KingJ, you are spinning in a circle of your own self-contradictions because the unyielding legal math of Scripture has backed your conditional system into an absolute corner. You have swallowed the camel of my premises, yet you are desperately trying to choke on the gnat of the inescapable conclusion. Let’s expose the total structural failure of your latest deflection.
Look at the total logical disaster you have just confessed to the entire forum. You openly admit that:
- Justification equals the non-imputation of sin (Romans 4:6–8).
- Reconciliation equals the non-imputation of sin (2 Corinthians 5:19).
- The elect were reconciled to God by the death of His Son while they were still enemies and unbelievers (Romans 5:10).
Let’s apply strict, unbending courtroom logic to your admissions: If an individual’s sins are
not imputed to them, it means their legal debt-bill has been completely blotted out and canceled from the cosmic ledger (
Colossians 2:14)!
If that non-imputation happened to the elect
while they were still unborn enemies 2,000 years ago, then
their legal justification was an accomplished, locked-in fact before they ever drew a single breath!
You try to invent a fictional category by claiming, “I do not agree that the elect were individually justified at the cross... Scripture never says that.”
KingJ, did Jesus Christ die on that cross for a vague, corporate cloud of faceless text, or did He stand as the targeted, legal Surety for
individual, specific sheep whose names were written in the Lamb’s Book of Life before the world began (2 Timothy 1:9, Ephesians 1:4-5)?
If He died for individuals, then those individuals had their specific sins blotted out at Calvary. If their sins are not imputed to them, they are legally justified in the Court of Heaven. You are forcing a monstrous contradiction onto the text: you want a sinner to be objectively "reconciled to God" via the non-imputation of sin,
while simultaneously being "legally condemned to the wrath of hell." That is an absolute judicial impossibility.
You then run to
Romans 5:1—
“being justified by faith, we have peace with God”—and demand that I produce a text that says a person is justified before believing.
Once again, your complete lack of covenantal and grammatical precision leaves your exegesis in a total shipwreck. You flatten the entire Bible into a single carnal category.
You fail to realize that in the vocabulary of the Holy Spirit, “Justified by Faith” structurally means “Justified by CHRIST!”
Let’s let the Apostle Paul explicitly define his own terms. Look at
Galatians 3:23:
“But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed.” And verse 25:
“But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.”
Let’s apply some unyielding logic to your conditional system: If the word "faith" in these verses means an individual's personal act of believing, then your theology forces you to argue that nobody in the Old Testament ever believed in God until New Testament times! But that is historic and scriptural nonsense. Abraham had personal faith; David had personal faith.
Paul is
not talking about a timeline in human psychology
; he is using the word "faith" as a metonymy for the historical arrival of Jesus Christ and the Gospel dispensation!
When the Bible says we are "justified by faith," it is pointing entirely to the
objective work of Jesus Christ, who is the sole Object of faith! Where is the legal payment made that clears the sinner from wrath? Look just eight verses later in
Romans 5:9:
“Much more then, being now justified BY HIS BLOOD, we shall be saved from wrath through him.”
The cross actually worked, KingJ. The elect
godly seed (Malachi 2:15; John 1:13) were legally justified, reconciled, and perfected forever at the cross while they were still unborn enemies (
Hebrews 10:14). They possess
no internal spark of divine nature while they are unregenerate; they are totally lost in the wilderness of Adam (
Ephesians 2:3).
But because they are named as heirs in the Will (
Hebrews 9:15), the Holy Spirit breaks into their graves via
immediate regeneration without the Gospel, takes away the heart of stone, and sovereignly implants a
new spirit (Ezekiel 36:26)!
When the external report of that finished cross is outwardly proclaimed by the preacher, their newly given faith looks to Christ, embraces the truth, and
justifies them in the court of their own conscience, bringing PEACE to their troubled minds! Faith is the spiritual eye that reads the ledger; it is not the currency that buys it.
You haven't offered a rebuttal, KingJ; you have simply closed your eyes to the unyielding legal definitions and the absolute finality of the Holy Ghost's text to protect your human pride. You are forced to try and divorce the non-imputation of sin from justification because the text leaves your conditional system completely ruined. Stop turning the fruit of the Spirit into a human work, stop preaching a failed cross, and bow to the absolute finality of sovereign grace!