Posted on 06/27/2023 3:03:34 PM PDT by Faith Presses On
It is not easy, I think, for any Christian to come to a well-developed understanding of faith and works. The New Testament, if not read with faith, can seem contradictory. Jesus says over and over that people's faith and belief in Him saves them, but He also says over and over that people will be judged by their works. I know it took me some years of meditation to come to what I felt was a very good sense of how the two relate.
Of course, this has been a major point of contention, too, between Protestants and Catholics.
The other day, the Lord pointed out something to me about how trees and their fruit can be used to get a better understanding of faith and works. Faith is like the tree, and works are like the fruit of a tree. We all have faith in people and things. There are different kinds of faith, in a sense. When we have faith in God, or else wrongly put the faith due Him somewhere else, these are trees we worship. The fruit produced will be the type of tree that it is.
Sometimes people can worship both the Lord and idols. And no human is yet perfect, getting all of our fruit from the tree of faith in God. When someone turns away from idols, and to Christ, it's often when they realize that the tree of worshipping God produces much better fruit than the trees of the idolatrous world.
And as for faith and works, a fruit is not a tree, and a tree is not a fruit. Any fruit that is of the Lord will be come from the tree of faith in Him.
Thank you for this.
‘Pod.
You’re welcome.
I sort of lost the thought a bit at the end as I was sort of in a hurry, but the point is that faith — no matter who or what it’s in — is a tree, and works are the fruit of a tree. When our faith is in the Lord when it should be, then there will be the fruits of it. And, of course, in a secondary way, we have a much more limited faith in people and things. That produces a type of works too. We can also, though, wrongly put our faith in these secondary trees, as well as outright idols, false gods. And those fruits will ultimately be sin and evil.
The issue here centers around the quote James used from Genesis 15:6. “Abraham believed the Lord, and He credited it to him as righteousness.” Paul used this very same verse to prove that righteousness comes through faith alone. (Romans 4:3) Did James and Paul disagree? If they were both writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, this would be impossible. So what’s going on?
The context of Genesis 15:6 is God’s promise of a biological heir for Abraham. Abraham believed that promise before any of it came to pass, and his belief was credited to him as righteousness, just as Paul said. Sometime later Sarah convinced him to have a child with Hagar to “help” the Lord make good on His promise. Abraham agreed and when he was 86 years old, Ishmael was born. (Gen. 16:16)
But that wasn’t what God intended. 13 years later God said it was time for Sarah to become pregnant and the next year, when Abraham was 100, Isaac was born. (Gen. 21:5) God had kept His promise. (Notice that when Abraham tried to make God’s promise come true, it just caused a big problem. But when God was ready, all Abraham had to do was believe.)
Sometime after that, God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. In referring to Isaac in Genesis 22:5, Abraham used the same word that he used in referring to his servants. It means everything from “boy” to a young man about 20 years old. We don’t know exactly how old Isaac was, but we do know that Isaac was old enough to understand what was happening and had agreed to it. (In Gen. 22:6-7 the word translated together means they went up the hill united.)
From all this, we can conclude that several decades had passed between the time of the promise and the time of the sacrifice. Through all this time Abraham had believed God, and now he was being called upon to act on his faith. The writer of Hebrews said that Abraham did so because he believed that God would keep His promise even to the point of raising Isaac from the dead if necessary. (Hebr. 11:19)
Please note that Abraham didn’t initiate this action, rather he responded to God’s call. Verse 24 shows that a person of faith will respond in faith to the call of God, and in doing so will prove his or her faith to be sufficient for justification. This is not something God needs to learn about us, by the way. He already knows who are His. Neither is it intended to allow others to judge us. It’s not their concern. It’s something we need to learn about ourselves. As John wrote, “Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything
The problem some have is thinking that they can be saved by works alone. That’s where your notion of different kinds of trees is useful. Works, or fruit, come as a result of, or because of faith. Other kinds of trees may produce fruit of some sort, but to no avail.
Salvation is free. Discipleship costs everything.
Some months ago the gospel reading was Jesus’ “hate your parents for my sake...take up your cross” teaching. When I was teaching on it, I asked why people would be so willing to accept the idea that “you will own nothing, and you will be happy.” The answer is that it is how Jesus’ disciples are supposed to live: everything we have is owned by Him, everything we do is commanded by Him, and we live in the joy of the Lord. The leftists want the state to own everything and command what we do, but that is Satan’s perversion of God’s desire for us.
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