Protestantism teaches that if God has chosen you for salvation, he will ensure that you will believe that Jesus died for your sins and rose again to be your Lord. Good works result from trust. They have nothing to do with helping you gain salvation. They are the fruit of already being saved.
Paul, the first apostle of Jesus to write, is alleged to have been the paramount theologian and apostle of the
doctrine of justification by faith alone without good works or obedience. Was he really?
Paul taught that if the Law God
gave Moses were obeyed perfectly it would save and earn salvation (Romans
Paul said that the observance of
the Law does not save or justify anybody before God in Romans 3:20. It did not justify or save the Jews for
justification and acquittal are gained by faith alone and the Law was given to
make people aware of sin and what was sinful not to justify. By the way, the Law promises justification by
obedience but only to those who obey it perfectly and such do not exist which
is why it was not intended to justify.
God could give a Law to justify the perfect but which is not given to
justify his people for they would never be perfect. “No person will be justified (made righteous,
acquitted, and judged acceptable) in His sight by observing the works
prescribed by the Law. For [the real
function of] the Law is to make men recognise and be conscious of sin”.
Protestants understand he means salvation is without the Law and that
you can be saved without obeying God. In
short, they think he is saying that once you are saved you need no longer obey
to get saved but will remain saved no matter how you sin.
Paul said that the Law came in order to increase sins so that grace would
be increased.
This sounds terrible. God told us what right and wrong were to make
us sin more so that he could save us.
But if God did not do this then he would be sinning for it is a sin to
let a person do wrong and not tell them.
That is like using a person to commit a sin by them. So, God had no choice. Paul would have given this answer and those
who were as evil as himself would have propagated it even though the hypocrisy
of what they were doing in preaching about morality to the ignorant proved that
it was a big lie for the ignorant needing to be taught would show that God must
have let them be ignorant and thus to have sinned through them. The only solution is to argue that everybody
believes in the Law and won’t admit it.
Anyway, this is a digression.
Paul said that where sin was
plentiful grace was made even more plentiful.
After, Paul said, “What shall
we say to all this? Are we to remain in
sin in order that God’s grace favour and mercy may multiply and overflow? Certainly not! How can we who have died to sin live in it
any longer? Are you ignorant of the fact
that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His
death?”
What is this about? The people he criticises think that the more
you sin the more grace you get without you abandoning your sin. He condemns this view and tells us that we
don’t have to sin anymore. He says that
you get more grace the more sin you cast off.
He is condemning the view that justification is a licence to sin all you
want for the justified is dead to sin – doesn’t need to sin.
The doctrine of justification
by faith alone does not teach that the more you sin the better but it does
teach that unrepented sin need not cost you your
relationship with God. Since goodness is
imputed to you though you are evil this imputation cannot be increased for it
is just a declaration and not a quantity of grace. The more you sin the more grace you are
offered to get you out of sin but that does not mean justification is a license
to sin. The grace of imputation is different
from sanctifying grace because the first is like a blanket over a manure heap
and changes nothing while the latter changes you if you let it. The first is God pretending you are good and
the latter is God making you good.
The people would not have been
claiming that the more they sin the more grace they get if they meant
sanctifying grace therefore it is just the grace of imputation or justification
that they meant. They thought the more
you sin the better for it increases goodness in the sense that God has to
correct the badness by balancing it with the goodness of the saviour Jesus
Christ. But imputation is only a
reaction to a bad situation that should not happen in the first place for
people should not sin. Imputation should
not be abused for it should not even be necessary.
Paul meant the grace of imputed
righteousness when he said that sin increases the grace of righteousness and
that those who thought it makes the other kind of grace abound were wrong.
This fact alone proves that
Paul did indeed teach the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith and that
the Catholic Church has departed from Christianity in many things.
The difference is that in
Protestantism justification leaves you exactly as you are and in Catholicism it
makes you really righteous and not just declared righteous.
Paul in Romans 5 says that God proved he loved us when Jesus died for us when we were still sinners. This shows that he believed nobody was saved until after Jesus died. It shows that the trendy Christian lie that people were saved before the death of Jesus but by it though they didn't know what was happening up for what it is, a lie.
Paul asserts that Jesus has made us righteous by dying for our sins. He argued that since Jesus did this it is likely that he would save us from God's anger. Study this carefully. If Jesus has made us righteous by dying for our sins then God isn't mad at us any more. So how can Paul say he is? The answer is that though Jesus has made us holy and righteous we are still sinners. Jesus was holy and righteous for us, in our place. He did the good works for us so God credits them to our account. So God is not angry with us because the debt of goodness we must offer to him is paid. But he is angry that we are still sinners. The only way you can be a righteous sinner is by a legal fiction.
Paul then declares that since we have been reconciled to God by his Son's death we can count on being saved by the life of Jesus. Paul teaches that we can count on this not just because Jesus has reconciled us with God but also because we are filled with joyful trust in God through Jesus.
Does he mean that our joyful trust is evidence that we are being saved by the life of Jesus?
But to say we can count on being made whole or saved because we trust makes no sense. It is like saying we trust because we trust.
He means the trust is not natural trust. It is not ours. It is trust infused into us by Jesus. It is supernatural. Only magical trust can be a sign to us that we can count on God.
Ephesians 2:8-10
goes: “For it is by free grace (God’s unmerited favor)
that you are saved (delivered from judgement and made partakers of Christ’s
salvation) through [your] faith. And
this [salvation] is not of yourselves [of your own doing, it came not through
your own striving], but it is a gift of God; Not because of works, lest any man
should boast. For we are God’s [own]
handiwork.”
If the writer of this letter really meant
that then why did he not make it clear that he meant graceless works? He should have for graceful works are still
works.
He was writing to Greek converts more than
ex-Jews. To the Greeks works would have
been understood as any works. If it is
true that Paul believed that only graceless works have nothing to do with
salvation and that was why the Law of Moses didn’t save, then the Greeks would
not have been familiar with this usage.
They were not Jews and had never known the Law of Moses. The issue about grace and the law was a
Jewish-Christian one. Works just meant
works here.
If Paul had meant graceless works he would
have said so. The readers were not
experts in his theology for he had to tell them a lot so they wouldn’t have
understood if he meant what the lying Catholic Church says he did. Who would embrace a theology that said good
works could not save and then said they could if they were done by grace and
were not your works? That makes no
sense.
If you get grace and even if it is free and
you get it by going to sacraments or doing good works you can boast. This shows that the passage clearly teaches
salvation or justification by faith alone and even this faith is God’s work not
yours so you have nothing to feel superior to anybody else about.
“And that I may [actually] be found and known as in Him, not having any
[self-achieved] righteousness, that can be called my own, based on my obedience
to the Law’s demands (ritualistic uprightness and supposed right standing with
God thus acquired), but possessing that [genuine righteousness] which comes
through faith in Christ (the Anointed One), the [truly] right standing with
God, which comes from God by [saving] faith” (3:9 AB).
Paul’s righteousness is not his
own.
Catholics say that it is not
his own in the sense that God influenced him to be holy.
But then he would have written
“not just my own”.
Then they say that all we do is
God’s doing in the sense that God holds us in existence, keeps us existing and
acting and gives us help apart from this to do good. But Paul says he no longer has his own
righteousness but God’s. If Paul meant
what Catholics say then he could not have said that his new righteousness is
different from the old righteousness he once had.
So, Paul meant that he was
regarded as righteous in the sight of God by a legal fiction and not that he
really was righteous. It is like God
pretending that a sinner is holy and declaring that he is not a sinner in the
legal sense.
This makes the verse an
important one in relation to the dispute between Catholics and Protestants
regarding whether or not we are saved by faith without good works or obedience.
Catholics would say that Paul
would not be made righteous merely by obeying the Law if he meant to earn
salvation by it. He could only be saved
by obeying the Law in faith, that is, the faith that comes from God, and shows
that one has his grace and is right with him.
Paul meant he really was righteous according to the Law and gave no hint
that he meant he was righteous his own way and by his own standard based on the
Law which would not be following the Law in reality.
If Paul believed that then why
did he not say that his righteousness was no good because he obeyed without the
grace of faith? The only reason is that
he did not believe the Catholic doctrine.
The righteousness Paul had was
the good deeds of Jesus covering over his sins for which they made up. God has to look on the good side all the time
that is why he can stop looking on our sins and just concentrate on the
righteousness of Jesus which to him is our own.
It is like somebody earning you a coat and when you put it on and they
give it to you it is yours. The
righteousness of Jesus is Jesus’ gift to me so it is mine but it is not my
righteousness in the sense that I have done the obeying for I have not.
CONCLUSION:
Paul contradicted the Roman Catholic idea that salvation is by faith and good works to teach that salvation produces good works but you will be saved without them and that to depend on them is to indicate that God's grace is not in you.