Martin Luther was a very intense and sensitive individual. Before he learned that he could be made right with God simply by receiving salvation as a free gift by faith, he was a very miserable person. He believed that he could only be right with God by being morally perfect. Finding this perfection impossible, he despaired. But when studying Paul’s epistles, he learned that we are justified, or made right with God, by faith alone, apart from our works, he was filled with an enthusiasm to see to it that this truth was known by as many as possible and that it was not lost to people again.
Because he was so jealous for the doctrine of justification by faith alone, he didn’t like the epistle of St. James. He called it an epistle of straw and said it should be removed from the canon. Why is that? It is because James seems to contradict the doctrine of justification by faith. In fact, James seems to say that a man is justified by works! You can imagine how that bothered Luther!
Many people have debated whether or not James was contradicting Paul. What are we to make of this? Do they contradict each other? This is very important for us because, whether we are presently as emotional about these matters as Luther or not, we all should be seriously concerned that we understand what the Bible says about how to be right with God. For, there is coming a day of judgment and it is in this life that we determine how we will stand on that day; whether we will be with those who go to heaven or not.
Well, let me see if I can help us to understand what James is saying so that we may have settled minds on the matter. First of all, when we read those epistles of Paul where he is especially concerned to teach us how to be justifed before God, such as Romans and Galatians, we observe that Paul is writing these letters in answer to people who are making our good works too necessary for our salvation. There were people in his time who taught that faith in what Jesus has done for us is not enough to make us just before God. Instead, we must add to our faith good works, and, for them, that meant we must dedicate ourselves to the faithful performance of the religious rites of Judaism. Unless we have these religious works added to our faith, our faith will not be accepted. In other words, faith is insufficient; our good works will determine our destiny.
Paul’s answer to these people is plain. The only good works we need in order to be saved are the works of Jesus on our behalf, in his death and resurrection. The saving benefit of those works is freely offered to us by God and we receive that benefit by faith alone. Our good works do nothing for us to make us right with God. We are justified by faith alone.
When we go to James, however, we have a different audience. In his case, he is writing to people who, instead of making works more important than they should be, they are slighting good works, making them unnessary for anything at all. Let me show you. If you read 2:14-17, notice what he says:
14: What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him?
15: If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food,
16: And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?
17: Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.
You see the situation. Here he speaks of someone who says he has Christian faith, but he does not do the Christian thing, the loving thing, to those who are in need. He thinks his good works do not matter; that he can have Christian faith without living a Christian life.
Paul was dealing with people who believed they were safe with God through their righteous works. James is dealing with people who believe they are safe with God having a faith and no works at all. Paul was dealing with works-righteousness; James is dealing with hypocrisy. Someone says they are a Christian but will not live like one. Now that’s a different matter from Paul’s.
Notice also how Paul is dealing with a more quantitative perspective while James is dealing with a qualitative perspective. Paul’s opponent wants to know how many good things he has to have all added up in his life in order to be right with God. James’ opponent wants to think that the quality of his faith doesn’t matter; it can be with works or without. That is why James asks the question in v. 14: “can faith save him”, which is better translated, “can that kind of faith save him,” a faith that ignores living the Christian life. You see the difference.
Well, since we now realise that Paul and James are dealing with two different situations, we can understand how their concerns are going to differ. They are not going to say the exact same things as each other because they are not dealing with the exact same situations.
Let us also notice that the Bible uses the word justification in two different ways. First, there is the one we have been talking about regarding Luther and Paul. This kind of justification is the imputing to us the righteousness that belongs to Jesus in order to make us right with God. It is something put to our account, received by faith alone, which makes us just in God’s sight. The Bible compares it to a garment that we put on, so that when we stand before God on the judgement day, we appear clothed in Christ’s righteousness.
But there is another kind of justification, and it is a justifying in the sense of proving something or someone as true. For example, in Luke 7, Jesus tells the people about how the ministry of John the Baptist was truly from God, and Luke says that the people who heard Jesus justified God (v. 29). In other words, they sided with Jesus in believing God had proved His faithfulness in sending John and that His ways were the right ways. God was the true God and John was truly his servant – not a fake or perhaps a hypocrite. This is what James means by justification; someone is proven to be what they say they are, or what someone else says they are.
This other kind of justification helps us to understand what James says later in the chapter about Abraham. Let’s look at it:
21: Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he had offered Isaac his son upon the altar?
Let me stop here. Do you see how, on the surface, this seems to contradict Paul? Paul writes frequently of how we are not justified by works but James says we are. This is the very kind of apparent conflict we are trying to solve. I proceed.
22: Seest thou how faith wrought with his works, and by works was faith made perfect?
23: And the scripture was fulfilled which saith, Abraham believed God, and it was imputed unto him for righteousness: and he was called the Friend of God.
24: Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.
Now, let’s go back over this remembering the second kind of justification we have referred to; the kind that proves something genuine. When James says, “Was not Abraham our father justified by works”, he means, was not Abraham proven to have true faith by his works. The story he relates about Abraham offering up his son Isaac took place about 30 years after the first time we are told in Genesis that Abraham believed God. You remember the story: after Abraham had left his home in Mesopotamia and journeyed to Canaan, God appeared to him and promised to make him the father of a great number of people. When Abraham believed God’s promise, his faith was accounted to him for righteousness. This is the kind of thing that Paul talks about. But many years later, God told Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mt. Moriah. You’ll remember that Abraham was about to kill his son when God stopped him; the whole thing was a test of his faith. What kind of faith did Abraham have? Was it the kind that would obey God no matter what God told him to do? When Abraham proved that he did indeed have that kind of faith, God said, “Now I know that you fear God.” In other words, Abraham had proven that his faith was true and so God justifies him in the second sense of the word; he declares him genuine because of his works. Thus, in the second sense of the word, Abraham was justified by his works.
Now that’s what James is talking about and he uses Abraham to prove his point. People who think that they can simply agree to Christian teaching and have a kind of faith in God that goes no farther than that, that does not go on to act on that belief and live a Christian life of obedience to God, James says that that kind of faith is in vain. It’s not the kind of faith that saves anyone. Faith without the works that go along with it, James says, is a dead faith.
Now Paul says the same kind of thing about faith. Speaking to people who have believed in Christ, Paul says in 2 Cor. 6, “We then … beseech you that ye receive not the grace of God in vain,” and then, in ch. 7, he goes on to tell them, “Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.” Paul expects people who have true Christian faith to live the Christian life- a life of holiness. We are, as the Bible elsewhere says, to bring forth the fruits of repentance.
Christian faith, in the heart of a person, is to bring forth good works and thereby, as James says of Abraham’s faith, it is perfected. Good fruit does not make a fruit tree a good tree. Rather, good fruit proves the tree is a good tree. The fruit is the perfection of the tree’s goodness. With the fruit we see and we taste that the tree is good. The good fruit enables us to justify the tree, to declare it a good tree because it is fulfilling the end for which it was created, to be provide food for man. So it is that if someone simply says they have Christian faith, but there is no fruit of that faith in their lives – if their deeds are not Christian deeds – then their faith is not the real thing. It is not a good Christian faith and they are in trouble. Their faith, says James, is in vain, and if they do not repent and truly believe in Christ, they will be on the wrong side of the Judgment.
Thus we learn that Paul and James are talking about two different aspects of faith; they are not contradicting each other, but complimenting each other. But the most important thing we have to learn is that you and I cannot expect to live hypocritically, professing to be Christians but not living like Christians, and, at the same time, have assurance of eternal life. As James asks, “Can that kind of faith save us?” He then answers, “No. Faith without works is dead”; that kind of faith has no spiritual life and and cannot lay claim to the promises of eternal life. Let us make much of how it is that we are indeed justified by faith alone, apart from works, but not to the extent that we begin to think that our works don’t matter at all. They do not justify us, but if we have no good works, we do not have the kind of faith that justifies. Saving faith is a repenting faith, an obedient faith, a faith that is living and produces good fruit. Thank God for the wonderful promise of eternal life through Christ by faith alone, but may we also seek His grace as believing people that we not presume upon God’s wonderful gift. Let us, relying upon Him alone, prove our faith is true, by keeping on the narrow way that leads to eternal life.
Amen.
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