8For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9not by works, so that no one can boast. 10For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Dig Deeper
A few years back a student of mine really wanted to be chosen for a class that had very specific high standards. It was a special class for which only a very few would qualify. The problem came in that the student simply did not have the specific experience necessary to be chosen for this class. Unbeknownst to the student, I went to the teacher responsible for choosing the handful of students for the class and asked her to let this young man into the class. I gave my word that I would be responsible if he couldn’t handle it, but I assured the teacher that I was sure he would. I had nothing to gain by doing this and only something to lose, but I did it because I really like and believed in the kid. It was, in a sense, an act of grace. He certainly didn’t deserve to be in the class of his own merit. Once he was in the class, he thought that he had earned his way into the class and became rather arrogant about it. It was a relief that he did well, but he was never really able to see things accurately because he thought that he earned something that he hadn’t.
Paul wants to make sure that this never happens for young Christians, or Christians of any age for that matter. The ability to access God’s incredible grace that He has lavished upon unbelievers through the life of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with personal merit. No matter how smart, good-looking, or moral we are, we can never earn God’s grace through Christ. We must be extremely clear that we do not have our status in Christ because of anything we have done. This serves a two-fold purpose. It causes us to be appropriately grateful and appreciative to God for what He has done on our behalf but it also reminds us that we should never look down on those who are not in Christ. We have not, after all, earned our position in Christ. God gave us a gift that we did not deserve.
Before we can consider, thoughtfully, what this great gift of grace is, perhaps we should take a moment and consider what Paul is not referring to. It has become extremely popular in our culture to understand Paul’s reference to being saved by faith as a mental agreement to the fact that Jesus lived, died, and arranged salvation through that death for those who believe that it happened. If anything is added to that, so the argument goes, it is considered works and must be rejected. In that view, doing anything such as baptism, must be considered a work and discounted as a necessary component to the process of salvation. For starters, this is not a consistent position. The same people that would argue that nothing could be added to faith, including the act of baptism, would never argue that repentance is unnecessary, yet repentance, in that worldview, should be considered more of a ‘work’ than baptism.
In order to truly understand what Paul means here, we must understand what he means by faith. It would be far more accurate to understand faith as "believing obedience" rather than "mental assent." For first century Jews, faith embodied the concept of believing that the promises of God would be fulfilled by Him, and subsequently acting on that belief (see Rom. 4:18-21). But in what do we have faith? What promises of God are we believing in? In essence, all of the promises God gave concerning blessing and redeeming the world through Abraham’s descendants, as well as many others, have all been fulfilled in the Messiah (2 Cor. 1:20). That God has acted in the life of the Messiah and made that gift available to all those who would die to themselves and enter into the Messiah’s death and his life at the waters of baptism, is what faith concerns. We have not been saved by this faith in the life of Christ, but through it. The gift, the grace all come from God, not from us. Baptism and entry into Christ’s life do not earn God’s grace or salvation, it is simply the obedient entry into it. There is simply no other way to come into contact with God’s grace in the life of Christ than entry through baptism, and to argue any other means or mode is to be rather irresponsible with the word of God and the obedience to which He has called us.
This salvation cannot be entered into through any works of the law. All the law can do is point out our sin and where we have fallen short, it cannot provide a remedy. Only through faith in the Messiah’s life can that be achieved. During the middle ages it became quite popular to believe that access to God could be gained through what people did, including excesses such as indulgences. Paul’s position will not allow for that then or now, anymore than it did in his own day. We can do nothing to gain salvation and the life of the age to come. We can choose to obediently accept God’s grace, through no merit of our own. This joining to Christ is what matters, as God does everything to us, we do nothing for ourselves. Salvation is clearly through faith (Mark 16:16; Acts 16:30-31; Eph. 2:8), repentance (2 Cor. 7:10; 2 Pet. 3:9); confession (Acts 19:18; Romans 10:9); the act of new creation (2 Cor. 5:17; Titus 3:5); and baptism (Acts 2:38; Acts 22:16; 1 Cor. 6:11; 1 Pet. 3:21). They are all so closely tied together in this saving act that to try to separate any of them from the others is pointless and unnecessary.
We are God’s work of art, His new creation in Christ Jesus, remade to show the world what true human beings are to look like. Thus, we enter into the life of the only genuine human being (one who had not been reduced to less than that by sin) with the opportunity lavished on us by God’s grace to be hidden in that life (Col. 3:3). That God has prepared this way of life in advance for us was already described more fully by Paul in his opening prayer of verses 3-14. For Paul faith is a life-changing event that will dramatically change who we are, producing the life of the Messiah in us (Phil. 1:21). It simply cannot be reduced or perverted into the belief that salvation is about making the right decision or saying the right prayer one time in our life so that we can get into heaven. Faith is about entering into God’s new creation and becoming part of that new creation. We are, as Paul, says, created in Christ Jesus to do good works. This is different, in Paul’s mind from the previously mentioned works, which referred to the works of the law. A life of works does not earn that salvation but it is the unmistakable and irreplaceable evidence of that new life. It is absolutely vital, however, to the growth of that new life that we understand that it is nothing we can enact on our own. If we don’t truly grasp that, we are in very real danger of being unaware and ungrateful for the incredible and unspeakable opportunity provided in Christ (Luke 7:36-50).
Devotional Thought
Paul says that God has, from the very beginning, been planning to have a people in Christ that would do good works and demonstrate what being a genuine, restored human being would look like. Are you appreciative of what God has done in Christ? Are you about being transformed into the image of Christ, doing good works? Or do you occasionally slip into self-focus and do very little, thinking that your own goodness will earn you into God’s presence? God’s grace results in a strange but wonderful paradox where if we recognize it, we will humbly be about transforming into Christ and doing good works, but if we don’t, we tend to do very little.
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