The term “filthy rags” is not the issue. There is no significant difference when this is translated as “polluted garment.” The issue was your changing “righteous deeds” into “efforts to overcome sin” and the context of this passage which is not even to say that our righteous deeds have no value. It is not speaking of all people and in the context it makes it clear that God does have regard for those “that joyfully works righteousness.” The point in passage is that we cannot hide our sins beneath a cover of righteous deeds.
And I repeat, this “understanding” is wrong. Not only does the Bible say no such thing, but the Bible says the exact opposite, praising constantly those who repent and seek to change.
The problem is people who measure themselves as righteous by covering up their sins with something else. And this is just as true for those who cover up their sins with belief in dogma as for those who cover up their sins with righteous deeds. Jesus says we must be perfect, because there is simply no place for sin in the kingdom of God.
This is correct. Jesus said it in Matthew 19, “with men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” It is possible for God, not for churches with their dogmas or rituals, but for God alone!
All that live will die. That much is true. But Bible certainly does not say that all are condemned or damned from conception. Nor does it even say that all are condemned from birth. It SAYS all are condemned because all have sinned.
So you are in fact teaching that men can save themselves, dictating your own formula by which they can do so. This is not what Jesus said.
I have said no such thing. On the contrary I have said it is impossible for us to save ourselves by ANY works – not works of charity and not works of reciting dogma either.
this furthers my comment to Beaglelady and that’s the point. I do not really get it that people get hung up on how this all works.
We are saved as a result of our faith, however, good works come as a consequence of having that faith.
Salvation still requires works…but it is not the works that get us salvation, however, without the fruits of our faith (works), our faith is dead (as is clearly outlined by James).
I think that the problem is that modern evangelicals have this idea that works and the law are “the old ways” of doing things and that Jesus came along and stated “you don’t need the law, all ya gotta do is believe on me…love God and love your neighbour”. That is absolutely true, Jesus was right, however, the point of it was, if one catalogues the ten commandments (Gods moral law), they combine into two fundamental categories…Loving God and Loving thy neighbour! So the law has not been done away with at all, the wages of breaking the law remain as they always have been.
As an evangelical, one should not be saying, I’m not under the law anymore so I don’t need to bother with the ten commandments…that is a bit of a misinterpretation of what Jesus meant. They forget that Jesus came and lived a life according to the law.
I think of this fact and its implications in a really simple way…I am a former school teacher, would I demonstrate to my students methods that I myself do not actually want them to follow? Of course not…that is stupid.
It makes sense to me that Jesus came here to demonstrate to us that following the law is vitally important…its just that we are sinners by nature and cannot possibly keep it without stumbling.
Fortunately, Jesus has taken those failures upon himself to cover our filthy rags with His righteousness so that we are not condemned by our failures so long as we believe on Him and follow Him. However this also means that where we know what we intend to do is wrong, we are ignoring the whispering of the Holy Spirit and ignoring what the bible says about the new covenant (that God will write his laws on our heart and in our minds)
From wishful thinking people make up stuff which does not work. They want magic by which they can get a pass for all their sins. But there is no such magic.
No. We are saved by God. This is the gospel of salvation by the grace of God taught by Jesus and Paul. Faith is only the answer to the question of what we can do which is the other side of the coin. We cannot do it. Only God can do it. So we must have faith in God. But no this doesn’t mean we are saved by our faith. It means we are saved by God.
Indeed. Jesus said only God can save us. But Jesus did NOT say that it doesn’t matter what we do – quite the contrary! The problem with the young man in Matthew 19 is that he wanted to know what he could do so that his salvation would be accomplished. And the first thing Jesus asked was about fulfilling the law and all that the young man should do – so what we do is clearly important. But Jesus continued giving the young man more things to do, until he gave up – and finally explained that what the young man wanted was impossible. So the point was that there is no enough we can do – nothing by which we can get our salvation accomplished. We have to do everything we can – and that is the essence of faith, but in the end God is the only one who can save us. Thus the whole point of grace and faith is that salvation will never be one of our accomplishments – there will never be a time when we are entitled to salvation.
Thus Paul explains in Romans 10…
5 Moses writes that the man who practices the righteousness which is based on the law shall live by it. 6 But the righteousness based on faith says, Do not say in your heart, “Who will ascend into heaven?” (that is, to bring Christ down) 7 or “Who will descend into the abyss?” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead).
Faith doesn’t ask such questions because faith is the opposite of entitlement. You have to put your salvation in God’s hands, not by doing nothing but by doing everything you can in “fear and trembling”. If you think you have rules by which you can say who goes to heaven and who goes to hell then you have already crossed the line from faith into legalism.
This is overly simplistic and naïve, because the law of the Old Testament was full of things like circumcision, what you can eat, lack of personal grooming, and outrageous archaic barbaric laws for the treatment of other people – like stoning to death people caught in adultery. Some of these were even repudiated by Jesus and Paul. Thus the summation of the law in the 2 great commandments is therefore fundamental to Christianity. Frankly people spout such rhetoric like this about the law is because they want a keep a few favorite barbarisms of their own even though it is quite clear that love doesn’t have anything to do with it.
The notion that with a little blood black magic you can get indulgences for your sins is not an understanding of Christianity that I will ever have any regard for. Hiding your sins behind your religion and religious rites is not acceptable to God at all. Read Isaiah chapter 1. That is a misunderstanding of what Jesus and Paul were teaching.
Yes that is what it is really about… the hope that God can change us so we leave our sins and become more like Him.