manolo wrote:Mr P,
With respect, I can't see how your analogy works. People can be 'clean' of drugs but in the Christian story nobody can be clean of sin. OK, there are born agains and such like, but the 'fall' is a structural part of Christian mortality. IMHO there is no getting away from it in this life.
Another thought is that there are plenty of nice and kind parents who enjoy a drink and plenty of 'clean' people who are downright nasty to their kids, even abusive. Again, the analogy isn't working, which is a common problem with analogies of course.
Alex.
I think if my analogy wasn't working you may not protest so much. A direct disagreement is not your style.
Jesus commanded us to be perfect, even as the Father is perfect. The Father provided the Son for this purpose so in a sense perfection and sinlessness is possible.
I know bad people who are good parents, and good people who are poor parents. But I don't think this bears on the topic. A lot of people reflexively have a binary perception of bad and good people. Good people are essentially good who make only well intentioned errors, bad people are always conniving miscreants who take pleasure in other people's pain. This is not reality.
To be brief, being good in one area does not erase our sin in another. Another seed to be planted here is that the consequence of the sin is not necessarily what makes the sin immoral. Eg drug use is very easy to use to illustrate obvious relationships between sin and harm, but we get a lot of examples of harmless sin, like white lies or an occasional beer, or whatever. I don't really catalog that stuff.
I'm trying to do this without going through all the work of cutting a pasting, but in the scriptures the overall theme is the old saw virtue is it's own reward.
The OT law of Moses perspective is akin to training seals. If you want a seal to do something, jump through a hoop, you reward and punish the seal. The act of jumping through the hoop however does not produce a fish. And so progression in this case is limited. Or "dammed".
The new law of Christ is more akin to weightlifting. If you want a larger muscle there is only one way to obtain it, working that muscle. In this case the act of lifting the weight produces the muscle. If one, as is commonly the case, is lazy, and wants to neglect their calves in favor of their deltoids they have "dammed" themselves. They simply will not have the calves. No matter how glorious the deltoid, the calf will be scrawny.
Such is the nature of perfection. There are no shortcuts. God will however give you some do-overs.