How are sins past,present,and future forgiven

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I truly don’t understand when i here protestants say this.

Is it sorta tied up in the idea since Jesus suffered for my sins my sins are forgiven once i put my faith in him?
 
It’s based on a few different ideas depending on which particular Protestant group you’re dealing with.

One of them is a form of strict penal substitution. This is the idea that Christ literally suffered Hell for us. In other words, Jesus wsa seperated from the Father and literally went to Hell, the place of the damned. Now because He is God and thus infinite, spending even a moment in hell is equivalent to all the humans that ever sinned spending an eternity there. When a person accepts Christ, then that person gets a sort of “check mark” in “God’s payment ledger,” saying Christ paid for all his sins. It doesn’t matter what that person will do in the future, because Christ already suffered all that penalty for him.

Another is the more general concept of imputed righteousness. In almost all Protestant systems, a person who comes to Christ doesn’t really become just. God simply declares that person just because when they accept Christ, they get the right for Christ to represent them at the judgment. When they die, God doesn’t judge them exactly, but rather, He looks at them and sees Christ, so anyone who has accepted Christ is judged not by his own life, but by Christ’s life.

The problem with the first idea is that if the Son could ever be seperated from the Father, you would have two gods, not one. God would not be a three in one Trinity, but would be at least two gods. The whole idea of the Trinity is that God is only one. One being cannot be seperated from itself. Folks that believe this idea either don’t recognize the huge problem in their belief, or just claim it’s a mystery human beings can’t understand. The problem here is by and large a very weak understanding of the Trinity. Without getting into it all, the belief in the Trinity is not one that is just blankly against reason and we can’t understand at all. Rather, it’s something we can never understand completely, but we certainly can understand the logic of it to some degree, and both modern Christianity and the early Church fathers are full of an understanding of the Trinity that begins to pull away the shades of mystery. It’s not even remotely the same sort of thing as saying the Father and the Son seperated from one another. That is to say that there is no way to understand the mystery at all, whereas the real mystery of the Trinity can be understood to a point. We can at least start to see how it makes sense. The concept these Protestants have, by the way, completely contradicts all the understanding of the Trinity that we do have, and that which the Fathers of the Church taught us.

The problem with the second theory is all sorts of teachings from Scripture which are too numerous to get into here, but which you can see examples of here: scripturecatholic.com/justification.html, particularly #3.

God bless.
 
Another is the more general concept of imputed righteousness. In almost all Protestant systems, a person who comes to Christ doesn’t really become just. God simply declares that person just because when they accept Christ, they get the right for Christ to represent them at the judgment. When they die, God doesn’t judge them exactly, but rather, He looks at them and sees Christ, so anyone who has accepted Christ is judged not by his own life, but by Christ’s life.

This is the theory i keep running into. This is also that " I’m covered by the blood of the lamb belief"

Wow, talk about not wanting to take responsibility for your own sins.
 
Boy! I wonder where you Catholics come up with this c_ _ p that protestants are suppose to believe
 
allischalmers said:
Boy! I wonder where you Catholics come up with this c_ _ p that protestants are suppose to believe
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we get it from your pastors,those of you who try and tell us we are children of the whore of babylon,and from people just like you.
 
Well, since Protestants don’t teach the ‘same thing’ from denomination to denomination, or even from church to church, we can’t really state that “All Protestants believe in OSAS” or “All protestants believe in predestination” etc.

But SOME protestants do believe in any, and all, of the above. . .and more.

My best friend (Protestant) is by no means OSAS or predestination. . .but she does believe that there will be some kind of rapture, she is not sure about whether saints are ‘awake or asleep’, but they are definitely not just DEAD, she likes the Sinners Prayer personally and thinks it is important, if not essential, to one’s being a Christian, she is born-again, she reads her Bible faithfully and feels ‘led by the Spirit’. . . and she credits the CATHOLIC CHURCH with leading her to BE a born-again Christian through her attendance at Catholic Charismatic services.

So. . . I know that not all Protestants have ALL the ‘same’ beliefs as my best friend. Some of her beliefs are very “Catholic” and common to us both—we recognize the importance of Scripture and read it daily, though I recognize Tradition and she is not sure; we both have a ‘personal relationship’ with Christ and acknowledge that by no other name are we saved, but the way we have the relationship differs. And some of MY beliefs (in the Immaculate Conception) she absolutely does not accept for herself, and some of hers (born again) I absolutely do not accept for me.

And yet–she is one of the dearest Christians on earth. And she’d say the same of me. God love her.
 
as-a-child said:
I truly don’t understand when i here protestants say this.

Is it sorta tied up in the idea since Jesus suffered for my sins my sins are forgiven once i put my faith in him?
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While the links can be informative, we can have a battle of the links. “My links can beat up your links.” At that point, we might as well all go home. People, let’s bring in the relevant arguments, not dump links on the site.

Christ is the God-man. His actions were/are eternal. I don’t want to go into this too much here, but the acts of God are outside of time. The crucifixion is out of time - although it occured in time.

Gods’ saving action, then, is outside of time, although from where we see it, it is within time. If His action is outside of time, then if you are saved, then you are saved past, present and future. Your baptism, for example, is not just a temporal act but also something eternal. If Christ gives you his Spirit, He has given it to you for good. He is the author and perfector of your faith, not you. Human cooperation is not necessary.

Catholics immediately jump on the verses about obedience and condition. The monergist (meaning someone who believes that human cooperation is not necessary, but mon- (only) -erg- (energy) -ist (believer in)) will say that if God decides to save you, He gives you the faith, He starts it, He finishes it. He also demands obedience and brings about your cooperation through discipline (see Hebrews 12 - God treats you like sons, including the woodshed)). Monergists look at the conditional verses as secondary to the great promises of assurance. They also reject the Catholic interpretation of verses such as Paul’s statement that he had not yet arrived as not referring to salvation but to sanctification.

There is a mistaken notion that justification and sanctification can be separated. That notion has penetrated Protestant thought as well as the Catholic response. They can only be separated for analytical purposes. First God imputes righteousness, then He infuses it through the process of sanctification.

There. That should be enough to make everyone mad at me.😃
 
Church_Militant said:
You might wanna listen to this MP3 Bible study on this error. It’s known as OSAS (Once Saved Always saved). It has notes here.
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Pfui. I looked at the notes to see if I wanted to hear the MP3 (Which I don’t know how to do :o). Not a decent critique. Sort of like saying Catholics worship Mary because they have statues of her in their churches. The author is attacking a pop Protestantism. The critique is readily answered and has been, even on threads around CAF.

OSAS is an acronym for a comic-book Calvinism. Please give Protestants credit for more depth than displayed in the notes.
 
Truthstalker said:
Christ is the God-man. His actions were/are eternal. I don’t want to go into this too much here, but the acts of God are outside of time. The crucifixion is out of time - although it occured in time.
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The crucifixion occurred completely in this world’s time/space. It began in our time and ended in our time. That’s why His work of redemption was “finished” once for all. He was also entombed in our time (three days and night) and bodily resurrected after the prescribed time.

As a sacrificial Substitute, God laid on Him the sins of the world (Jn. 1:29; 1 Pet. 2:24; Is. 53:5-6)), and He died in our stead. For this reason salvation is by GRACE through faith alone.John 3:14 “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life.”

It’s all related to the incarnation of the Son. The Son assumed humanity, and humanity operates in the time/space continuum of this world where, since the fall, everything has a beginning and an end.
 
Pfui. I looked at the notes to see if I wanted to hear the MP3 (Which I don’t know how to do :o). Not a decent critique. Sort of like saying Catholics worship Mary because they have statues of her in their churches. The author is attacking a pop Protestantism. The critique is readily answered and has been, even on threads around CAF.

OSAS is an acronym for a comic-book Calvinism. Please give Protestants credit for more depth than displayed in the notes.

Actually in fairness to the bible christian society, this is how the speaker( John Martinoni) taught it when he was an assemblies of God minister.
 
as-a-child said:
Actually in fairness to the bible christian society, this is how the speaker( John Martinoni) taught it when he was an assemblies of God minister.
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I don’t know much about AOG theology. Converts, in part to help justify their conversion, often downplay their past. Born-again Christians dramatize their life of sex, drugs and excitement before conversion. I have read of Protestants who tell of their idol-worshipping past as Catholics, and Catholics who tell of the sterility of the Protestant worship they used to have. Perhaps that is at play here. Perhaps he is oversimplifying things without realizing it.

On the other hand, that might be actual AOG teaching. Or he might have misunderstood their teaching and thought that was what they were teaching. I don’t know.

But there is a lot more depth to Protestant teaching than can be easily dismissed by the notes that were presented. The position there may be held by some Protestants, but not by all.
 
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