“Grace through Faith”

Sunday, October 10, 2021

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2.8-10)

These verses are justly loved by many, but they are also the topic of fierce debate, between those who adhere to extreme versions of “faith only” doctrines, and those who emphasize the requirement that we act on God's offer.  Typically, the argument goes back and forth as each side seeks to emphasize its preferred focus within the passage.  One group shouts, “saved through faith!”  The other shouts, “created for good works!”  Neither budges, and no progress is made toward reconciliation.  The situation is oddly similar to the current political climate—most people generally just want to be left alone, but for someone to pick up the phone if they need to call 9-1-1.  But the people who really care, who are deeply engaged in public affairs, become more polarized by the day, and more entrenched both in their opposite policy proposals, and in their conviction that the other side is made up of the most evil people ever to walk the earth.

That’s clearly ridiculous; is the solution, both in politics and the church, to form a compromise right in the middle?  No.  In the political sphere, to make up an absurd example, if one side of the argument were to advocate the seizure of all children nationwide at age 8 to work in the salt mines, and the other side disagreed, would the proper solution to be to wait until the children turn 13 before enslaving them?  No, clearly one side has it right, and the other has it wrong.  When good and evil compromise, the result is still evil.  In the same way, we should not be deceived by the allure of compromise in our doctrine.  Compromise isn’t the highest good.  Good is the highest good.  If the truth happens to lie somewhere between the ideas of the most extreme fringes, we shouldn’t be surprised; but that doesn’t mean we can throw a dart anywhere between them and declare the spot where it lands to be the new truth.  Many religious bodies, exhausted with arguing, simply vote their way through the crises, as if the will of the Lord can be determined by a 51% majority opinion among men.  God gets to make the rules, and our job is to listen and obey, not nitpick, interpret them out of existence, and substitute our own; and yet, not just today but throughout the long history of Christianity, if we look we will find many times when men put themselves in the place of God and professed to make the rules on his behalf.

But even if we shun that approach, refusing to play God is the easy part—we understand that these aren’t just matters of life and death, but matters of eternal life and death, and so we hold fast our convictions.  But those convictions don’t always line up, from person to person.  We end up with two or more groups of people who have become, through their apparently honest desire to please God and get to heaven, irreconcilable.

Funnily enough, that’s exactly what Paul was leading up to when he wrote the words about grace, faith, and works in Ephesians 2.  His next sentences aren’t just about the salvation of individuals, but about the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile:

Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands—remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. (Ephesians 2.11-16)

These two groups of people—one vastly outnumbering the other—seemed irreconcilable.  God’s chosen people Israel had the oracles of God, the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the law, the worship, the promises, the patriarchs, and to top it all off, the Christ is, at least in fleshly terms, a member of their nation (Ro 3.2, 9.4-5).  The Gentiles, on the other hand, were separated from all these things, and had no hope of salvation, even though many of them sought God.  Understandably, there was a great deal of hostility between the two, as a result.  The Jews passed judgment on the Gentiles, and the Gentiles resented it and persecuted the Jews in return.  This conflict was often violent.  As much as it ever truly ended, it was with the destruction of the Jews’ cities and appropriation of their land, after which the survivors were scattered to the winds.

But what has Christ done?  Purely out of his deep love for the world, he gave his life to break down the wall between these two groups, unifying them into one body.  That’s his goal for all of us, too.  He requires that we be faithful to him.  He requires that we devote ourselves to good works.  But we are saved by his grace.  God reached out to us even though we were utterly undeserving, and through his doing—not ours—opened the path to reconciliation.  Let’s keep that in mind, look first to him as our Lord and shepherd, and spread the news far and wide.

Jeremy Nettles

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