OK, I can conceive of God creating a place where He sustains it and its inhabitants' existence, but has no further interaction or contact with them.
Sounds like the Christian concept of purgetory.
Yes, it does.
Deut. 30:19 (ESV) I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, So, Moses (or G-d) were being unfair?
Nope. This passage follows the description of the blessings and curses that Israel is subject to as terms of the Covenant. These are temporal rewards and punishments. Reward and punishment after death exists, of course, but I don't think this passage is talking about that.
angelo: Au contraire. There are many passages in the Tanakh where men are described as righteous. All men sin. Those who are righteous are those who repent of their sin and ask forgiveness.
ArGee: Psalm 143:2 (ESV) Enter not into judgment with your servant, for no one living is righteous before you.
I think this is an issue of a temporary state of righteousness, immediately after atonement, and a permanent state of righteousness.
The psalms are poetry, and they do make use of figures of speech. "No one" may not literally mean "no one" in this context. Or, you could read it to mean that no living person at the time of the writing of the psalm was righteous. Doesn't mean that man is incapable of righteousness. I favor the first interpretation I offered.
Yes, righteousness is temporary in that it can be lost through further sin. But then it can be regained through further repentence and atonement.
Thank you for sharing that, but there is no indication that any of these methods are effective alone, of themselves.
Sacrifice alone, without repentence, was equally inefficacious. You may understand these passages differently, but I read them to mean that, when we repent and ask forgiveness for our sins, God forgives us. We offer our prayer as "the sacrifice our our lips".
You and I are in complete agreement up to your last sentence. Again, I am not surprised. Yeshua taught what all the Rabbis taught. He was thoroughly Jewish. Christianity is a thoroughly Jewish religion which has made a way for the goyim to enter in as the royal priesthood of G-d that He called the Jews to be.
But I read your last sentence to say that the sacrifice of our lips obviates the need for the sacrifice of blood. Both are required, the sacrifice and repentence. That has always been the Christian message as well. We just accept that the sacrifice has been made once for all time. But I'll get to that when I answer your next post. To make things simpler, let's deal with any objections you have to this paragraph in your response to that one.
Shalom.