Grace vs. Works

Egahds! Is this still an issue?!

Jews understand the difference. Evangelicals don’t. Jews pick the wrong one. Evangelicals aren’t sure.

How does one inherit the Resurrection? Or as the Evangelicals put it, “How is one saved?”

Paul rendered eloquent arguments. . .but if you don’t know Judaism you don’t get the correct gist. Evangelicals don’t understand that “works” means rituals and requirements of the Torah— not good deeds.

Grace verses Works are doctrinal fights that never should have gone as far as they have . . .on either quarter. What the argument boils down to on either side is, “how much am I involved in my own righteousness?” But does the love of God really prompt such an attitude in people? Certainly not! The love for God does not allow one to even consider let alone dwell on their own merits. How often do you contemplate what your reward will be when doing something for one of your parents? Ever have to take them to the doctor? Pick them up? Do you anxiously consider what they might do for you in return? Of course not! Why? Because you love them. It doesn’t enter your mind to think of how much each little action will gain you in favor or prestige. You don’t walk about with scales or tally an abacus.

   Yet we are commanded to love God more than all things. The love of God is not different. It is more. If it is not the same love, we could not relate to it. We could not carry it out. The love of God is love. Period. It is not different. It is love. It is more than for all others.

   Wherein then can anyone find justification to constantly debate how they “are saved.” If we do not do this with our parents, but at the same time have constant thoughts of rewards in our minds toward God, how is it that we love him more than they?

   One obviously cannot earn the Resurrection by the works of the law (Ma`aseh ha-Torah), else the greatest commandment is violated: “Thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, all thy soul, all thy mind and strength.” If you are keeping to right ways, which God clearly instituted for everyone’s benefit, with an eye and heart to gaining from God, you indeed are not doing it out of love for God . . .not even love for your fellow man.

   God ingrained the correct motive into Moses. How many times is it said “if your hearts are right and you keep” not “your hearts will be right if you keep”? God never intended laws to supersede the state of your heart. This is made plain by how people interpret the law. Some will interpret toward their own righteousness and gain. Yet the others who keep to the same laws interpret to God’s glory and praise. Yet the same ma`aseh ha-Torah are being done in appearance.

     Man did not give the law. Therefore it does not proclaim his righteousness. A soldier does not get praise for doing his duty. He is merely following orders others have laid down, and has done them according to the method outlined in military protocol. Where is the glory? There is none. He does his duty. He did not write the laws, win the battles, nor make the peace. This is man before God. Wherein can there be salvation in this? There isn’t. The soldier lives a good soldier’s life, obeys the rules, and is discharged with honour.

   But for life there is one element missing: Love. The soldier can do his job and not love the military. There’s been many of those. But you cannot live this life and not love God. He is a jealous God. The works of the law cannot command love, nor set a beginning and an ending on it, else it is not love: it is command and compulsion, requirements and precepts. We need no detailed instructions how to love our children or parent. Yet now do we need detailed instructions what the love for God is? It is not different. It is more.

   Therefore let grace and works cease to be argued, and let love take their place. Get rid of the abacus and the scales, the lengthy debates walk from.

   The love of God is manifest toward us in that he came to walk among us and suffer for our sin. This alone showed the great love of God toward the greatest of his creation: mankind. For he put a part of his spirit in Adam, and we all of us have the knowledge of the divine nature: to love, hate, help, comfort, honour, dignity, everything that comes of God’s own nature. Herein is the reason for creation: that God might reveal himself over time to mankind, and we should have no doubt about the nature and greatness of God. Consider just how vast and complex the Universe is; how vast and complex the Universe of a single cell is— all this his hand has made! This God is the only one worth learning about: and this is the reason for life.

   Let one remember this as the motivation for his creation. In it there is no uneven weight. God gave life that we might enjoy beauty, creation, thought, feelings and hope. And within this life he teaches us of his own nature, that man should not be ignorant of his creator. God has not taken anything from us, but has given all things to us. He has made his nature plain, his standard set at the Cross, the crowning act of self denial for his greatest creation: mankind. By this act he has made our hearts supple, and enlivened our mind with what is the true way to live one with another.

   The Jew often hears the Christian drum-beating that Christ suffered on the Cross to fulfill some legal obligation in the law, as if God is some American lawyer nitpicking and parsing words. The Jew then wonders what is in the Torah that says a man must be sacrificed in order to wipe away its ordinances. There is none. Unfortunately, this is excessive Hellenized philosophy implied in some New Testament passages. It was with the growing authority of epistolary arguments in the 2nd century that such a legalistic view was taken as divinely inspired.

   Scripturally, the Prophets do not make mention of that. Indeed, how can they? When God promised Moses that a greater prophet (“that prophet”) would come at one point, the law was not even given yet. Our fathers had just heard the decalogue, for God answered Moses by voice from the mount, and we could not bear it. We insisted that Moses commune with God and we would do all what God commanded Moses “. . .but let not God speak to us, lest we die.”

   The Passover was also before the Torah was ever given. God passed over us in the house of death, and then in the Torah instituted this for a beautiful sign of commemoration: that it is his actions that bring salvation and redemption, deliverance and freedom. Why? We suffered worse in later generations at the hands of the Babylonians— frankly even within the land from our own sin. Why should Egypt be so set apart? Because God delivered us without law, without obligation, while we knew nothing of the Torah. The Passover shows his love for us.

   Again, we see this in our sins in the desert when the law was already given. In order for us to be healed from the serpents, Moses was instructed to place a snake upon a pole and raise it up so that all could look upon it and be healed. This is not a requirement of the Torah. It was expiation because of our sins and our breaking of God’s instructions.

   Such are signs of what was to come— that at the last God would pass over us and bring us out of actual sin, not just out of the oppression of a foreign nation. Bringing us up out of Egypt so beautifully demonstrated what he would do once and for all for our sins . . .and what his motive would be. There was no obligation in the law for him to do this. He planned it before the Torah.

   The Cross is the supreme act of love toward us, and the greatest act which reveals God’s attitude toward his creation: that he finally came among us and lived as us to look upon us and see our lives; to teach us direct from his mouth. It was not to close some loophole. To deny this is horrendous indeed: to say that God did not come and willfully suffer to reveal himself at last is the utmost absence of faith. All the prophets testify to this in blunt language.

In Psalm 110 David plainly declares:

   The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool. The LORD shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion: rule thou in the midst of thine enemies. With thee is dominion in the day of thy power, in the splendours of thy saints: I have begotten thee from the womb before the morning: thou hast the dew of thy youth. The LORD hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek. The LORD at thy right hand shall strike through kings in the day of his wrath. He shall judge among the nations, he shall fill the places with the dead bodies; he shall wound the heads of many on the earth. He shall drink of the brook in the way: therefore shall he lift up the head.
 

   Long before the law was Melchizedek, and none of his actions were prescribed by the Torah. Every sign, in fact, that the prophets provided of the coming Redeemer spoke not of some legal obligation: it spoke of God’s predetermined plan to reveal himself, not compunction to close loopholes. The Torah’s was set in its own place. It could not bring life, it could not deliver from the death of a serpent’s bite. God always had to provide separately for that.

   So what if some Jews corrupted that and thought the law proclaimed their righteousness. What if some, even many, gained the upper hand and thought and taught that all they had to do was keep its precepts by appearance? Everything for themselves. The world is too familiar today with “spin,” and no one can figure out how certain dominant attitudes, in fact, became dominant attitudes, whether political, racial, social, religious or geopolitical. Humankind lives in an odd world of impression, rationalizing and mythology. It becomes binding over time, and no one knows why. Most just tag along. Impressions build upon impressions and hearsay. The upshot is we are left with a modus operandi of how we do things and how we look at things. But what is the fact behind them? The status quo serving interpretation aside, what is the plain language and the rational inference from all that God has declared?

   God, in fact, designed the law to not be independent of the spirit. The law can only be approached from a right attitude. It cannot be approached with only mindless desires to placate one’s guilt or desire for righteousness based on precepts. Show and sham is not what God brought the law for. He did not design mankind to be an empty vessel. If you approach the law with an eye to attaining your own righteousness, you will fall.  If you love God and believe, the purpose of the laws becomes plain: they declare the righteousness of God and provide a safe environment for mankind to live in.

   The Lord, while amongst us, said it plain, as Moses was told that he would when he would speak directly to his people through “that prophet.” Matthew 7 If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him? Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.

Matthew 22: Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

   There it is plainly said. Here is the purpose for laws and instructions: to pass this world in peace and safety and learn of God. You do nothing for God by doing this: God is giving you the rules for a happy and safe life.

   To love God is not merely to obey, it is to believe. To love God is not to call him a liar. He said he would come. To deny that he came and took upon flesh that he might reveal himself to us is indeed dreadful. .  .and yet it too is violating the Torah. Is it not written in the book of the law?: “The LORD thy God shall raise up to thee a prophet of thy brethren, like me; him shall ye hear: according to all things which thou didst desire of the LORD thy God in Horeb in the day of the assembly, saying, We will not again hear the voice of the LORD thy God, and we will not anymore see this great fire, and so we shall not die. And the LORD said to me, They have spoken rightly all that they have said to thee. I will raise up to them a prophet of their brethren, like thee; and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them as I shall command him. And whatever man shall not hearken to whatsoever words that prophet shall speak to them, I will take vengeance on him.”

   So in the end what is the pathway to the Resurrection? The same as it always was: “Thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, all thy soul, all thy mind.” This should be the motivation for doing anything. If that is the case you will not call him a liar. You will believe what he has declared, and you will do things out of the same love that motivates his actions. From the beginning he said a greater than Moses would come. Moses understood it: He declared in his book of Job 19:25-27: “My redeemer lives. . .” in the present tense in his time. Yet he also says “I know that he shall stand upon the earth in the latter days.” What else?  “And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me.”

   Therein is the true man of God speaking. God gave the law through Moses, and yet Moses looked forward to a redeemer, a redeemer that was living and yet in the latter day would tread upon the earth to bring the Resurrection. Truly, Moses was the man of God. Let those who believe that just by keeping precepts of the Torah they will inherit the Resurrection think about Moses.

   Why a redeemer at all? Because no man can fulfill the greatest commandment. Therefore his coming and his atonement would be the greatest act there could be. If man would believe, either Jew or Gentile, he would pass over their sins. That is not an excuse to sin. The grace of God was made manifest, and to use it as an excuse is not to love God at all. How great is just a spark of faith! It opens an entire world in which God dwells, a world in which we see who he is and how he regards his creation. We see his acts, and now we see his motivation: love, nothing but goodness. Therein is faith so great. If you deny what God has done you are denying him, and you are ignorant of the whole purpose of life. You close the door that reveals God. Why should God pardon those that do not believe— that cast back something extremely well done of him?  

   No man can be the Redeemer. Therein is the grace of God found. It was in God’s heart, and when he brought it to fruition it was mercy. When you believe, it is faith. Abraham believed God, and God declared him righteous for that. Abraham did not use that as an excuse for sin. He continued to live a very just, godly life. Therefore believe. It enlivens your whole heart when you understand and acknowledge what God has done. You will discover a nature that is consuming, and obsessively commanding to learn of.  You believe? Good. What is the great command? “Love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, soul and mind.” You love God? Good. What is the great command? Believe. Though they are separate, they cannot be separated.