Now, That's a Good Question!

It doesn’t mean that God directly punishes a person for a sin somebody else committed. God says that each person is punished for their own sins. However, we still deal with the consequences that come down from previous generations and in that sense miss out on some of the benefits of God.

Galatians Paul tells us that Christ on the cross became a curse for us; he was accursed—cut off from the Father, sent outside the camp, even crucified outside the city limits of Jerusalem—to make certain that the whole of God’s curse promised to the evildoer would be visited upon himself so that he might bear the whole the sinner’s punishment.

be cursed in the Old Testament meant ultimately to be cut off from the presence of God, to be sent out from his immediate presence, just as the scapegoat was cursed in Israel by being driven out into the wilderness, away from where the presence of God was focused in the center of the camp.

People are making a lot of assumptions when they consider that this is a reference to hell and that Jesus went there between his death and his resurrection.

but it seems to be a later addition and has caused no small amount of controversy ever since.

We know that the Apostles’ Creed was not written by the apostles, but it’s called the Apostles’ Creed because it was the early Christian community’s attempt to give a summary of apostolic teaching.

it when he discovered that he’d actually promised to kill his own daughter.

In fact, we would call that an unlawful vow. Once a person makes a vow to sin, he is required not to keep that vow if it obligates him to sin

Jephthah’s vow was a sinful one. He should have never made that vow in the first place. God didn’t command him to make it; he made that vow and then in a mistaken concept of vow keeping thought it was his moral obligation to keep

Scripture speaks in the strongest possible language prohibiting the sacrifice of human beings as a religious activity. Religion can sink no lower than when it seeks to appease the deity through human sacrifice—with the obvious exception of the perfect sacrifice that was offered once for all, where God sacrificed his own Son for our sins.

So perhaps Abraham was thinking that although he knew what the law said, if the author of that law told him to break it, he had better break it.