Featured Romans 3:21-26 doesn't support penal substitution

So your argument seems to be, "If sin is intrinsically destructive, and if sin is rebellion against our own happiness (as I claim), then why are there people who are living without any acknowledgement of God who seem to be happy, healthy, and live well-ordered lives? If we conceive of sin as offense that will someday bring punishment in the future, that seems to have greater explanatory power regarding such people."

My first response is that this is a practical argument, not a biblical one. This isn't looking at what the Bible says first and then trying to make sense of the world from it. This is looking at the world and then trying to understand the Bible according to it. So that is reversed.

My second response is simply: time. There may be time before what is objectively true is subjectively realized. If I drink great tasting poison, there may be 10 seconds of bliss on my tongue before the poison rots my insides and sends me into a retching seizure. The 10 seconds of bliss doesn't mean that drinking poison was not destructive.

Third, there is endless data that material prosperity and worldly goods do not bring happiness. Look at the lives of wealthy celebrities. Additionally, there is plenty of upper middle class depression, divorce, suicide, etc.

Fourth, a person's personal life might not seem to have lots of brokenness, but the world does. And it is easy to trace the world's brokenness to a lack of following God's laws.

 

We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed. We will all be changed by participation in Jesus' death and resurrection.

Again, if Jesus truly died in your place for your sins as your substitute, then you would never physically die.

 

"My argument is much more simple than that. It is that God decides what a sin is..."

Agree, and he spelled out His decision on what sin is IN THE CREATED ORDER. "And God SAW that it was good." God sees the goodness in the created order.

God is not just king. He is the creator. Any king can say "I don't like that behavior and I am going to punish it." Only the creator says "This is the way I have made the universe and you in it, to violate it is to destroy yourself."

"all sin is sin against God..."

Agree! And is God not our true source of happiness? So, to rebel against God, it is necessarily the case that we are rebelling against our own happiness, correct? This strikes me as inescapable.

Are we not designed to love God? So in rebelling against God, how are we not rebelling against our own design?

Again, how does a perfectly ordered being, whose loves are in perfect priority, with God at the center, nevertheless break God's laws? Please, tell me. It seems to me that only a person who disorders their soul, who replaces God with another object of worship, can ever break God's law. Someone who exchanges the creature for the Creator (Romans 1).

Jeremiah 2:13 "My people have forsaken the fountain of living waters, and formed broken cisterns that can hold no water." What happens to people who do this? They die. From the act itself.

Psalm 5:9 regarding the wicked - "Their inward part is destruction itself." Case closed.

 

"...with Christ, all due to our Lord's penal substitution."

You are just arguing in a circle, re-asserting the conclusion you have yet to prove.

"...is true but not really relevant."

What?!?!?! You are trying to dismiss as irrelevant a fact that is absolutely central to the whole discussion. The central claim of penal substitution is that Jesus is punished in our place so we don't have to suffer that punishment.

So when I bring up a main punishment for sin (physical death) that you will most certainly suffer, you say "well, that's not relevant." I'll have to hold your feet to the fire on that one.

True, that Paul has a sense of time which is "we have been saved, we are being saved, and we will be saved" but that doesn't change the fact that you will still face physical death, and that physical death is a punishment for sin.