The following is a response to this video.
Myth 2: I agree with Dr. Jennings' main point from a human relations standpoint and of course from the standpoint of God's dealings with man. Romans 5 8 is as true as it ever was.
However, I strongly disagree to the point of considering Jennings heretical regarding what he says about Christ paying our debt. Christ did go to the cross to pay man's debt to God. We owed a debt we could not pay; He paid a debt He did not owe.
"Did Christ die to get God to forgive us..."
First of all, Christ is God. You Seventh-day Adventists have a history of being confused about this.
It isn't a matter of someone forgiving you a debt but still demanding you pay, or a matter of another person paying the debt you owe to your debtor. Rather, the One you owe the impossible debt to forgave it by paying it Himself: by sending Himself to Earth in the form of the Son, the second person of the Trinity, to pay the penalty for our sins and thereby forgive them, being both merciful and just in accordance with His character.
Also, a lot of the stuff Jennings says in here is rich considering he's a Seventh-day Adventist and thus believes in the investigative judgment. Ellen G. White apparently didn't realize the phrase "it is finished" spoken by our Lord on the cross means "it is finished."
Myth 3: Yes, God's forgiveness was always present, even in the Garden of Eden. As many Christians recognize, God's slaughtering of the deer to make clothes for Adam and Eve was a picture of what Christ would do on the cross. All the animal sacrifices for the next four thousand years were a picture, a shadow, of what Jesus would do at Calvary. The believers of Old Testament times were saved because they looked forward in time to the cross.
Christ's death on the cross signified God's forgiveness that went back to Eden. If I owed the Canada Revenue Agency an impossible amount of money and Prime Minister Trudeau came to my door informing me he'd paid my tax bill out of his trust fund, I'd want a piece of paper signifying this fact. That way, during times I wondered if the government was going to demand the money from me after all, or times when I thought Trudeau's appearance might have been a dilusion or something, I would have the official piece of paper with the Prime Minister's seal confirming what had taken place. Christ's death on the cross is the seal of God having both forgiven and paid off our debt Himself.
Christ has forgiven humanity but most of humanity doesn't want His forgiveness. They don't want to be His friend.
When a Christian says Christ has forgiven me or they've been pardoned, it is their recognition, in a reconciled state, that God in the person of Jesus did this for them.
By the way, Jeffrey Dommer became a Cristian before he died.
Myth 4: Again, this is a case where both things are true. God does apply Jesus' record to us in the sense that God sees Christ in us, our willing spirit man, instead of our weak flesh man. Christ in us is God's vision, as it were, of what we will be in eternal perfection. Yet, God also recognizes that, as fallen human beings, we still have the aforementioned fleshly nature to deal with. Flowing out of our faith in what Christ did for us on the cross, God manifests good works in us, growing us toward that perfection, into the likeness of His Son that He sees in us.
Myth 5: How can a 49 year old have been married for 38 years?
Myth 6: God doesn't forget our sins because this would mean He wasn't omniscient. What God does is not bring them to mind. The blood of Christ is applied to our records in that they are covered and payed for by Christ's blood.
Christ is our advocate. When Satan accuses the brethren of their sins, God looks at the record books and says that it's dealt with by the blood of the Son. Our sins are blotted out in that they are not accounted to us because of Jesus.
When we get to Heaven, we will have a perfect understanding that, though the sins we committed in this life are a historical fact, we are not at all on the hook for them.
Dr. Jennings speaks here and in a previous session about Hell. He, as an SDA, does not believe in an eternal burning Hell. He thinks the existence of such a place conflicts with God's loving nature, that its unloving to scare people with the consequence of Hell if they don't come to Christ.
However, Hell is perfectly loving. The Lord did everything He could to save man and that gift of salvation is available to every person alive now and whoever lived. If, as I said earlier, a person doesn't want this salvation, doesn't want to be God's friend, then the loving, just thing to do is to put them in the place prepared for the devil and his angels. Satan and his demons don't have repentance available to them; the unbelievers have repentance available to them but they refuse to take advantage of it.
Hell is eternal because God's standard is perfection. If we won't take Christ's complete perfection upon us, we deserve to be punished for all eternity.
Jennings says in this previous session that death is God letting go. Death is not, in fact, God letting go because if this were the case, everyone who died without knowing the Lord would fly apart at an atomic level the moment they died. Rather, death is relational separation from God. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they no longer had the relationship with God they once did. The Bible says that if we go down to Hell, God is the re, so eternal Hell actually is, in its main component, eternal relational separation from God.
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