We can discuss a topic from the standpoint of Scripture only, or we can include the Spirit of Prophecy. It's hardly reasonable for you to attempt to prove things using the Spirit of Prophecy, and then prohibit my using her. I'm stating her position to refute your claims as to her meaning.

You believe she taught that God could not legally pardon without Christ's dying. But she clearly didn't believe this, because she stated that God offered to pardon Lucifer again and again, without Christ's having died. There's no reason for me to prove this from Scripture, because your claim has to do with her position. So I'm refuting your interpretation of her position by using her own words.

1. What was the currency used to pay the price to redeem sinners?
TE: God's love and life given in Christ is the currency.

2. What was the price?
TE: The price was Jesus' life.

3. Who determined the ransom price?
TE: We required the sacrifice of Jesus' life in order to be saved.

4. When was the price paid?
TE: The price was paid when the life of Christ was given.

5. To whom was the price paid?
TE: I stated "not to whom, but for whom" and I also stated that it was for those whom God loved.

6. What was purchased?
TE: We were purchased, we being the human race.

7. What would have happened to A&E if Jesus hadn't agreed to pay the price to redeem sinners?
TE: If Christ had not given His life for the salvation of man, man would have been lost.

8. Why couldn't A&E or angels pay the price?
TE: The salvation of man requires the life of Christ, who was (and is) divine. An angel does not have salvific life to give to us.

Tom, you couldn't be more wrong about what she wrote.

God in His great mercy bore long with Lucifer. He was not immediately degraded from his exalted station when he first indulged the spirit of discontent, nor even when he began to present his false claims before the loyal angels. Long was he retained in heaven. Again and again he was offered pardon on condition of repentance and submission. (GC 495)

Satan had excited sympathy in his favor by representing that God had dealt unjustly with him in bestowing supreme honor upon Christ. Before he was sentenced to banishment from Heaven, his course was with convincing clearness shown to be wrong, and he was granted an opportunity to confess his sin, and submit to God's authority as just and righteous. (4SP 319)

Tom, in light of the following insights, I am having a hard time accepting your theory that Jesus had to die because we required it.

Instead, these insights teach me law and justice required Jesus to pay the debt we owe, and the debt we owe is suffering and death proportionate to our sinfulness.

Jesus didn’t pay some other debt. He paid our debt in particular, as if He were a sinner paying the sinner’s debt in the lake of fire.

Jesus is our substitute. He didn’t pay a debt we required of Him. Not at all. Jesus paid the debt we owe to law and justice, not a debt He owes to us.

We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ's death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself. All the same, some of these theories are worth looking at.

The one most people have heard is the one about our being let off because Christ volunteered to bear a punishment instead of us. Now on the face of it that is a very silly theory. If God was prepared to let us off, why on earth did He not do so? And what possible point could there be in punishing an innocent person instead? None at all that I can see, if you are thinking of punishment in the police-court sense. On the other hand, if you think of a debt, there is plenty of point in a person who has some assets paying it on behalf of someone who has not. Or if you take "paying the penalty," not in the sense of being punished, but in the more general sense of "footing the bill," then, of course, it is a matter of common experience that, when one person has got himself into a hole, the trouble of getting him out usually falls on a kind friend.

Now what was the sort of "hole" man had gotten himself into? He had tried to set up on his own, to behave as if he belonged to himself. In other words, fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realising that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor - that is the only way out of a "hole." This process of surrender - this movement full speed astern - is what Christians call repentance. Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here's the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person - and he would not need it.

Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off of if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going back. It cannot happen. Very well, then, we must go through with it. But the same badness which makes us need it, makes us unable to do it. Can we do it if God helps us? Yes, but what do we mean when we talk of God helping us? We mean God putting into us a bit of Himself, so to speak. He lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another. When you teach a child writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters: that is, it forms the letters because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it. Now if we had not fallen, that would all be plain sailing. But unfortunately we now need God's help in order to do something which God, in His own nature, never does at all - to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God's nature corresponds to this process at all. So that the one road for which we now need God's leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. God can share only what He has: this thing, in His own nature, He has not.

But supposing God became a man - suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God's nature in one person - then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God's dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God's dying unless God dies; and he cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all.
(Why Did Jesus Have to Die?)

He was engaged in paying the vast debt which man owed to God. The penalty must be exacted. The punishment has been endured by the sinner's substitute. He took the place of the transgressor, and suffered the penalty of justice that must fall upon him. Jesus suffered the extreme penalty of the law for our transgression, and justice was fully satisfied. Its demands have been met, its authority maintained. By paying our sin debt of death, Jesus removed a restraint from God’s love. His suffering and death allows the grace of God to act with unbounded efficiency.

Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off of if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like.

But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.(Luke 6:35)

I said that she wrote that God offered to pardon Lucifer again and again and offered him the opportunity to confess his sin before being banished from heaven.





Clearly what I stated is correct.

If you wish to start a separate thread to discuss this in more detail, that's fine. However, if you're going to make the point that according to her that God did not have the legal right to pardon those who transgressed His law without Christ's death, then why shouldn't I be able to refute your argument from her writings?

Tom, in light of the following insights, I am having a hard time accepting your theory that Jesus had to die because we required it.

TE: What you've stated here is not very clear. Since you're referring to this as my theory, here's how I would express the idea. One of the reasons Jesus died was to accomplish our salvation. He died to "bring us to God," as Peter put it.

Instead, these insights teach me law and justice required Jesus to pay the debt we owe, and the debt we owe is suffering and death proportionate to our sinfulness.

TE: I wouldn't say instead, but that this is simply expressing the same thought in different words.

Jesus didn’t pay some other debt. He paid our debt in particular, as if He were a sinner paying the sinner’s debt in the lake of fire.

TE: I thought your idea was that these deaths were different. Now you're equating them? I actually agree with what your saying this time.

He was engaged in paying the vast debt which man owed to God. The penalty must be exacted. The punishment has been endured by the sinner's substitute. He took the place of the transgressor, and suffered the penalty of justice that must fall upon him. Jesus suffered the extreme penalty of the law for our transgression, and justice was fully satisfied. Its demands have been met, its authority maintained. By paying our sin debt of death, Jesus removed a restraint from God’s love. His suffering and death allows the grace of God to act with unbounded efficiency.

TE: I agree a lot more with C. S. Lewis' explanation than yours.

TE: Our whole problem is that we are not right with God. What needs to happen is that we be "brought to God," as Peter puts it. So God did what was necessary in order to accomplish this.

TE: I still haven't seen you present anything from Jesus Christ in support of your ideas.

TE: Also I've repeated pointed out that historically your assertion is impossible, unless you are setting forth the idea that nobody understood why Christ had to die until centuries after His death. Who can you cite before Calvin that expressed the idea that Christ had to die to effect God's ability to legally pardon?

You have yet to prove she said God was willing to pardon and reinstate him after he was guilty of sinning without making it conditional upon him accepting the atoning, substitutionary death of Jesus, without making it dependent upon Jesus paying his sin debt of death.

Based on this unbiblical theory (which you freely admit cannot be proven from the Bible), you go on to surmise, Jesus did not have to die for us to satisfy the legal demands of law and justice, that is, to give God the legal right to pardon and save penitent sinners.

But all the quotes I have shared in my last few posts teach the exact opposite of your theory.