without love? Paul established a law that fornication was wrong, so now people know that fornication is a selfish sexual relationship that is without love.

Without the law to tell people what constitutes "love," how would people determine what "love" is?

rhutchin

Does a person also stop stealing, killing, and lying because the person is under the law. Clearly, if a person "loves" God, he will do those things God has commanded would he not? A person may pick and choose, but that only means that he sins and is in need of forgiveness.

Any murder that a person wants to justify is a "mercy" killing. Society says that it is "right" to kill babies so long as they are still in the womb and sometimes even if they escape the womb. How merciful is that? If a mother followed Jesus, would she kill her undorn child? If she does kill, her unborn child, has she sinned?

I'm willing to bet that neither I, nor you nor anyone else, keeps the whole law even when they profess to be acting in "love." If homosexual relationships are not contrary to Jesus' commandment, then would there be any reason for heterosexual relationships to be so?

The purpose of the law is to tell people where they fail to act in "love" and are in need of forgiveness. The law does its job very well. Without the law, nothing would be contrary to "love."

Johnny Skeptic

You are tangibly dangerous to American society. Thanks primarily to fundamentalist Christians and right wing like liberal Christians, physician assisted suicide is legal only in the state of Oregon. Suffering, terminally ill people deserve to die peaceful, dignified deaths if that is their choice, not what are often painful deaths like you and God want them to die. Religious based opposition to homosexual causes hatred, bigotry, and judgmentalism. Thanks to people like you, the suicide rate among teenage homosexuals is very high. The largest colonial empire in history by far under a single religion was conquered by Christian nations by means of persecution, murder, and theft of property.

Actually, God is by far the most dangerous being in the world. His actions and allowances are directly responsible for every bad thing that happens in the world. Nothing can happen without God causing it or allowing it. God makes people blind, deaf, and dumb, references Exodus 4:11. God punished people for sins that their ancestors committed, reference Exodus 20:5. God kills of his most devout and faithful followers with hurricanes. Even Attila the Hun would not have killed his devout and faithful followers with hurricanes. Why didn't God clearly tell Christians in the first century that slavery, colonization, and the subjugation of women are wrong. Some Sophists and Stoics who lived in the first century opposed slavery. Now how do you suppose they were enlightened enough to know that slavery is wrong. Doesn't God give wisdom to Christians who ask for it?

You have four of my posts left to reply to at the thread on 2 Peter 3:9. We can discuss these and various other issues there, including Calvinism. At the other thread, I will ask you how God chooses the elect, by merit, or OUT OF A HAT, and why Muslims in Syria and Saudi Arabia have been so successful at preventing God from choosing the elect in their countries.

rhutchin

Your opinion, of course, but not more than that. There are alternatives available. Poor pain mgt is usually associated with inept doctors than any religious doctrines.

Clivedurdle

Rhutchin. Please be clear what you would do about homosexuality if you were POTUS. What laws would you pass? Death sentence?

Gamera

[QUOTE=rhutchin;3852637]Morality will not save anybody. Obedience to God will not save anybody. The Law will not save anybody. The gospel of Jesus Christ saves people. It is how God manifested his salvational power to us.

Romans 1:16 - For I am not ashamed of the gospel: it is the power of God for salvation to every one who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

Whether one eats shellfish or mixes cotton and linen tells us nothing about loving others. Indeed, like I say a proscription to stealing tells us nothing. If stealing bread saves a child's life, maybe it's a loving act. God judges our intentions, not our obedience to a defunct legal system meant for Iron Age tribes barely on the verge of conscious understanding that other people count.

"Sin" is the verbiage of the time and place, directed to an audience that understood it in one way. Sin is simply another way of saying behavior that shows lack of love. Paul says that the Law was the schoolteacher of the Jewish nation -- it wasn't given to the gentiles and it never applied to them.

Are you claiming nobody is saved by the gospel if they don't read Leviticus. Rubbish.

The gospel message stands on its own and saves on its own, being an existential call to become a loving person. It has nothing to do with the Law, and the first gentile Christians would not have even known or care what the Law is (and frankly neither do I).

James 2:10 - For whoever keeps
the whole law but fails in one point
has become guilty of all of it.

How do you respond to James?

Gamera

[QUOTE=rhutchin;3852664]Loving God is meaningless. No truly honest person can claim they love God, somebody they never meet. We love God by loving others. Hence Jesus commands his apostles not to love God (and OT trope), but to love others.

See I Cor. 13, which states specifically that love is greater than faith. And 1 John 4, which states that loving God means loving others. There is no love of God without loving others.

God hasn't commanded me to do anything except love others. I'm not under the Law and never was.

Romans 7:6 - But now we are
discharged from the law, dead to
that which held us captive, so that
we serve not under the old written
code but in the new life of the Spirit.

Romans 13:8 - Owe no one
anything, except to love one
another; for he who loves his
neighbor has fulfilled the law.

Galatians 5:4 - You are severed
from Christ, you who would be
justified by the law; you have fallen
away from grace.

Rutchin, do you keep the entire Law? Do you keep the Saturday Sabbath and avoid shellfish? Do you stone those who don't?

Please tell us in detail your relationship to the Law.

seebs

You know, when I read a single post in this thread, and saw a reference to Gamera, I was trying very hard to figure out what a giant turtle with jets had to do with anything.

Now it makes a LOT more sense.

Gamera

You seem to want to avoid the issue and wander off into abortion politics (which don't occur in the biblical texts at all).

So getting back on track, if a person in horrible pain whom you loved begged you to kill them to put them out of their misery, would killing them be a "sin" in your axiology of morality. It isn't in mine, since no loving act is wrong. Keeping the 10 Commandments would be wrong in that case.

Similarly if stealing a piece of bread from a rich man saved the life of a starving child, would you claim it is wrong. I don't. It's wrong not to steal the bread.

The 10 Commandments are defunct, replaced with the higher law of love

Be honest. You don't even try to keep the whole Law. You pick and choose. You don't keep the Sabbath and you don't avoiding mixing linen and cotton. You don't think those laws apply. Why?

Loveless relationships are contrary to Jesus' commandment to love one another. It doesn't matter what the gender of the participants are.

You're making this up. The admonition not to eath shellfish really isn't about love. If it is, let us know how.