There is a great post on As Bereans Did about the common arguments legalists use to "prove" that the law is eternal (whihc it is not).
One of those so-called "proofs" is the moral law. It is an excellent article, with many well thought out points, but I picked this part of it to highlight
MORAL LAW
Maybe by this point you are thinking, maybe the national and ceremonial laws aren't eternal but the moral law has to be. Supposedly the moral law flows naturally from God's own moral nature, therefore the moral law is eternal because God's moral nature is unchanging. Then why not say that? Why not claim "the moral law" instead of "the law"?
I'll tell you why. People do not make this argument to get others to stop murdering or coveting. What they want is to justify the non-moral laws on their cherry-picked list, like tithing, meats laws, holy days, and the weekly Sabbath.
Let's ask that tough question, though. Is the moral law eternal?
What about the law against adultery?
That's a law everyone can agree is a moral law. How could that exist before there was marriage? In the future, no one will marry (MAT. 22: 30). The law about adultery does not exist if marriage does not exist. Just like the Sabbath without days.
The moral law prohibiting adultery is not eternal.
What about the law against murder?
How can the law against murder exist before humans could die, or continue on after all humans are immortal? All humanity will eventually be immortal. The law about murder does not exist if morality does not exist.
The moral law prohibiting murder is not eternal.
What about the law against covetousness?
How can the law against covetousness exist after the fullness of the Kingdom has come, and we have fully received the inheritance we are promised in Jesus, and we are fully possessors of all things? How do we covet what is already ours? In the future there will be no such thing as limited resources. Everyone will have more than plenty, and then some. The law about covetousness does not exist if limited resources does not exist.
The moral law prohibiting covetousness is not eternal.
What about the law against idolatry?
How can the law against idolatry exist after everyone lives in the direct presence of the true and living God? Who among us, when we live in the fullness of the Kingdom of God, would ever, ever turn back to worshiping anything less? It's absurd! The law against idolatry does not exist if there is worship of other gods/things/etc does not exist.
The moral law prohibiting idolatry is not eternal. This one has the best chance of being eternal, but it seems somewhat childish to me to presume perfected beings will need a law.
"But those acts are still wrong even if they are impossible to commit," someone is no doubt saying right now. That's like saying it's a sin to kill a dinosaur. They're are no dinosaurs, but it's still a sin to kill one. Makes sense? No. And here we go, back to myriads of unknown laws governing things that do not and might never exist.
"The law is eternal..." STOP! No, it isn't. Not even the moral laws are eternal.
Turns out eternality is not an attribute of moral law and never mattered in the first place. This entire argument is a pointless exercise in futility, and a distraction.
This is a problem some people solve by leaving it obscure and refusing to deal with it. Somewhat reminds me of the situation in my last post, "Willful Ignorance". It is easier to bury the head or to make sweeping generalities than to investigate it and realize you've invested so much of your time, energy, and money in a mistake. Common Legalist Arguments - Part VI
24 comments:
Really dumb.
Who are the idiots who said that when the new heaven and earth have arrived that laws like murder, adultery, etc. will be necessary? Or is it you that says it no2hwa?
They will not be necessary because all who are in that kingdom will be perfect like the Creator.
hwa and his minions were not law keepers and he and his org did not teach the laws of the Creator. They taught some just like basically every other religious group, but they also taught things that would be penalized by death in a torah observing world which is shown in D'varim (Deut.) chapters 13 and 18. That will be shown in the future though it can be shown now and has been many times.
This is not obscure in the least.
''I'll tell you why. People do not make this argument to get others to stop murdering or coveting. What they want is to justify the non-moral laws on their cherry-picked list, like tithing, meats laws, holy days, and the weekly Sabbath.''
thus these false teachers use the alleged demand to ''keep'' the ten commandments purely as a tool to impose on the unsuspecting and well intentioned believer the burden of all other laws and let's be blunt their greedy eyes are on the money flow from tithes as you say - as they teach stealing is involved if this burden is not met. Terrible people with terrible motives
I guess the fact that the law is spiritual is beyond your comprehension. The physical represents the spiritual. Adultery represents "mixing" which results in an impure product. The physical representation of that is staying true to your spouse. The spiritual application would be staying true to God.
Hatred and slander can be considered "murder". And on and on.
So yes, the law is eternal.
The folks over at As Bereans Did are as confused an any protestant out there.
If As Bereans Did is correct about this, Lucifer/Satan wasn't breaking any law when God decided to cast him out of Heaven. Follow their idea to its logical conclusion, and you've just vindicated Lucifer and condemned God.
I guess the fact that Jesus Christ fulfilled the Law is beyond your comprehension Anonymous @ Thursday, June 27, 2024 at 4:35:00 AM PDT. We will stand before God clean and whole because of HIM, not because of anything we've done or haven't done! Moreover, Jesus of Nazareth summarized and distilled God's Law into two Great Commandments. Hence, if one is truly living in the Spirit, loving God and neighbor, then a specific commandment against murder or hatred is rendered superfluous. So, maybe you're the one who is confused.
There could be a point of confusion here for readers. When this writer uses the term "moral law" he is not talking about the moral content or thrust of the law. He is talking about a category of laws that are principally concerned with social behaviors. For instance, the proscription of adultery is a moral law in this view. But the proscription against wearing clothing of mixed fabrics is not a moral law.
The entire Law of Moses has a moral content and most Christian denominations recognize this moral content as a part of their theology (contrary to what HWA stated repeatedly). For instance, the law against adultery is about love and loyalty in its moral content. Marriage may go away. Love and loyalty never will.
One must make a distinction here between the letter of the law and its moral content. The letter may go away. Its moral content is eternal. When you do a close analysis of the law, you must separate these two and treat them differently. The New Testament says that the letter of the law of Moses is obsolete. It does not say that the moral content of the law is obsolete. As Paul says,
"... Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life."
If one is an able minister of the New Testament, one will recognize and preach this distinction.
An adjuct to this post is the following article:
https://armstrongismlibrary.blogspot.com/2023/01/a-meditation-on-god-law-and.html
Scout
This post is a prime example of how far the supposed leaders of Sabbath Christianity have fallen.
Godless and devoid of scripture. Desiring to do evil and trying to justify sexual immorality, perversion, lying lips and lying hearts, evil throughout. Using blogs to subvert the very church of God from within.
All warned about and condemned by Jesus Christ. They cannot stop but grow worse as they age. How sad and pathetic.
People forget the full implications of Jesus' teaching that the sabbath was made for man. All the laws were made for man. The time-space continuum was made for man. Everything physical was made for physical man.
Star Trek should have been mandatory watching for all Armstrongites. There would be a much deeper level of understanding. We exist on the holodeck.
People hate doing the right thing and want to make up their own lies to live by.
As also in all his (Paul's) epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction - 2 Peter 3:16.
The letter kills, Paul says. Context, context. What did Paul mean? The letter of the law is now obsolete, gone away? No. He meant sin, defined by the letter of the law, kills - Romans 7.
Twisting scripture means twisting Paul’s words out of context, out of the letter, and into a different context to support a false conclusion. Or twisting any scripture to make it say, what it in fact, does not.
I never quite know what to do with the COGlodyte adage of "they don't keep the law because they want to be sex perverts and commit every sin known", on multiple levels.
On one hand, maybe it's just a thoughtless, parrotish repeating of a very old advertising hook - make your product look sterling, demonize the competitor to the worst extent possible. "The RSK washing machine is designed to be gentle on clothes - it won't rip or tear or rend your clothes like the washing machines you may know" even though incidents of washing machines in general actually doing that are already few and far between. That old slant works in advertising, presentations in the boardroom, politics, even in marital disputes - even though it is clearly another form of bearing false witness.
Maybe it's the COGlodytes' reflection of how many Christians simply don't live up to their ideals in general. We could all name names both well-known and only known to us in our personal lives. The problem I see with that notion is that I knew plenty of WCG members who were just as shitty as the hypocrites on the outside. Frankly, I've come to believe that more a person wants to talk about and show off their own morality, the odds are very high that they're actually a shitty person - but that won't play well in COGland, for sure, where performance art is a big deal.
Or maybe it's.... I hate to use this term, but maybe it's a fear response. An instant catchphrase that has nothing to do with any Christians anywhere, just a slogan that justifies the COGlodyte instead, telling them that yes, they must be more holy and therefore superior to the random guy at the Presbyterian church down the block. Which really doesn't sound so great when it's put that way, does it? "God, I thank thee that I am not like this tax collector..."
Did anyone ever put a gun to anyone's head and say "Keep the law"?
(The irony is that I despise clueless and hypocritical Christians myself. Many churchgoers aren't people I want to be around. I'd be perfectly happy if there were a new movement of Christianity that chose to simply exist and lead by example instead of wagging their fingers at us all the time and jumping up on self-appointed pedestals like a bunch of dorks - sort of like the Masonic "to be one ask one" concept. So I sort of get it. At the same time, come on, they're not all a bunch of slavering hedonists out there trying to rival Aleister Crowley in breaking every moral code imaginable.)
The ancient Egyptians believed that various gods controlled the natural world rather than the laws of physics and chemistry. Once these laws became common knowledge, plus observing these laws acting on their surroundings, meant that there's no doubt that these laws exist.
Luke 19:9 makes this same point with God's moral laws. "Then Abraham said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.'" Once Gods laws were pointed out by Moses, and their existence verified by everyday experience, there's no excuse for disbelieving in them. Raising the dead would make no difference since there's already ample proof.
,,,” leaders of Sabbath Christianity have fallen.
Godless and devoid of scripture”
This pretty well summarizes thI point of view. Presupposing alleged sabbath keeping defines being a believer.
The irony is such professing law keeping we all know is a lie because the fact is no one can keep the law as required in the spiritual elevation that Jesus gave to it in Matthew ch 5
Having read this comment I would add faithless to being godless and devoid of scripture.
Many of these commentators and influencing writers on here are at the very heart of Sabbath leadership.
They are a disgrace and are tares that prance about God's Feasts, they are destroyers from within. They are the fallen Sabbath leaders who possess no shame, are completely unteachable and are WORSE than any uncalled satanist. Beware them and turn to Jesus Christ.
You never quite know about anything 'RSK'. A double minded man.
Whats my name, fool?
"I guess the fact that Jesus Christ fulfilled the Law is beyond your comprehension ..."
Jesus fulfilled the law so that He could qualify as the sacrifice for us, otherwise His death would have been for His own sins.
Apparently you define "fulfilled" as "abolished", which He said He did not come to do.
Satan is crafty that way. A little twist here, a redefinition there, and he has everyone going down the wrong path.
“ Many of these commentators and influencing writers on here are at the very heart of Sabbath leadership.”
Your comments are perplexing. On the one hand you talk of commenters here being at the heart of sabbath leadership and on the other berate people for being sinners and satanic for not keeping law.
Anonymous 10:34 wrote, "The letter kills, Paul says. Context, context. What did Paul mean? The letter of the law is now obsolete, gone away? No. He meant sin, defined by the letter of the law, kills - Romans 7."
This is an old Armstrongist ploy. The idea is that the law is holy, just and good and it is the human heart that is the problem. That view has some merit but it is not the solution that the New Testament provides. The law of Moses is holy. And the human heart is faithless. But the NT solution indicates that there is also something wrong with the law. Paul says of himself and other ministers:
"...our qualification is from God, who has made us qualified to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life."
One can say it is sin that kills, because if there is no sin there is no death. One can say that it is God that kills, because if there is no God there is no law and there is no sin and there is no death. But in the statement above Paul identifies the proximate cause as of death the letter of the Law. And it is the letter that the New Testament focuses on. The letter is the operative cause of the trouble, hence, the law is replaced by the spirit. And this is a twisting of Paul's words because this same theology is supported elsewhere in the NT. The twisting comes into play when Armstrongists try to make the NT assert that the Law of Moses is still in force. The verbal acrobatics are extraordinary.
If Armstrongists lose this debate about the letter it is a real problem. Paul says that a qualified minister will not preach the letter but the spirit. This statement would disqualify everyone in the Armstrongist ministry as Christian ministers. And Armstrongists have lost this debate over and over again.
Scout
Armstrong write “.. yet we must obey the Commandments, to BE saved’
Armstrong acknowledged obedience to the law will not save a person, but then, inexplicably, makes an about turn - by stating the ten commandments ‘’must’ ’ be obeyed if we are to ‘”BE’ saved.
As best as I understand , Armstrong’s doctrine concerning salvation and the law may be described thus:
we are saved by grace as a free gift. - but this is an initial gift only arising from our repentance - we must then actually obey / DO / KEEP the commandments - if we don’t we can no longer BE saved.
the capitalized BE is important corroborative evidence that supports this conclusion in my opinion.
Such doctrine on salvation by the worldwide churches does not accord with the bible, wherein we are taught that we can never achieve salvation by our deeds/works of the law.
It is perhaps the biggest mistake amongst many by this falsely claimed one true church.
Thanks for the mention!
I had a typo in there which I have since corrected. I said, "The law about murder does not exist if morality does not exist." That should have been morTality, not morality.
Scout
The letter is the operative cause of the trouble, hence, the law is replaced by the spirit.
Thanks for the commentary and we can rejoice it is the spirit remarkable in deed cheers
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