The Doctor of PERPETUAL Misunderstanding. We can’t have a discussion when you don’t listen, don’t read, and don’t answer questions.

I will, however, point out something someone once said, “You neither understand the Scriptures, or the power of God.”

(It’s in the Bible, but you don’t like answers from there, so we’ll leave it general).

On the day of Christ Jesus, I will NO LONGER be a sinner or have sinful inclinations. I will be changed

When is that day? When you are dead and in heaven?

How do you become a non-sinner?

As I see it, there are a lot of holes in your understanding of these verses.

Basically this is a summary of your theology.

1) God declares righteous but you are still a sinner.
So at this point, God is lying to Himself about what you really are. Like declaring you good when in fact you are still bad. This is supported by your statement that we remain sinners after this declaration.

2) You become new creatures in Christ and are regenerated.
How precisely this happens you did not explain because all you did was quote scripture that that is what happens but no why or how

3) On the day of Christ Jesus, you will NO LONGER be a sinner or have sinful inclinations.
But you do not say when this will happen and how this will happen. If this happens after death in heaven well that means that you got to heaven still a sinner. So God admitted you to heaven still dirty. But Revelations is very clear that NOTHING UNCLEAN WILL ENTER HEAVEN.
So you see, your understanding of Scripture is very weak and convoluted.
I think you are afraid to confront these illogic in your theology and this is why you have consistently evaded my question when I asked you if we get to heaven as dung heap covered by snow. That is what you believe but you can’t really accept that that is what you believe and you try vainly to find scripture support for this and fail.
I think your own theology does not make sense even to you.

Can I just say that putting heaps of citation does not help your cause because at the root of our debate is precisely how you understand justification. This is what I am trying to draw out of of you. How precisely YOU understand these verses.

God declares me legally righteous by faith in Christ.

And that is exactly how I presented the first point. So I understood you correctly then.
The Scriptural citations do not say one way or another what happens to you after you have been declared righteous. Does that mean that somehow you are no longer a sinner as in no longer filthy and grimy? Did an ontological change happen to you, to your being?
To clarify that point further, if sin is making you grimy and foul smelling, are you now cleaning and nice smelling after God has declared you righteous?
You said it is a legal declaration. So take for example a murderer. When God declares him no longer a murderer, is he in fact no longer a murderer or is this just a legal declaration and does not change at all the state of this person’s soul.
Perhaps it would help if you will clarify for me how you understand sin and what it means to be a sinner.
So let’s take it one by one:
!) What is sin
2) When you commit sin, what happens to you? What happens to your soul?
3) If sin changes you, how does it change you?
4)When God declares you righteous, does it change you internally? Does God declaring you righteous make you in fact(and not just legally) righteous, that is clean and good and holy through and through in your being?
I think settling those point will suffice for now.

Also, if you can cut down the citations because it is not scripture that is being questioned but your understanding of it. So what I am hoping for is that you are able to explain scripture rather than just dumping quotes.

But according to you, you are not saved unless you are justified.

Uh, yeah.

So basically it goes like this, God legally declares you righteous (even though you remain a sinner through and through) and then you are saved. Now if I got that wrong please correct the misrepresentation.

You are wrong…again. There must be some title you can merit: The Doctor of Perpetual Misunderstanding. It has to be intentional on your part, because you seem fairly literate.

One last try…

God declares me legally righteous by faith in Christ. (Rom
3:24, 5:1, 5:9, 8:30-39). He is, after all, the just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus (Rom 3:26). In Him I have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of my trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on me (Eph 1:7-8). I have no fear of condemnation (Rom 8:1). I am already raised with Christ and seated with Christ in the heavenly places (Eph 2:6). I have an imperishable inheritance and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for me (1 Pet 1:4). I am protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. (1 Pet 1:5)

I am a new creature in Christ by virtue of the regenerating
work of the Holy Spirit. (2 Cor 5:17, 21; Eph 2:4-10; Titus 2:5-7)

I am still in the flesh, so I still have sinful tendencies.(Gal
5:13-17, Rom 7:14-25) Measured by the teachings of Jesus, I have serious deficiencies, guilty of various sins…some more overt, others internal.

God, who began a good work in me, will perfect it until the
day of Christ Jesus. (Phil 1:6)

On the day of Christ Jesus, I will NO LONGER be a sinner or have sinful inclinations. I will be changed (1 Cor 15:51), I will be raised imperishable (v. 52). I will put on immortality. (v.53) I will have victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (v. 56) I will be conformed into the image of God’s Son (Rom 8:29) . I will be glorified (Rom 8:30). I will be like Him, for I will see Him as he is (1 Jn 3:2).

You don’t seem to believe God has the power to glorify His
people. It is, somehow, a strange idea to you. You think God deficient in power in some way. It comports, I suppose, with your view of Jesus as a half-Savior. But I look at the Scripture and it says God “will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory, by the exertion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself” (Phil 3:21).

Well, I think I’m done now. I am confident you will once
again claim I have not answered your question, and claim I think I am going to heaven in a sinful condition. You are simply incapable of reading others with comprehension, at least regarding simple truths from Scripture. A veil lies
over your eyes. I will allow other readers to decide who is more engaged with the key issues in our discussion and more faithful to Scripture.

The cross of Jesus Christ is not a papering over. You approach blasphemy with statements like that.

Sorry rdt but indignation is not sufficient as a response to my question.

Here it is again, you said that you remain a sinner but God declares you righteous – that your righteousness is a mere legal declaration but inside you remain the same filthy disgusting sinner.

This is why I keep asking you if you really believe that when you get to heaven you are a dungheap covered with the snow of Christ? In an earlier post, your response was in the affirmative.

This is why I keep asking you whether God lies to Himself about the true state of your soul.

Please, no more dancing around and just answer that.

Justification deals with our legal standing before God’s justice. That is NOT ALL that salvation is

But according to you, you are not saved unless you are justified. So basically it goes like this, God legally declares you righteous (even though you remain a sinner through and through) and then you are saved. Now if I got that wrong please correct the misrepresentation.

You are still a sinner…a profound sinner in need of God’s sustaining grace every day.

Yes, but we are talking about the end of life. If you died a sinner, according to you it does not matter because all God has to do is to declare your righteous because He has covered you with the snow of His Son. So basically God is lying to Himself as to the truth of the state of your soul…

You are the same putrid, foul person but with a new dress – His Son.

Do you even comprehend the total incompatibility of God’s holiness with sin that you think the two can live quite harmoniously together in heaven because sin has been succesfully hidden beneath the brilliance of Jesus?

The same sort of doubts that made Jerome unwilling to translate the lame apocryphal books he considered
unworthy of the canon. He was “prevailed upon, too, I believe, and quickly dashed them off. He also had doubts about James.

But who gets to set the canon? You see, this is specifically the point. St Jerome as great as he is could not have determined the canon by himself, which is why changed his mind and translated the Deuterocanonicals.

In fact, Jerome wrote the following to Pope Damasus (the Pope who got the ball rolling with regards the canon :As I follow no leader save Christ, so I communicate with none but your blessedness, that is with the chair of Peter. For this, I know, is the rock on which the church is built ! This is the house where alone the paschal lamb can be rightly eaten. This is the ark of Noah, and he who is not found in it shall perish when the flood prevails. … He that gathers not with you scatters…”

Martin Luther’s reasons were quite different. He was trying to excise a book of the Bible because it went against his pre-conceived theology and in the process has “scattered”.

Furthermore, how can one call the deuterocanonicals lame when Christ Himself referred to this. In fact, the Qumran finding attest to the fact that the Jews of Jesus’s times used the deuterocanonicals.

According to Catholic doctrine, the proximate criterion of the Biblical canon is the infallible decision of the Church. This decision was not given until rather late in the history of the Church (at the Council of Trent).

That is a false reading of the declaration of Trent. The only reason the decree was necessary was because the doctrine was challenged. What happened at Trent was it affirmed what the Church had set 1200 years ago. This declaration would not have been necessary had not Luther challenged the canon.

Luther is in “good” company then, is he not?

Hardly. I doubt that you would have caught Luther dead with Jerome’s declaration above on his lips.

But that does not answer the question at all. The question is how is having faith different to doing works if both are considered gifts from God?

Regarding the coveting of your neighbours car:

You said that all sin is grave. So therefore coveting your neighbours car is grave. According to you, God papers over your mistake by trying not to see that you are a sinner. How does that work for God. If sin is terrible, then how can God let sin enter His presence in heaven by just covering it?

The cross of Jesus Christ is not a papering over. You approach blasphemy with statements like that. His is an all-sufficient sacrifice that fully pays the debt of sin to divine justice. That is justification. It is very simple to demonstrate that dikaiosune is a legal term. When the penalty is paid, one has the legal standing of one that is fully acquitted. “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.”

Justification deals with our legal standing before God’s justice. That is NOT ALL that salvation is. It is much, much more, but justification secures our place as having our debt of sin paid. You think justification is salvation. It is an aspect of salvation.

Now, I will say this one last time since you simply ignored previous explanations. Sanctification necessarily follows justification because of the new birth. We are changed. We
are new creatures in Christ. We are given a new disposition by the Holy Spirit.

Yet, we are still sinners…grievously so. You are and I am. We violate the exalted levels of the moral law as explained by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. We often fail in basic righteousness and holy habits. That is because we
are still in the flesh (something you crudely understand as merely our biology). You are still a sinner…a profound sinner in need of God’s sustaining grace every day. You have no merit to claim God’s favor. No human being ever has had such merit…no, not even a saint. They have no left over merit for some unbiblical mystical treasury. They are unworthy sinners. Even so, in the eyes of God’s justice, we are righteous in Christ, and already seated with Him in the
heavenly places (Eph 2:5-8). Papered over. Incredible words. If you were destroyed financially and living on the
street, and a friend gladly paid all your debts and set you up with an income to live comfortably, and yet he himself had to live on the streets, would you say, “Hey, bro. Thanks for papering over my financial situation.”

The best way to describe the security of the believer in Christ who is still a sinner (like me) is best seen in the epitaph the great missionary William Carey wrote for his own tombstone: “A wretched, poor, and helpless worm on Thy kind arms I fall.” If you do not understand this, you do not understand the Gospel.

Luther did not try to excise James from the Bible. He did question for a time its canonicity. He translated the Bible into German, including James.

I think he did. And it is precisely because of James’ teaching on faith and works. The only reason it was not excised was because he was prevailed upon. What makes him think that he is above God that he would dare to label the Word of God an “epistle of straw”?

The same sort of doubts that made Jerome unwilling to translate the lame apocryphal books he considered
unworthy of the canon. He was “prevailed upon, too, I believe, and quickly dashed them off. He also had doubts about James.

He wasn’t alone in that opinion, which is why the Catholic Encyclopedia says, “According to Catholic doctrine, the proximate criterion of the Biblical
canon is the infallible decision of the Church. This decision was not given until rather late in the history of the Church (at the Council of Trent). Before that time there was some doubt about the canonicity of certain Biblical books, i.e., about their belonging to the canon.”

Luther is in “good” company then, is he not?

Do you “gnaw” your communion wafer? It’s a metaphor, isn’t it?

Who said it is a metaphor? Certainly not Jesus. The only reason He changed from phagein to trogein was to drive home the fact, that He means what He said. You need to eat His Body and drink and His blood. And that is exactly what we do.

Let’s stop for a moment. He is the bread of life. How will people obtain life from this sort of bread, who is not a loaf, but a person? His words are “Come to Me” and “Believe in Me.”

Sorry but that is not what Jesus said at all. You got it backwards. I don’t know if that is intentional or you just really did not bother reading John 6 properly.

After He said come to me and believe in me He said: I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and THE BREAD which I shall give for the life of the world IS MY FLESH.

You cannot get any clearer than that. This bread that you need to eat is HIS flesh.

So basically it goes like this: If you COME to me, and BELIEVE in Me, you will eat my flesh and drink my blood because that is what I will give you so that you can have eternal life. If you come to Jesus and truly believe in Him, THAT is what you will do.

Eating and drinking of Jesus is not a metaphor. He was quite adamant about that.

He extends the metaphor of the Bread of Life into consuming Him.

It was never a metaphor. He made sure of that by repeating it 7 times. He is the food that you need to eat to gain eternal life. Your belief will be tested on whether you do that. And the belief of many were tested on verse 66 they fall away from him. It is interesting that that this falling away from Jesus happened at John 6:66.

The entire Gospel of John supports the latter view.

Not in the least. In fact, this very protestant belief did not come about til the 12th century with Berengarius. From the beginning this is what the Church has always believed.
The people who do not believe are like those who left Jesus at 6:66 and walked with him no longer.

So what happened? Well he said come to me. They walked away. Believe in me. They would not. The teaching is too hard and it is still to hard for many people today. So like those disciples 2000 years ago, they left.

Jesus was very clear: Verse 56-57: He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so HE WHO EATS ME will live because of me.

Luther did not try to excise James from the Bible. He did question for a time its canonicity. He translated the Bible into German, including James.

I think he did. And it is precisely because of James’ teaching on faith and works. The only reason it was not excised was because he was prevailed upon. What makes him think that he is above God that he would dare to label the Word of God an “epistle of straw”?

The big difference, of course, is that you live in fear of not cooperating sufficiently with grace, such as when you might covet your neighbor’s car, and thereby violate the 10 Commandments. What if you didn’t remember this coveting and failed to confess it?

But that does not answer the question at all. The question is how is having faith different to doing works if both are considered gifts from God?
Regarding the coveting of your neighbours car:
You said that all sin is grave. So therefore coveting your neighbours car is grave. According to you, God papers over your mistake by trying not to see that you are a sinner. How does that work for God.
If sin is terrible, then how can God let sin enter His presence in heaven by just covering it?