BY COLLEEN TINKER
Just today I received an email asking about one of those inevitable former Adventist dilemmas: “I would appreciate your understanding on faith and works as James 2 discusses the subject. As you know, the Adventist church uses this passage as another proof text that we should obey the 10 Commandments as the ‘works’ which show our faith in Jesus. However, my understanding of these ‘works’ is that through faith we will naturally want to help and to do things for others. I am interested in hearing your thoughts about this subject.”
I understand the writer’s confusion. The Adventist arguments embed themselves, and it takes time and context to retrain our way of understanding James’s words. Here’s how I understand this passage now.
First, here is some background on James that helped me. James (the half-brother of Jesus named in 1 Corinthians 15:7 as one of the people to whom the risen Christ appeared—and one of His brothers who did not believe in Him during his ministry [Jn. 7:5]) wrote this epistle probably before 50 AD. It is likely it was the first New Testament epistle that was written. Paul had not yet written his epistles (although Galatians may have been written near the same time), and Paul was the one who had been assigned by God to explain the administration of the New Covenant (Ephesians 3:8-10). In other words, James and the other apostles knew the essence of the new covenant, but they didn’t have the detailed exposition of it that Paul eventually gave to the church.
James wrote this book to the scattered believing Jews who had fled from Judea because of Roman persecution: persecution both of the Jews and of the Christians. So his audience was Jewish: they had grown up in traditional Judaism, and now they believed in Jesus—but they were still Jewish in their culture and thinking—and they didn’t have the New Testament written down yet. Here James is writing to encourage them, and he writes from a Jewish perspective because his readers know the law, unlike most the first readers of Paul’s later works who were gentiles who had no background in the Mosaic law.
Not teaching the Ten Commandments
Importantly, in the second chapter James is NOT telling these people that they have to keep the law. He is explaining, in the first 13 verses, that the law actually condemns them if they break any tiny point of the law. He further identifies the “royal law of Scripture” NOT as the Ten Commandments (v. 8) but as the statement found in Leviticus 19:18 that Jesus quotes in Matthew 7:12: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This—not the Ten, is the “royal law” of Scripture.
Next he reminds them that if they break this law, they are STILL guilty of breaking the whole law. In other words, if they show partiality to anyone, they are sinning and condemned by the law as surely as if they committed adultery or murder (v. 9–11). James, however, goes on to show them that they are no longer under that condemnation of the Mosaic law (which included the Ten Commandments).
Then James shifts his argument. In verse 12 he says, “So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty.” The Ten Commandments and the entire Mosaic law is NOT the “law of liberty” as Adventism tells its members. In fact, Paul will later write in his epistles that the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life (see 2 Cor 3; the Ten Commandments are a law of death). The Law of Liberty is NOT the Mosaic law!
In this verse it’s important to remember that James is writing to people who are already believers. This is not an evangelistic piece; he is admonishing people who have trusted Jesus and have already been born again. In Jesus’ own words, these people have believed and have already “passed out of death into life” (John 5:24). So, when he says that they will be “judged by the law of liberty”, he is not saying the Ten Commandments will condemn them for their sin. Rather, he is talking about the judgment of their works as Christians that will determine their REWARDS (1 Cor. 3:12–15; 2 Cor. 5:10; Rev. 22:12).
When believers are judged for rewards, their sin isn’t even an issue. Their sin has been taken care of by the Lord Jesus on the cross. Rather, Jesus will evaluate their works done AS BELIEVERS. If they have built upon the foundation of Christ which Paul (and the apostles) laid with works of eternal value (the works of God He gives them to do), those believers will receive rewards for those works. As Adventists we thought those “rewards” were salvation—but no! Salvation is a free gift! Rewards are given according to the quality of one’s work.
If a believer builds poorly on the foundation of Christ—if he does not invest in God’s work but builds worthlessly (wood, hay, stubble), that believer’s works will be burned up—BUT he himself will be saved—as one passing through fire. As an Adventist I thought 1 Corinthians 3:10–15 condemned people with bad works to being lost, but good works yielded salvation. That is not at all what that passage says! Salvation is never about our works. One we are saved, however, once we have believed God and the finished work of the Lord Jesus and trusted Him with all of our lives, our works do not condemn us. We either receive rewards for works of God, or our works without eternal value are burned up. But a true believer is saved on the basis of FAITH, not works.
Abraham our example
The second half of James 2 uses Abraham as the illustration of this idea. We have to remember that Abraham is the prototype of all who are saved: “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness” (Gen. 15:6). Romans 4 explains how Abraham is the “father of faith” to both the Jews who trust Christ and to gentiles (without the law) who trust Christ. Everyone who believes God and “does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly”, as Paul says in Romans 4:5, is justified by faith and his faith “is credited to him as righteousness”—just as Abraham was credited in Genesis 15:6.
Now, as one who believed God, Abraham trusted His commands and directions. Consequently, when God asked him to offer his promised son Isaac as a sacrifice, Abraham did not argue with God but prepared everything necessary for such a requirement. Abraham was not an unbeliever who was trying to appease his god. No, he was a believer in God, and he trusted His word. He had already seen how God had kept His promise to give him a natural son supernaturally. He already had accumulated wealth even though he didn’t own any land in the promised land yet. He had already seen God keep His promises.
Because he trusted God, he did this most terrifying thing that God asked Him to do. We learn in Hebrews 11 that he reasoned that God could raise Isaac from the dead if necessary. His trust in God was so complete that He obeyed when God told hum to do the most counter-intuitive thing imaginable—and God redeemed the event and disclosed His provision in a way Abraham could never have imagined. And thus, as James 2:22 says, Abraham’s already-existent faith and trust in God overrode his natural reaction to what God asked him to do. He trusted God and knew His voice and His faithfulness—and he obeyed God. And then the even greater miracle occurred; in the act of obeying God because he trusted Him, Abraham’s faith grew even more as he watched God bring about His own divine purpose through Abraham’s obedience.
In other words, the obedience James is talking about is NOT to the Mosaic Law including the Ten Commandments. He is talking about a believer’s obedience to God Himself. A believer is already a new creation, indwelt by the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:13-14) and made eternally, spiritually alive (Jn. 5:24 and Col 1:13, for example). Obedience cannot secure salvation or create saving faith. These things are entirely gifts of God to us. But a believer’s life will have fruit. If a person has truly been born again, his works cannot UNSAVE him. But a believer can refuse to obey God’s Scriptural commands to believers. In fact, I suspect that most of us will have some of our works “burned up” because we acted outside of faith in God and His word. But these acts do not “unsave” us.
Abraham, James tells us, is our example of a true believer who trusted God and did what He asked him to do—and as a result of his obedience AFTER believing, his faith grew as God accomplished His will through him. Furthermore, James makes the point that if we truly trust Jesus, our life will bear His fruit. We cannot claim to have faith in God and in His eternal work of completed atonement and show no evidence of His life in us.
There is a tension here that we cannot explain. Our works are never part of our being saved or of our being lost—and concurrently, God asks us to respond to Him in faith and trust and obedience. A believer’s obedience to God’s word is rewarded, but it is never the means of salvation. On the other hand, a believer’s disregard for God’s word is judged—but the believer’s salvation is not dependent upon those work but upon his trust in the Lord Jesus that led to his new birth and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit (Acts 16:31; Ephesians 1:13–14; John 3:18; 5:24; 6:29).
Everything God’s word says is true, even if we cannot figure out how to harmonize everything. The more I trust the actual words of Scripture in spite of apparent tension, the less confusing those tensions are—and that result is something I cannot explain. I only know that the Lord’s word is living and inerrant, and it changes me and tells me the truth. I also know that the book of James is not teaching the continuation of the Ten Commandments; rather, it is teaching believers to submit themselves to their Savior who died for them and to trust His word to them. In doing so, our faith as believers grows. †
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