king_alvarez posted:Kimball_Kinnison posted:You can cry for mercy, but if your creditor gives you mercy, then he is denied justice. At the same time, if he is given justice, then there can be no mercy for you.I'm not sure I agree that mercy and justice are mutually exclusive. I'm going to think about this further and perhaps write something more about this.
Kimball_Kinnison posted:You can cry for mercy, but if your creditor gives you mercy, then he is denied justice. At the same time, if he is given justice, then there can be no mercy for you.
king_alvarez posted:Kimball_Kinnison posted:By paying the price for our sins, Christ has paid the debt that we created through violating God's laws. Justice can therefore be satisfied. Christ then offers us a new deal: repent and follow God's commandments (repenting again when we fail). If we hold up our end of Christ's offer, then our debt to him will be considered paid in full. If not, if we reject the mercy offered to us, then we are left to the demands of justice all over again.What do you believe is the price (or wages) of sin? If it is death, then is not the price of our sins paid for when we eventually die, thereby satisfying justice? The only reason why I would see the need for a mediator is if we were to able to attain eternal life without having to die first.
Kimball_Kinnison posted:By paying the price for our sins, Christ has paid the debt that we created through violating God's laws. Justice can therefore be satisfied. Christ then offers us a new deal: repent and follow God's commandments (repenting again when we fail). If we hold up our end of Christ's offer, then our debt to him will be considered paid in full. If not, if we reject the mercy offered to us, then we are left to the demands of justice all over again.
Kimball_Kinnison posted:...The wages of sin is death. God cannot tolerate any unclean thing, and so if we are at all impure (and sin by its nature makes us impure), we cannot be in God's presence. That is a form of death. ... God's ultimate goal is for us to live with Him, and we can only do that if we overcome spiritual death (separation).
Kimball_Kinnison posted:By their very nature, mercy and justice are mutually exclusive. Justice is a matter of cause and effect. It's akin to saying that the fine for littering is $100. By law, if you are convicted of littering, you have to pay $100, no exceptions. Mercy, on the other hand, is explicitly getting something that you do not deserve. Again, to use the littering example, if the judge instructs you to only pay $50, even though the law requires $100, he has shown you mercy but violated justice. You might confuse the two because most human laws allow for some measure of justice (such as a wide variety of potential sentences). That is an attempt to add an element of mercy to the justice system, because humans are imperfect beings, including the ones who sit in judgment.
ObiWan506 posted:alvarez, yes. Scripture says if Christ did not rise from the dead then our preaching is in vain. But he did so it's therefore just another fancy hypothetical that doesn't mean anything.
Lord_Vivec posted:Doesn't that sound a bit harsh to you, KK?
king_alvarez posted:Kimball_Kinnison posted:By their very nature, mercy and justice are mutually exclusive. Justice is a matter of cause and effect. It's akin to saying that the fine for littering is $100. By law, if you are convicted of littering, you have to pay $100, no exceptions. Mercy, on the other hand, is explicitly getting something that you do not deserve. Again, to use the littering example, if the judge instructs you to only pay $50, even though the law requires $100, he has shown you mercy but violated justice. You might confuse the two because most human laws allow for some measure of justice (such as a wide variety of potential sentences). That is an attempt to add an element of mercy to the justice system, because humans are imperfect beings, including the ones who sit in judgment.To clarify the problem I have with reconciling mercy and justice, what exactly is justice? It is different than just cause and effect. In your example of littering, "justice" is a completely arbitrary "effect." It could just as well be a fine of $500 or $5000 or ten years in jail. There is nothing in the value of littering and the value of $100 that suggests that they are in some way inherently equal. Suppose the law requires a fine of $1,000,000 for littering. Would that fine be justice or would the judge that mercifully reduces the fine to $100 be showing justice?
Kimball_Kinnison posted:However, God is perfect. God has established His law, His commandments. Any time that we violate God's laws, we have sinned, and all sin carries the same penalty: separation from God (spiritual death). Only the pure can be in God's presence, and purity isn't a relative thing. If you have any "spots" (sins), you are impure. It's really an all-or-nothing deal. ... God's standard is perfection. The only way we can achieve that is through Christ.
ObiWan506 posted:Before I go further alvarez, are you asking what's the difference between the physical body and the soul? Or are you asking why our deaths aren't enough to absolve us of our own sins?
king_alvarez posted:ObiWan506 posted:Before I go further alvarez, are you asking what's the difference between the physical body and the soul? Or are you asking why our deaths aren't enough to absolve us of our own sins?Hmmm, well actually kind of both, I think. My initial question had to do with why death wasn't enough to absolve us of our own sins, in other words, pay back the debt or price of sin and enable us to be in a clean, pure state before God. Thinking about this led to some different possible scenarios regarding the nature of the soul as it relates to the physical body. I guess I don't have a really well defined question in there as my mind kind of just went off in a bunch of different directions as I was thinking about this. And I'm sure the differences between different Christian denominations makes the issue confusing as well, for example, I wonder how the Mormon beliefs regarding our prehuman existence might affect this discussion. I guess for the purposes of this discussion, if the soul is irrelevant to the question of the wages of sin, then I'm content with ignoring the topic of the soul altogether, at least for now. I might bring it up again sometime, though, because I do have a lot of questions about that too.
Kimball_Kinnison posted: This is one of those areas where vocabulary causes confusion between different denominations and people. A lot of it depends on how you define what the "soul" is. For example, a lot of people use the terms "spirit" and "soul" interchangeably. Other people use the term to refer to a human being (as in the traditional distress call SOS - Save Our Souls). In LDS doctrine, humans have a physical body and a spiritual body (spirit), and two of them together constitute a soul. So, when you use the term soul, to what are you referring? Kimball Kinnison
