Forgiveness

I see that Uncle Ken is still trying to interject a point system into the Judeo-Christian tradition. While it's true that many Christians believe that, they would be surprised to find out that it comes from the Persian prophet Zarathustra, who was neither a Jew nor a Christian. The way that the Judeo-Christian system is set up, no one is good enough to get into Heaven on his own merits. You are expected to sin, and then obtain forgiveness. The Jews used to obtain forgiveness by sacrificing animals in the Temple before the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. I'm not sure what they do now, or that they even believe in an afterlife. The official Christian position is that Jesus became the ultimate sacrifice, rendering all other sacrifices unnecessary and ineffective. Salvation is a free gift conditional only on repentance and the acceptance of Jesus Christ as your lord and master. You will probably sin after that on occasion and, when you do, you just repent and accept all over again.

I never gave temptation a lot of thought but, of course, it's in there. I remember that Jesus himself was tempted by Satan at least once. Satan took Jesus up on a mountain top where they could see all the kingdoms of the world and promised Him that they would all be His if He would abandon God and worship Satan. Of course Jesus didn't buy it, and told Satan to "Get thee behind me!" I suppose that's what we're supposed to do when we are tempted to sin. We could think of temptation as kind of a test, but you don't pass it by merely declining to sin this one time. You have to reject Satan and call upon Jesus to cast him out.

I'm pretty sure that the part about the trespasses means exactly what Uncle Ken thinks it means. You can't expect that your sins will be forgiven if you don't forgive others who sin against you. I don't think you have to forgive them, though, if they don't repent, because even God doesn't do that.