Posted on 03/13/2022 2:56:25 PM PDT by dynachrome
So, are you attempting to dictate how and when the realization must come to someone, or are you willing to wait on the Lord?
HE is the only one who knows where anyone’s heart really is, or where it might be headed.
Are you arguing against the death penalty because it precludes redemption? If so, I offer an alternative in my Freeper profile, beginning “I can live without the death penalty if”...
“We’re supposed to be a largely Christian nation that believes in the possibility of redemption.”
It’s FAR BEYOND mere “possibility”; 100% of the redemption that needed doing was done at The Cross. As Paul taught, “God was in Christ Jesus reconciling the whole world to Himself, not counting men’s trespasses (i.e. sins) against them.”
Brother, THAT’S redemption, it’s total forgiveness, it’s why the veil in the temple was torn wide open, that the fellowship of God is now among men. And Christ was the price of everyone’s redemption, the proxy for every man’s forgiveness, and will He not have the fullness of the reward for which he suffered?
It is telling, in Acts 2, at the end of Peter’s great sermon, what Peter DID NOT tell the crowd when they cried out to him, “What must we do?” Peter DID NOT, as do many American Pastors every Sunday, tell the trembling crowd “Ask God to forgive you.”
Nor ought we. The forgiveness is past tense; it’s DONE.
NOBODY needs to ask God to forgive them; they need to do as Peter said:
REPENT of having lived in ignorance (or even outright denial, or rejection) of the magnificent gift of God and the price He paid for it,
and “BE BAPTIZED INTO the Name of Jesus Christ” which is a whole idea in a phrase Western Christianity has too often reduced to getting dunked in a tub. Yes, that’s a part of it, but it’s only the outward act of declaring the inward reality: that we wholeheartedly, and with thanks, embrace God’s gift of forgiveness wrought in The Person and work of Jesus Christ, and irrevocably commit — just as cloth is irrevocably colored when baptized in dye — to knowing Who Christ is, learning what Jesus taught, longing for His Glorious Return, and living daily as if it’s all True.
The message that this is what God has done for us, and it is accessible to “Whomsoever will”: THAT is “The Gospel”; THAT is the EXCEEDINGLY Good News.
Well, people with different religious orientations have different beliefs and read the Bible differently.
Some of us who consider ourselves Christian find capital punishment abhorrent and a great error - and that is more than a little informed by our own religion and spiritual understanding.
Well, I just laid the beating heart of The Gospel squarely in front of you. It should be plain that — even while you’re still living — “you can’t redeem yourself through reflection, good works, and mental change”; if you could accomplish that feat of yourself, then Christ died needlessly, and God was an idiot for implementing that whole Incarnation/Death/Resurrection fiasco.
No, manifestly, the task lies infinitely beyond the realm of human accomplishment; that great gulf is beyond our power to even begin to span, and that is The Principal Reason God completed the entire work Himself, and left to us the simple choice to believe or not.
Well, do you believe in Hell? and if so, how do people wind up there?
There have been those who, with enough gandy-dancing around have concocted intricate means of dismissing Hell from the pages of the Bible. But theirs isn’t a “straight read” of the text, wherein the existence of a very literal eternal Hell is clearly stated.
As for who goes there, in the end, only one sin will send anyone to Hell: Unbelief.
But there will be many who go there. Jesus stated plainly, “wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter in there” (Matthew 7:13); Satan will have plenty of company.
“The wages of sin is Death.” (Romans 6:23)
If any will not believe that Jesus Christ was proxy for them, and received that penalty for sin in their stead, the death sentence will devolve to them, and they will, in their unbelief, bear that penalty themselves. In fact, those unbelieving who are yet living at the return of Christ will have the unique experience of being personally executed by him. Revelation 19:21.
All who are finally condemned are those who chose not to believe the Truth;. As Paul wrote they “are perishing because they refused to love of the Truth, and so be saved” (2 Thessalonians 2:10); they never were “baptized into the name of Jesus Christ,” as Peter exhorted his generation (Acts 2:38). They will go to Hell because they chose never to receive the complete forgiveness God gave them in Jesus Christ on The Cross.
Well, at what point in one’s life must one come around to this ‘belief’? Are some just born with it, does it happen to different people at different times, when?
It seems to me that it didn’t come to Paul until he was rather advanced in his... exploits. Fortunately for him, he hadn’t been executed for some of his nasty doings BEFORE his conversion could take place. (If you’ll recall, this little sub-discussion began because I objected to capital punishment.)
By The Book, each has his entire life to choose, or not; barring fatal accidents, or that all things don’t come into their final end, first, and so cut short his day of opportunity.
But I will come to the nub of it:
It is no sin to execute a criminal who, were he spared from Death, might yet choose the way of eternal life, and so be saved.
It is no sin to take his life, and thereby extinguish all hope of eternal life with God.
It is no sin because none but the man himself may be rightly accountable for the disposition of his soul before Almighty God; his blood is on his own head, and the offer of eternal salvation stands undiminished to the very last fading vestige of his consciousness; that he yet may choose life even as he passes into eternity.
The agents of civil government duly enacting the penalty of death upon him for his crime stand no more guilty of his blood than would a falling rock from a roadside precipice, a startled bear in the woods, a meteorite from the heavens, a bolt of lightning upon a mountaintop, or a blown tire precipitating a fatal head-on collision.
Many unbelieving perish untimely in sudden accidents. Does the Almighty bear bloodguilt that He did not intervene to save them alive that they might have yet another day to consider His priceless offer of salvation? Might they not, just as likely, continue as before, and go on to live ignorant, or even in outright rejection of The Gospel? The lives of those who escape death tend mostly to bear this out.
God, Himself, commanded that death should be the penalty for any of several sins. “Who sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” This was not the decree of a man. “The wages of sin is Death.” It was no man who thought that up.
Is God sinful to command that, as penalty for certain crimes, Death be wrought upon one man by others having governing authority?
So how is it sinful to follow His example, and establish death as the penalty for certain sins; and to vest civil government with that authority?
Whether by the command of God, or by a vote of the Legislature, is not the life of the man forfeit in both cases?
In either case, might not prolonged life just as equally prove a seed bed where deliverance from so dreadful an end might yield a crop of repentance unto faith in Christ, or resentment unto not only hardened unbelief, but outright defiance and enmity against God?
I would rather chance that, in the throes of doom, the sinful man might embrace salvation at the threshold of eternity, and enter into it “as one escaping through flames” than that he be given clemency only to live out his days perfecting utter devilishness; a scourge to the righteous, and a stench in the nostrils of God.
Jesus Christ Himself will, upon his Return, PERSONALLY EXECUTE a sentence of Death upon all who remain, to the end, unbelieving; that very One who died in their place shall, in the Day of Vengeance send them to ultimate damnation, and yet it will be no more, nor any less, than what they, in their stubborn unbelief, have already emphatically chosen.
On both sides of Calvary’s hill God does not shrink from the verity of Romans 6:23; that the wages of sin is Death.
So consider that the heart of any man lies mostly unknown to any but himself and God; and that any man may choose the way of life or the way of Death up to his final conscious moment, entirely unknown to any other; that the final state of any man is strictly a matter between him, and His Creator; that whereas we may have influence, we really have no say.
And, too, consider that the penalty was known before the crime was committed, and yet the crime was committed, and in the commission thereof, the due penalty was actually consciously acknowledged, and embraced.
In all of this it becomes more and more apparent that the criminal not only is, but has intentionally made himself, his own prosecutor, judge, and executioner; that the principle agent of his demise is none other than himself, that he alone stands accountable to God for his soul, and all others are innocent of his blood.
The only sin in Capital Punishment is the sin of the one who, by his own choices, makes himself subject to it.
They don’t F around ..
Nothing like Peter the Grewt when he showed his weak son how it’s done with the Streltsy he was personally purging after a number of uprisings against his mom and himself for the Tsars movement towards Europeanization of Russia ....ironic considering no?
He allegedly did a fair number of the 1200 or so ...and made his boy lop off a few as well as insisted his nobles partake in the fun and if they refused he hanged them for months in summer next to the window his sister Sophia had been exiled to in a monastery she’d been forced to vows in after she allied with the Streltsy and was tsarina for a few years till Peter took control
She tried again with the Streltsy and failed and that was it
Monastery for her
Chopping bloc for the Streltsy foolish enough to have aided her
It was a bloodbath
Peters son was not up to it and eventually allegedly turned on dad....and was himself executed after yet another Streltsy missstep....they were like a praetorian guard sorta
Catherine the Great...a Prussian and Fredrick the greats niece ....was part of political hardball that killed two more tsars
Russia is complicated and brutal and vast and cold
It respects a firm hand ...like Arabs and Latino campesinos and African tribals
Seems like an unlikely spot for nation building and Republic incubating
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