Is Faith a Work? Contending with Calvinism, Part III

Those who argue that faith is purely a gift of God contend that a dead man has no power to exert his will.  If he did, he would be “saved” before he was saved.  Yet Scripture addresses this false dilemma by identifying the quickening power of God.  Such a power does not render the soul passive but active, alive to its need.  We call this process conviction.  Those who respond are saved.  Those who do not remain lost.  What the Calvinist would call irresistible grace becomes a problem to the person who was convicted but said “no.”  We all know people like this.  If we argue merely that God chose not to give that person faith, what then?  The simple fact that there is no way to prove this doesn’t seem to bother anyone who believes this. 

The only people it should bother are those who are not saved and who wonder if they ever will be.  Like waiting to be swept up in a tornado, they wait for a manifestation of grace and meanwhile exempt themselves from responding to grace.  But we forget the Scriptures: “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.”  We forget the power of the gospel itself to awaken the will in unregenerate persons.  We do have a choice, and our response to grace must be by faith.  I say again, grace ceases to be grace when it is not available to all.  By removing the requirement of faith, you make salvation accessible only to some—the elect, or the “select.”  Again, I say, this sleight of hand creates the very entitlement to salvation that defined the Pharisees. 

It is the spirit of legalism to invent loopholes in God’s Word to create its own brand of salvation.  The biggest loophole today is that we may sin with impunity if we are saved by grace alone.  This sounds more like Antinomianism than Pharisaism, to be sure, but this doctrine—with the force of Pharisaical law—has bound and gagged the true intent of grace, in effect not removing sin but condoning it.  Sadly, no one is talking about the removal of sin today.  Reformed theology and Progressive Christianity alike have attacked a Biblical doctrine of holiness, for holiness has been equated with legalism.  I say our prevailing brand of Christianity is not only every bit as legalistic now as it was in Christ’s day but more so.  In fact, I would argue that the more Antinomian we become, the more legalistic we become. 

If there is no “law” against something, we allow it.  Even when there is a law against it, we allow it.  Oh, we don’t allow it in the practical settings of moral society, but we allow it in the kingdom of God, for, no matter the “law” we break, we can’t break our own salvation.  I call this legalistic.  The spirit of legalism can be identified every bit as much with what it “legally” allows as by what it “legally” forbids.  How can we not see this?  The Pharisees legally “allowed” the crucifixion of Christ, yet His crucifixion was anything but legal.  The charges were false, the trial was clandestine, the verdict was “not guilty,” yet the execution occurred—the very reason Pilate washed his hands of it.  What greater trick of Satan than to call faith a work and to say we are saved by grace alone?  Grace without faith isn’t grace at all but election which promotes a heinous elitism that is antithetical to the Cross. 

Faith is not a work, and yet faith is seen only by works.  Paul refers in Romans 3:27 to the “law of faith.”  This law is being broken by those who have written their own law—salvation by grace alone—out of feigned loyalty to God.  Jesus said, “If you love Me, obey me.”  God has joined faith to our salvation, and no one is saved without faith.  What God has joined together let no man put asunder.  Calvinists talk out of both sides of their mouth.  They claim that we are saved by grace alone, but when challenged on this point, they aver that grace and faith are one and the same, both bestowed as a gift of God in the moment of our salvation.  Faith, therefore, isn’t something we exercise but something we receive.  How do we receive faith?  By faith?  No, by grace.  Hmm. 

What indeed has happened to this historic revelation that so shook the foundation of Catholicism: “The just shall live by faith”?  Now faith is called a work.  If they admit that faith is not a work, they would have to reconsider the Scriptures that require faith for salvation, and they would also have to admit that it is possible to lose that salvation if we lose our faith.  Then down goes the unconditional eternal security that is the natural consequent to unconditional election.  Then also down goes their sense of entitlement for having been elected.  So, they make faith the same as grace—a package deal, both bestowed by God.  Piper and others say that Ephesians 2:8-9 reads in the Greek as if the neuter pronoun “it” refers both to grace and faith alike: “it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.”  Clearly, it is the salvation that is the gift—the salvation by grace through faith.  Why should we remove the only thing the Lord requires of us?  Because that “thing” is the condition of our salvation as long as we remain on this earth.  “The just shall live by faith.”  And “without faith it is impossible to please Him.”  We know that “whatever is not of faith is sin.”  And on and on we go, uniting Scripture with Scripture in the fabric of faith.  

But we would rather trust in a tradition (a law) of our own making.  Like the Pharisees, we would rather think we have it made; we can never be lost.  But why would the Lord free us from the Pharisees only to enslave us by the Antinomians?  It is sin that enslaves, and any doctrine that plays games with sin most surely denies the Biblical means of our salvation.  But we know that lawlessness will define the last days, for such is the breeding ground for the Antichrist.  Indeed, the spirit of lawlessness has created its own legalism with a mask of Antinomianism.  This we see in Progressive Christianity.  You try to disprove their heresies by the Bible, and they say there is no “Bible,” at least not one that is authoritative and definitive.  Shows like The Chosen undermine the Bible every day and redefine the Biblical Jesus.  Try saying anything against this charlatanism and you have wolves to pay. 

The fact remains that a false association between legalism and obedience has led many modern-day Christians to reject obedience.  This fallacy of false equivalence can only be refuted by Scripture.  If we really believe that obedience and legalism are the same thing and that, therefore, salvation requires no repentance, we are prone to believe that the person who most believes in holiness is the least likely to be saved.  This sounds absurd, and it is, but in everyday life, this is exactly the perception that is winning.  Just read the responses for one of The Chosen articles.  Person after person attacks any application of Scripture—any standard at all—as legalistic and Pharisaical.  Pastors of said doctrines would deny that they are preaching a sinning religion, but the reality begs otherwise.  Sin is not only tolerated among Christians, it is applauded.  Backsliding is considered to be the norm.  Thus, the true doctrine of grace has been slandered by its loudest supposed adherents.  

Legalism has become the punching bag to please the Antinomian, but no one is more legalistic than the Antinomian.  The lawless person requires obedience to his own standards and rejects God’s standards.  “Oh,” but you say, “the Pharisees upheld the law.”  No, they did not.  They circumvented the law with their own loopholes and, thus, broke the spirit of the law in order to make “legal” their evil, selfish desires.  For this sleight of hand, Jesus called them a brood of vipers, slippery and venomous. Today most churches have embraced a lawlessness that negates most of the New Testament. This lawlessness is, in actuality, the new legalism because it has rendered God’s law null and void.  

In the same way that the Pharisees used the law as their host, Antinomians use grace as their host.  Both Antinomians and Pharisees are religious parasites sucking the life out of the true gospel.  The very thing by which Christians ought to be able to identify one another—the power of a changed life—becomes the thing that marginalizes them as outcasts.  Try upholding a standard today and see what happens.  You will without a doubt be labeled a Pharisee.  You know you are anything but, but your religious “friends” have so slandered the gospel that their eyes have been blinded to the truth.  These belligerent enemies of the cross are themselves the new Pharisees.  Our culture has surely succumbed to postmodernism and to its descendant, meta-modernism.  Today, we consider ourselves victims to be petted and pitied.  Our own feelings define our salvation.  “Poor darlings; they could not help themselves, and who are we to judge?”  Thus, justice is fallen in the streets, and wisdom is decried as foolishness.  

We may think we have progressed, but we are Pharisees, to be sure.  The Pharisees in Jesus’ day created loopholes to cancel out the commands of God and taught these loopholes as if they were commands.  Because they found clever ways to bind and gag the law and then called these ways “legal,” the word “legalism” rightly defines them.  They found “legal” ways to exploit widows, to dishonor their parents, to permit divorce, to accuse falsely their political enemies, and to worship idols of their own making.  Their compulsory handwashing symbolized their fixation on appearances that merely disguised true corruption.  Jesus called them whited sepulchers full of dead men’s bones. 

This deadness and corruption became the Lord’s target in the Sermon on the Mount.  “You have heard it said, but I say unto you.”  Jesus exposed their licentious motives and called them a brood of vipers, sneaky and malicious.  He pulled the rug out from under them not only by exposing their motives but also by proclaiming His purpose to fulfill the entire law, such that not one jot or one tittle (otherwise obscured by the Pharisees’ tradition) would pass from the law until all would be fulfilled.  Jesus never condemned the law itself but the Pharisees’ tradition surrounding the law (see Matthew 15:9).  We are living in an age of such darkness that we call this darkness light and light darkness.  But the Lord’s Word is settled forever in heaven.  

What does all this amount to for us today?  Today we have patted ourselves on the back for our efforts to denounce Pharisaical tendencies and have thus rather gleefully thrown out the law—not merely Old Testament law but the commands of Jesus.  Why?  Don’t we see them as not only irrelevant to our salvation but as equivalent to Pharisaism?  The common teaching—gone “viral,” as it were—that there is nothing we can do to change our salvation—lies at the bottom of our disrespect for the Lord’s commands.  Scripture is bulging with refutations to all of this nonsense, but no one reads it.  And good luck trying to proclaim it.  Heretical teaching has assumed the force of law, replacing Scripture to the point that Scripture itself is seen as unbiblical. 

Follow all of this logically, and the entire Bible, including the New Testament, would be whittled down to the length of a website.  Yes, I’m afraid in the going theology of most professing Christians, the New Testament would be pretty thin.  In place of John’s letters to the churches or Jude’s epistle or James’ we would find Reformed teachings and writings of popular voices such as John Piper.  In order to reinforce our loyalty to the doctrine of salvation by grace alone, we have thrown out historic requirements for salvation such as repentance and faith, for these are “works” and, therefore, not grace.  This is heresy of the highest degree and makes a mockery of the Cross.  Lord, deal with these workers of iniquity.  Come quickly, Lord Jesus!