Any sin, known or unknown, intentional or unintentional, moves us away from God. Sin is anomia - lack of God's law or being against it. And if we realize that God's law is a description of what He is like, then it makes perfect sense that going against that law moves us away from Him.

The difference between known and unknown sin is that known sin is so damaging to your character that it becomes so much more difficult to repent. Unknown sin may be a mistake, but known sin is rebellion.

As for Ezekiel, the timeframe depends on the individual. A change of heart doesn't always happen simultaneously with a change of all our actions. Take Namaan for example.

I think she says that you will be lost with one sin cherished. . .

Somewhere in the MH there is a statement something like that if you have a living faith in Christ you do not have to go around and worry in case you should make a slip just before the final judgment, because the judge will see in which direction you are going. . .

I have been looking for that statement.I guess the only way I find it is to read the whole book again.

To me it sounded like Palau, a small island group east of the Philippines. At that time it was the only republic in the world where the ruling president was a Seventh-day Adventist.

A friend of ours married his daughter.

Reading MH is never a bad thing.

I have never been comfortable with the idea that it's ok to sin at the end of your life if you have been good up to that point. The concept is that your trend is upward as long as you have more good than bad. That is fundamentally legalistic.

When any have sins remaining upon the books of record, unrepented of and unforgiven, their names will be blotted out of the book of life, and the record of their good deeds will be erased from the book of God’s remembrance. {GC 483.1}

Even one wrong trait of character, one sinful desire, persistently cherished, will eventually neutralize all the power of the gospel. Every sinful indulgence strengthens the soul’s aversion to God. {SC 34.1}

It looks like I conflated the two. In any case, I still believe that sin, even just one, is fatal. The only way to survive it is by repentance.

Arnold, It is amazing how it is possible for me here in Iceland to listen to a sermon of yours in California through a tiny gadget so small that I hardly feel its weight.

While listening a relative of mine called me on the phone, so early this morning I returned to the place where I left off.

Yours is a good old fashioned sermon in a modern garb. Our early pioneers never knew what a four wheel drive is. Now even our comfortable car is a 4wd and gets us through the snow in the driveway.

This is just what Jesus did; presenting the Gospel through stories from his contemporary life.

Conversion and turning away from sin to Jesus means everything. That item I mentioned from MH must never be used as an excuse, but only as a comfort for those who might be giving up in their struggle.

Your homiletics remind me of at least three of my professors, but I'll post this now.

Our homiletics professor, Dr. Beaven, warned us not to make references to Hebrew or Greek in our sermons. He claimed that would merely distract the audience.

Dr. Roland Loasby said he alway read the Bible in the original languages for his devotions. When he preached a sermmon it was usually based on a text where he used the original language to show his audience what beauty message there is in the WORD of God, quite a bit more than what you find in any translation. Loasby threatened to expel any student who used the KJV as a basis for learning the Greek vocabulary, or if they used an interlinear in class.

At times Roland Loasby would preach a wonderful sermon on the meaning of a single word in the original Biblical manuscripts. To him variation in manuscripts was no problems since there was always a wealth of spiritual knowledge left for us to study.

Then we had Dr. Siegfried Horn whose Adventist parents in Nazin Germany sent him to a Jewish school because then he was not forced to attend on Sabbath. So he learned to read the Hebrew like his own language, and later also Greek. While incarcerated by the Nazis he translated the whole New Testament.

From the Hebrew Bible he concluded that originally the ten commandments were just ten Hebrew words where comments were later added. This is one reason why the wording in the two renderings is not the same.

Horn edited the SDA Bible Dictionary in the Commentary series. His knowledge through Hebrew and archeology did not always coincide with tradition.

I'm not sure that the Bible can agree with Dr. Siegfried's conclusions about the Ten Commandments. If each commandment were one word, we would have something like the following (and I still can't do it with just one word in English):

1) no gods
2) no idols
3) no hypocrisy
4) remember sabbath
5) honor parents
6) no murder
7) no adultery
8) no stealing
9) no lying
10) no coveting

But that this cannot be the case is established by the New Testament and by Mrs. White's writings.

For example, "Honour thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with promise." (Ephesians 6:2, KJV)

If it were just the "honor" part, where is the promise? The promise was this part: "that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee."

I believe it would be impossible to wrap that promise, along with the command to honor one's parents, all into one Hebrew word--unless Hebrew is like these Asian languages where no whitespace is used to separate between words, and it is only used to delimit entire phrases or sentences, and one is choosing to define as one word that entire sentence. This would be the only way I could see of supporting such a claim as the "Ten Words." Of course, using that same yardstick, many verses of the Bible, if not most, would have been just "one word" in the original language as well.

Blessings,

Green Cochoa.

That sounds like a Catholic-trained professor. The Catholics like to keep people from understanding the Bible, and they look at only the priests as having sufficient knowledge to interpret it.

Blessings,

Green Cochoa.

Dr. Siegfried Horn was not referring to any English text, but to the Hebrew where one word can include so much more than an English word. And he was referring to an expression in Scripture which in Hebrew referred to each commandment as a single word, even though it is not translated that way into English.