8. The alternatives of faith and works
These verses may seem difficult in both concept and vocabulary, yet they are basic to an understanding of biblical Christianity. For they concern the central issue of religion, which is how to come into a right relationship with God. This is described in two ways. First, it is called being justified before God (11). To be ‘justified before God’ is the exact opposite of being condemned by him. It is to be declared righteous, to be accepted, to stand in his favour and under his smile. Clearly, this is a matter of vital importance. Human beings have an instinctive desire to be in favour with other people – friends with friends, children with their parents, employees with their bosses. Similarly, although we are by nature in revolt against God, we still long to be put right with him.
The second description of a person who finds God is that he or she will live (11, 12). The life referred to here is, of course, not physical and biological, but spiritual and eternal; not the life of this age, but the life of the age to come. The simplest definition of eternal life in the Bible comes from the lips of our Lord Jesus Christ himself: ‘this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent’ (John 17:3).
So ‘justification’ means to be in favour with God; ‘eternal life’ means to be in fellowship with God. And the two are closely, indeed inseparably, related. We cannot be in fellowship with God until we are in favour with him; and once we are in favour with him, fellowship with him is granted to us too.
The question before us now is: how can we enter the favour and the fellowship of God? In Paul’s terms, how can a sinner be ‘justified’ and receive ‘eternal life’? These verses give us the answer, plainly and unambiguously. We shall begin by considering the two alternative answers which people have given to our question. Then we shall see how one is false and the other true.
1. The two alternatives (3:11–12)
The apostle quotes twice from the Old Testament: the righteous will live by faith (11) and the person who does these things [that is, the requirements of the law] will live by them (12). We must look at these two statements carefully. Both come from Old Testament Scripture, the first from the Prophets (Hab. 2:4), the second from the Law (Lev. 18:5). Both are therefore the word of the living God. Both say of certain people that ‘they shall live’. In other words, both promise eternal life.
Despite these common features, however, the two statements describe different roads to life. The first promises life to the believer, the second to the doer. The first makes faith the way of salvation, the second, works. The first says that only God can justify (because the whole function of faith is to trust God to do the work), the second implies that we can manage by ourselves.
These are the two alternatives. Which is true? Are we justified by faith or by works? Do we receive eternal life by believing or by doing? Is salvation entirely and only by the free grace of God in Jesus Christ or do we have some hand in it ourselves? And why does the Bible seem here to confuse the issue and teach both, when they appear to us to be contradictory?
2. The alternative of works (3:10)
For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse, as it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.’ This is yet another Old Testament quotation (Deut. 27:26), for the apostle is at pains to show, as he was later to say to King Agrippa, that he was teaching ‘nothing beyond what the prophets and Moses said’ (Acts 26:22). In this verse from Deuteronomy a solemn curse is pronounced on every one who fails to keep all the commandments of the law. It is true that the word ‘everything’ seems to have been imported into Deuteronomy 27:26 from the following verse (28:1, ‘all’), but it does not change the sense.
To our modern and sensitive ears these words sound crude and even harsh. We like to think of a God who blesses rather than of a God who curses. Some people have tried to escape the dilemma by pointing out that Paul writes not of the curse of God, but of ‘the curse of the law’ (13). It is very doubtful, however, if the biblical authors would have recognized this distinction. The law can never be isolated from God, for the law is God’s law, the expression of his moral nature and will. What the law says, God says; what the law blesses, God blesses; and what the law curses, God curses.
Indeed, there is no need to be embarrassed by these outspoken words. They express what Scripture everywhere tells us about God in relation to sin, namely that no-one can sin with impunity, for God is not a sentimental old Father Christmas, but the righteous Judge of all. Disobedience always brings us under the curse of God, and exposes us to the dreadful penalties of his judgment, to ‘curse’ meaning not to ‘denounce’ but actually to ‘reject’. So if the blessing of God brings justification and life, the curse of God brings condemnation and death.
This is the position of every human being who has ever lived, except Jesus Christ. Paul assumes the universality of sin here; he argues it in the early chapters of the epistle to the Romans. It includes righteous and respectable people who think that they are excluded. Alan Cole comments that it was the ʿam hāʾāreṣ, the common people without the law, whom the Jews regarded as being under God’s curse. But the apostle here shocks the Judaizers by asserting that the people who are under the curse are not just the ignorant, lawless Gentiles, as they imagine, but the Jews themselves as well. As he writes in Romans: ‘There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ (Rom. 3:22–23).
We know this in our own experience. John defines sin as ‘lawlessness’ (1 John 3:4), a disregard for the laws of God. And all of us are lawless, for we have neither loved God with all our being, nor our neighbour as ourselves. Further, having broken the laws of God, we have brought ourselves under the curse of the law, which is the curse of God. This is true of everyone – not only the irreligious and the immoral, but Jews descended from Abraham, who were circumcised and in the covenant of God, and yes (to apply it to ourselves today) even baptized church members too. ‘Cursed are all who do not persevere in doing everything that is written in the Book of the Law’ (10, neb).
So this is why no-one can be justified before God by works of the law. It is quite true, as an axiom, that the person who does these things will live by them (12). But nobody has ever done them; therefore nobody can live by them. Because everybody has failed to keep the law (except Jesus), Paul has to write that Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law (10). The dreadful function of the law is to condemn, not to justify. We may strive and struggle to keep the law, and to do good works in the community or the church, but none of these things can deliver us from the curse of the law which rests upon the lawbreaker.
So this first supposed road to God leads to a dead end. There is neither justification nor life that way, but only darkness and death. We cannot help concluding, as Paul does: Clearly no one who relies on the law is justified before God (11a).
3. The alternative of faith (3:13–14)
This second alternative introduces Jesus Christ. It tells us that Jesus Christ has done for us on the cross what we could not do for ourselves. The only way to escape the curse is not by our work, but by his. He has redeemed us, ransomed us, set us free from the awful condition of bondage to which the curse of the law had brought us. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us (13). These are astonishing words. As Bishop Blunt put it: ‘the language here is startling, almost shocking. We should not have dared to use it. Yet Paul means every word of it.’ In its context, in which it must be read, the phrase can mean only one thing, for the ‘curse’ of verses 10 and 13 is evidently the same curse. The curse of the law from which Christ redeemed us must be the curse resting upon us for our disobedience (10). And he redeemed us from it by becoming a curse himself. The curse was transferred from us to him. He took it voluntarily upon himself, in order to deliver us from it. It is this ‘becoming a curse for us’ which explains the awful cry of abandonment, of God-forsakenness, which he uttered from the cross.
Paul now adds a biblical confirmation of what he has just said about the cross. He quotes Deuteronomy 21:23: for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole’ (13b). Every criminal sentenced to death under the law of Moses and executed, usually by stoning, was then fixed to a stake or ‘hung on a pole’ as a symbol of divine rejection. The fact that the Romans executed by crucifixion makes no difference. To be nailed to a cross was equivalent to being hung on a pole. So Christ crucified was recognized as having died under the divine curse. No wonder that at first the Jews could not believe that Jesus was the Christ. How could Christ, the anointed of God, instead of reigning on a throne, hang on a pole? It was incredible to them. Perhaps, as Bishop Stephen Neill suggests, when Christ crucified was preached, Jews would sometimes shout back ‘Jesus is accursed!’, which is the dreadful cry mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12:3.
The fact that Jesus died hanging on a pole remained for Jews an overwhelming obstacle to faith, until they saw that the curse he bore was for them. He did not die for his own sins; he became a curse for us.
Does this mean that everybody has been redeemed from the law’s curse through the sin-bearing, curse-bearing cross of Christ? Indeed not, for verse 13 must not be read without verse 14, where it is written that Christ became a curse for us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit. It was through Christ that God acted for our salvation, and so we can only receive it through Christ. We are not saved by a distant Christ, who died hundreds of years ago and lives millions of miles away, but by an existential Christ, who, having died and risen again, is now our contemporary. As a result, we can be ‘in him’, personally and vitally united to him today.
But how? Since he bore our curse, and we must be ‘in him’ to be redeemed from it, how do we become united to him? The answer is ‘by faith’. Paul has already quoted Habakkuk: ‘the righteous will live by faith’ (11). Now he says it himself: by faith we . . . receive the promise of the Spirit (14).
Faith is laying hold of Jesus Christ personally. There is no merit in it. It is not another ‘work’. Its value is not in itself, but entirely in its object, Jesus Christ. Christ is the Bread of life; faith feeds upon him. Christ was lifted up on the cross; faith gazes at him there.
4. Conclusion
The apostle sets the alternatives before us in the starkest contrast. He tells us of two destinies, and of two possible roads by which to reach them. He speaks like a kind of New Testament Moses, for Moses said: ‘I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses’ (Deut. 30:19).
a. The two destinies
Like Moses, Paul calls our two destinies blessing and curse. It is very striking to see them contrasted in verses 13 and 14, where it is written that Christ became a curse for us, that we might inherit a blessing. So far we have concentrated on the curse; what is the blessing? It is termed the blessing given to Abraham (14), because it is the blessing which Abraham himself received when he believed, and because God said to him: ‘I will bless you . . . and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you’ (Gen. 12:2–3). As it is unfolded in these verses, the promised blessing includes justification (being put into favour with God), eternal life (being received into fellowship with God) and the promise of the Spirit (being regenerated and indwelt by him). This is the priceless threefold ‘blessing’ of the Christian believer.
b. The two roads
By what roads do we attain to the ‘curse’ and the ‘blessing’? The first road is called the law; those who travel by it are those who rely on the works of the law (10); they are under a curse. The second road is called faith; they inherit the blessing. The first group trust in their own works; the second, in the finished work of Christ.
The challenge of this passage is straightforward. We must reject the proud foolishness of supposing that we can establish our own righteousness or make ourselves acceptable to God. Instead we must come humbly to the cross, where Christ bore our curse, and throw ourselves entirely upon his mercy. And then, by God’s sheer grace, because we are in Christ Jesus by faith, we shall receive justification, eternal life and the indwelling Spirit. The ‘blessing of Abraham’ will be ours.