If we cannot earn salvation and faith alone saves us, then faith is not a
good work that earns salvation. The
Bible says that salvation is a present from God and faith is accepting that
salvation. Your work of faith gets you
saved not because you deserve it but because God chooses to save believers. You believe because you have been saved. Faith, in the Bible, follows when God saved
you by his grace without asking any work from you.
Faith is not belief according
to the Bible. It is trust. It involves repentance and belief. So you
trust God to believe what he has said in his word and you resolve to obey him
and that is faith. The trust causes the
belief and the repentance and if you really trusted you would believe all God
said and commanded. So, it is belief in
God and acceptance of God’s way. Trust
that is followed by action that shows you trust is stronger trust than mere
trust that is not practiced. Faith in
the Bible could be called strong trust or more real trust. James may use faith in the sense of mere
belief without action when he wrote that faith alone not enough. The word can mean acceptance of a creed
without living it and acceptance of a creed and living it. Paul said that faith that causes good works
is necessary for salvation which to him meant faith that was sometimes one and
sometimes the other.
The Bible says that faith that saves
is both belief and repentance and is not a human work (Ephesians 2:8-10). Does that mean that God programs the saved to
believe and repent like robots? You may
have free choice but what alternatives you have to choose from is determined by
your thoughts and feelings. For example,
a person who is free to choose tea or coffee cannot choose lemonade for he or
she has forgotten that it is an option.
So, free agent can be made to go a certain way by manipulation. God can censor your thoughts and feelings to
bring you to faith. God can determine
your free will if we are free.
That would still mean that
faith is your work. It is an act you
have done in your heart. You may not
have been able to do it without God but it is still a free and voluntary
act. Salvation is all of God but not all
of God in the sense that God forces you to get saved eliminating your freedom
of choice. Faith is your work that God
has caused you to do.
If faith is your work then its
worth is in you and not in the one believed in or trusted.
It would then be a source of spiritual pride and smug
self-righteousness. It would mean that
the work of Jesus has no value for you unless you give it value. To accept the infinite work of Jesus would
seem to be an infinitely good work that deserves salvation and conflicts with
the Bible insistence that salvation is not by works. Personally, faith is always a work though the
Bible says it is not. The one who does a
good work that earns salvation and denies it is practicing self-deception.
Calvin said that everything we
do is tainted by sin and unacceptable to God and even our faith is sinful. But he saves us by faith even though we sin
in that faith. He does so out of pure
generosity and mercy and though the faith is useless. The reason faith has no merit is not because
we have no free will but because we are sinners. God pretends our faith is the faith of Christ
and does not see its faults. It is
really Christ’s faith that saves us.
Calvin would say we can do good but none of us will do it. In the sense that none of us will ever do
good it can be said that we can’t do good.
That way he can preserve free will.
Calvin “solved” the problem of how a good and fair God could honour
faith like that and accept the believer by saying that Jesus repented for and
in behalf of the sinner who tries to reach God through sin to make up for the
inadequacies. Calvin stated that anybody
who wants to be saved will be brought to salvation. One wonders then on what basis he can reject
the Catholic who sincerely wants salvation despite all the errors of
The solution to the problem of
faith being a work that saves is this.
It is not faith that saves but predestination. God has chosen you for salvation and at some
point he will cause you to believe and have faith and that faith will be
evidence that you have been saved. You
are saved by faith in the sense that faith is the principal good work needed
for salvation. So salvation by faith
alone does not mean that faith saves in itself but that faith is like good
works, a result of being chosen for salvation and saved and saves you in the
sense that it is the trigger for the activation of salvation. It does not earn salvation or merit it in any
way for the connection is not one of causation but of coincidence.
Some say that predestination
makes you counted for righteousness before God even before you are saved when
you exercise faith. So your salvation is
fixed but is not activated until you believe by the power of God.
Protestantism says that we are saved by faith alone without good
works. We are saved without works for
works. The evidence for salvation or
that you have been saved is by your doing good works.
Jesus said that the world would
know who his true followers were by their great love for one another.
He said that he was the vine
and the apostles were the branches (John 15). And apart from him they can do nothing. Meaning nothing good.
Sanctification is the making a
person holy or good. The Bible says it
is incomplete in this life (Romans
Only a true saved Christian
could be trusted to preach the gospel of God.
The problem is that it is so
easy to do some good works as evidence that one has been saved without being
really saved at all. Even Hitler could
have claimed to have been saved and offered some good works as proof. We all deceive people to make them think that
we are better than we really are.
The impotent evidence for
salvation makes one unable to be sure if one is really destined for Heaven or
not. No honest person who is supposed to
be unsaved can believe that they are completely incapable of good and will only
be able to do it when Jesus saves them.
The impotence of the evidence
can only terrify people and make them fear for the eternal salvation of their
friends.
If the good works are done
because of gratitude to God for saving you then there is a problem. You are doing them because you are glad God
saved you instead of being glad that God pleased himself to save you. That would make them bad works. The good works must be done to please God and
simply because they are his will. A
person that was really saved would be that selfless but hardly any even know of
the principle.
And how could you be saved on
your deathbed when you have no chance to do good works? When good works must follow salvation it
would seem that you have not been saved at all.
The doctrine that good works prove the gospel and are God’s testimony that his doctrine of salvation is true is one of the most inexcusable errors in the Bible and in the Protestant religion.
Conclusion
Faith is not a work. It is a fruit of the grace of God. Biblical salvation is all of grace and has no human input.