Devotional 81: The Nature of Good Works: Done in Obedience to God

The Confession Read

Good works are only such as God hath commanded in his holy Word, and not such as, without the warrant thereof, are devised by men, out of blind zeal, or upon any pretence of good intention.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 16, Section 1

Introduction

Two women rise early on the same morning, each convinced she is doing good. The first rises to nurse her infant child, to prepare breakfast for her family, to answer with patience the hundred small demands that a household makes upon a mother before the sun has reached its zenith. The second rises to make a pilgrimage to a distant shrine, to light a candle before an image, to repeat a set number of prayers in a tongue she barely understands, to forego the meal her body craves as an offering of self-denial. Both women are sincere. Both believe they are serving God. Both expend real effort and endure real cost. But only one is doing a good work, and the difference does not lie in the degree of their devotion, nor in the warmth of their feeling, nor in the opinion of those who observe them. The difference lies in something far simpler and far more searching: only one is doing what God has commanded. The Confession's opening section on good works establishes a single, clear principle. A good work is not whatever men, in their sincerity or their religious imagination, decide to offer to God. A good work is only that which God Himself has commanded in His holy Word. Everything else, however ancient its pedigree or fervent its devotion, is not a good work at all. It is a work devised by men, and it stands under the judgment of the God who has already told us what He requires. This first section of Chapter 16, like the opening section of Chapter 1, establishes the formal principle that governs everything that follows: God alone determines what pleases Him. The light of nature cannot tell us what works are good, any more than it could tell us what faith is saving or what repentance is genuine. For that we need the Word, and the Word is sufficient. The seven sections that follow in this chapter, treating the place of good works in the Christian life, their relation to the Spirit, their imperfection in this life, their inability to merit anything from God, all rest upon the foundation laid here. If we do not establish at the outset what a good work actually is, every subsequent discussion about the role of works will be fatally distorted. The medieval church got this wrong, and from that single error flowed indulgences, penance, monasticism, pilgrimages, and the entire apparatus of works-righteousness that the Reformation was raised up by God to dismantle. The Divines begin where they must: with the question of definition, and with the answer that Scripture alone provides. The chapter we have just completed and the chapter we now begin are closely connected. Chapter 15 taught us that repentance is a turning from sin: particular, honest, and lifelong. But what does the penitent sinner turn toward? He turns toward a life of good works. Repentance is the negative moment, the uprooting of the weeds; good works are the positive moment, the planting of the garden. A repentance that does not issue in good works is not genuine. Yet the moment we begin to speak of good works, we encounter a danger as ancient as Eden: the temptation to define good in our own terms, to do what seems right in our own eyes and call it righteousness. Every false religion since has been a variation on that theme. The Confession, in these few words, slams the door on every such redefinition, not with philosophical argument but with the naked assertion of divine authority. God has commanded. That is the beginning and the end of the matter.

Scripture Foundation

The prophet Micah condenses the whole duty of man into a single sentence: "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" (Micah 6:8). Every word of this verse is a weapon against the notion that good works are whatever men, in their religious sincerity, decide to offer. God has shewed — made plain, published abroad, written down — what pleases Him. The era of groping in darkness is over. To ask, "What must I do to be good?" and then to look for the answer anywhere other than where God has already given it is to treat the Almighty as a pagan idol who must be placated by trial and error. The second weapon is the word "require." Good works are not our gifts to God, offered from the treasury of our own spiritual creativity. They are His requirements of us: the response of the creature to the Creator, the obedience of the servant to the Master. The pagan approaches his deity asking, "What can I give you to win your favor?" The worshipper of the living God approaches asking, "What hast Thou commanded, that I may obey?" The third weapon is the substance of the requirement itself: justice, mercy, humility, virtues lived out in the ordinary course of human life, not in the extraordinary performances of religious specialists. God does not ask for pilgrimage or ecstatic experience. He asks for the steady, unglamorous obedience of a life lived according to His Word, in the station to which He has called us. The mother nursing her child at midnight is doing what God requires. The monk chanting psalms he does not understand for a purpose God has not commanded is not. Our Lord brings this conflict into sharp relief in His confrontation with the Pharisees and scribes: "Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition? ... Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying, This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men" (Matthew 15:3, 7-9). The Greek word translated "in vain" is matēn — empty, futile, void of any real content before God. These were the most religious men in Israel, men whose entire lives were organized around the service of God. Yet our Lord declares that their worship is empty, not because they lack sincerity, but because they have substituted the commandments of men for the commandments of God. The specific issue in the passage is their tradition of korban, by which a son could declare his property dedicated to the temple and thereby evade the fifth commandment's obligation to support his aging parents. But the principle our Lord draws is universal: whenever human tradition is elevated to the level of divine command, divine command is inevitably pushed aside. Either God's Word rules and human traditions serve, or human traditions rule and God's Word is made void. Paul knew this error from the inside. Writing to the Romans, he describes his kinsmen with a sorrow that breaks through his argument: "For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge. For they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God" (Romans 10:2-3). The phrase "zeal of God" — zēlon Theou in Greek — describes a consuming passion for the things of God. Paul is describing men on fire for God, men who would cross land and sea to make a single proselyte. And yet their zeal, for all its heat, was "not according to knowledge": not the knowledge of the law, which they possessed in abundance, but the knowledge of God's righteousness that comes by faith in Christ. Their zeal drove them not toward God but away from Him, all the way to the cross where they cried, "Crucify him," convinced they were doing God a service. Sincerity is a sweet thing, but it is not a safe thing. Sincerely mistaken zeal has filled more graves than honest vice ever did. The Old Testament provides a vivid illustration in the figure of Saul, the first king of Israel. God had commanded Saul to destroy the Amalekites utterly. Saul carried out most of the command but spared Agag the king and the best of the livestock. When Samuel confronted him, Saul's defense was couched in piety: "They have brought them from the Amalekites: for the people spared the best of the sheep and of the oxen, to sacrifice unto the LORD thy God" (1 Samuel 15:15). A good intention, surely? Samuel's answer cuts through the rationalization: "Hath the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry" (1 Samuel 15:22-23). The sacrifice that God had not commanded, however expensive and sincerely offered, was not a good work. It was rebellion — and rebellion, Samuel says, is as witchcraft. Doing what God has not commanded, even under the banner of devotion, substitutes human judgment for divine authority at the very point where the two come into conflict. The man who says, "I know what God commanded, but I have a better idea," has set himself in the place of God. The writer to the Hebrews draws these threads together in a prayer that captures the positive side of the doctrine: "Now the God of peace ... make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is wellpleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen" (Hebrews 13:20-21). The good work is defined by its relation to God's will ("to do his will"), and its end is to be "wellpleasing in his sight." It is God who works in the believer, through Jesus Christ, both the willing and the doing. The good work is not an autonomous human achievement that God then inspects and approves; it is a work that God Himself originates, sustains, and completes, using the believer as His instrument. And because it is God's work in the believer, it corresponds perfectly to God's will revealed in His Word. There is no tension between the Spirit's inner prompting and the Scripture's outer command, because the Spirit who works in us is the same Spirit who inspired the Word. The man who claims the Spirit is leading him to do something the Word forbids, or to neglect something the Word commands, is not hearing the Spirit. He is hearing his own heart, and his heart is deceitful.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Assembly met in a century when the question of what constitutes a good work was a matter of life and death. The medieval church had constructed an elaborate system of good works that extended far beyond anything commanded in Scripture. To the works that God had enjoined, such as justice, mercy, worship according to His Word, and the duties of one's calling, the church had added monastic vows, pilgrimages, the veneration of relics, indulgences, the rosary, fasts and festivals not found in Scripture, and an entire sacramental system within which confession, absolution, and penance were understood as good works contributing to the satisfaction for sin. Every one of these practices was supported by centuries of tradition and performed by millions of devout souls. But the Reformers, measuring each one against the plumb line of Scripture, found them all wanting. They were "devised by men," and however ancient or fervent, they could not be called good. The Council of Trent had responded to the Reformation by hardening these practices into dogma, pronouncing anathemas upon anyone who denied that the works of a justified man truly merit eternal life or that the good works of the saints are works of supererogation. The conflict was a fundamental disagreement about who defines good works, what they accomplish, and how they relate to the finished work of Christ. The Divines began their chapter by addressing the most basic question of all, and their answer was a reassertion of the biblical principle that had been buried under centuries of human tradition: God alone determines what is good. The Confession's sentence makes several declarations. The first is positive: good works are "only such as God hath commanded in his holy Word." The word "only" is exclusive to the point of scandal. No work, however noble in appearance or ancient in pedigree, can be called good unless it has a divine warrant. Where there is no command, there is no good work. This is the regulative principle applied to ethics: just as God alone determines how He is to be worshipped, so God alone determines what works are pleasing to Him. The second element is negative: good works are "not such as, without the warrant thereof, are devised by men." A work that lacks Scriptural warrant is, by definition, a work devised by men, and a work devised by men cannot be good, because goodness is determined by conformity to the will of God, not by the intention of the doer. The Divines were not condemning every human custom. The church may establish practices for the orderly conduct of its life. What the Divines condemned was the imposition of human customs as binding upon the conscience in the way that only God's command can bind. When a human tradition is elevated to the status of a divine requirement, it ceases to be a helpful custom and becomes a tyranny. The third element addresses "blind zeal" — the zeal of Saul of Tarsus persecuting the church, the zeal that Romans 10:2 describes as passionate but ignorant. Blind zeal runs hard, but in the wrong direction. The tragedy of blind zeal is that the more of it a man has, the more harm he does. Our Lord warned His disciples: "The time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service" (John 16:2). The man who does God service by killing God's servants is not a hypocrite. He is sincere, zealous, and utterly wrong. The Divines, who had lived through a century of religious wars, knew that zeal without Scriptural warrant is a fire to be controlled, not a virtue to be cultivated. The fourth element addresses "any pretence of good intention." This strikes at the root of the error most natural to fallen human nature: the assumption that a good motive sanctifies a bad action. Saul thought he was doing good when he spared the Amalekite livestock. Uzzah thought he was doing good when he reached out to steady the ark, and he died beside it. Good intention does not transform disobedience into obedience. The heart may mean well, but if the hand does what God has not commanded, the well-meaning heart is guilty of rebellion. We all want to be judged by our intentions rather than our actions, but God judges the heart by the standard of His Word, and a heart whose intentions lead it away from obedience needs not affirmation but repentance.

Theological Depth

Calvin, in his treatment of Christian liberty in the Institutes, provides the theological substructure for this entire section. The conscience stands before God alone, and God alone has the right to bind it. When men presume to legislate in matters where God has not spoken, they usurp a throne that is not theirs. "The whole life of Christians ought to be a sort of practice of godliness," Calvin writes, "for we are called to sanctification." But the measure of that godliness is not the traditions of men but the commandments of God. Whatever goes beyond the Word deserves no place in the Christian life. To add human inventions to divine commands is to imply that God's commands are insufficient, an implication that borders on blasphemy. Calvin's language is characteristically sharp: to bind consciences where God has left them free is to exercise a tyranny over souls that belongs to God alone. The One who purchased the Church with His blood is the One whose voice the sheep hear, and the voice of a stranger they will not follow. Yet the particular evil of works devised by men runs deeper still. They inevitably compete with the works that God has actually commanded, and in that competition they always win — not because they are better, but because they are easier. It is easier to make a pilgrimage once in a lifetime than to love one's wife as Christ loved the Church every day. It is easier to fast on appointed days than to mortify the lust of the eyes every hour. Human religion gravitates toward the quantifiable and the episodic, giving the conscience something to count, while avoiding the searching, unquantifiable demands of the law. The man who has made his pilgrimage can check the box and feel righteous. The man who must love his neighbour as himself can never check the box, because the demand is infinite and the failure is daily. Works of human invention are, in the end, a sophisticated form of evasion: a way of being religious without being holy. Watson asks the diagnostic question every Christian ought to put to his own conscience: what makes a work good? The work must be commanded by God; no divine warrant means no good work, however splendid in the eyes of men. It must spring from faith: whatever is not of faith is sin. It must be directed to the glory of God; a work done for the praise of men is vitiated at its root. And it must be performed in the strength of Christ, as a branch draws sap from the vine. Watson's four tests leave no room for self-congratulation. Measured by this standard, how many of our works survive? Turretin defends the Reformed position with a crucial distinction. There are traditions that are indifferent — customs of order and ceremony that vary from place to place and that the church may freely establish for the sake of decency. And there are traditions imposed as necessary for salvation or binding upon the conscience, and these are the ones the Confession condemns. To set a human authority alongside or above the divine is to produce what Paul calls ethelothrēskeia in Colossians 2:23, literally "will-worship" or "self-made religion." It has "a shew of wisdom" but is "of no value against the indulgence of the flesh." It looks pious. It feels spiritual. It accomplishes nothing. Hodge draws four propositions from the Confession's single sentence: good works conform to the moral law of God; no work is good unless commanded; works devised by men are not good whatever their appearance; and neither blind zeal nor good intention can transform an unwarranted work into a good one. He then applies this to a perennial temptation: the tendency to substitute philanthropic activity for the specific good works commanded in Scripture. The impulse is noble, but nobility of impulse does not make a work good. If our philanthropic zeal leads us to neglect what God has actually commanded, such as the worship of His name, the instruction of our children, the proclamation of the gospel, then our zeal, for all its outward benevolence, is blind. Warfield places Chapter 16 at the center of the soteriological chapters. The Confession has established that justification is by faith alone. Now it must answer what place works have in the Christian life, and the first thing to say is that works must be defined by God, not by man. Shaw brings this down to daily life: men have a natural propensity to substitute devices of their own for the ordinances of God, because humanly devised religion is more congenial to the flesh than divinely commanded obedience. The flesh can take pride in a pilgrimage; it cannot take pride in forgiving an enemy. The religion of human invention gives the flesh something to do that leaves its self-centeredness intact. The religion of divine command requires the death of the self. Shaw's counsel is simple: test every practice by this question — has God commanded it? If He has, do it with all your might. If He has not, do not bind your conscience to it, and do not judge your brother who does otherwise.

Puritan Application

First, submit every work you call good to the test of divine warrant. Take any action you are accustomed to think of as a good work, such as your church attendance, your giving, your private devotions, your patience with your children, and ask a question that cuts deeper than any inquiry about motive: Has God commanded this? If the answer is yes, do it with all your heart, looking to Christ for strength and forgiveness. If the answer is no, if the work cannot be traced to any command or precept in Scripture, be honest enough to call it what it is: a work devised by men. This does not mean every action must be covered by a specific verse. The general commands of Scripture cover the whole of life. But any practice elevated to the status of a religious duty must be warranted by the Word, or it is will-worship. Second, do not trust your sincerity as a guide to what is good. Sincerity is precious; God desires truth in the inward parts. But sincerity without knowledge is a sword without a hilt — it wounds the hand that wields it. Saul was sincere when he spared the Amalekite cattle. The Pharisees were sincere when they tithed mint and neglected judgment. Paul before his conversion was so sincere he could describe himself as "touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless." Yet all of them were sincerely wrong. Measure your sincerity by the Word, not the Word by your sincerity. A sincere heart that trembles at God's commands is a treasure. A sincere heart that substitutes its own impulses for God's commands is a danger to itself and everyone it touches. Third, resist the perpetual temptation to add human inventions to divine requirements. The Christian life, as God has laid it out in Scripture, is already more than enough to occupy every waking hour. The duties of worship, family, calling, charity, self-examination, mortification, and prayer, pursued with Scriptural vigor, leave no room for additional religious duties. Yet the flesh is never content with what God has commanded, because what God commands leaves no ground for boasting, while what men invent leaves ample ground. The works of human invention feed pride in a way that simple obedience cannot, because obedience keeps the eye on the Master while invention keeps the eye on the self. Examine your religious practices. Are there things you do that Scripture does not command and that you regard as marks of superior spirituality? Are there things you abstain from that Scripture does not forbid and for which you secretly judge others? If so, you have begun to build an altar to a god of your own devising, and the true God will not share His glory with it. Fourth, rest in the simplicity of what God has actually commanded. One of the great liberties of the Reformed faith is that we know exactly what God requires. We are not left to guess, to grope through shadows, or to follow the shifting opinions of religious experts who claim special access to hidden knowledge. God has shown us what is good, and He has shown it plainly. The duty is uncomplicated, even if the performance of it is impossible apart from grace: do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with God. Love the Lord with all your heart and your neighbour as yourself. Worship according to the pattern of Scripture, not the inventions of men. Fulfill the duties of your calling with diligence and contentment. Care for the poor, the widow, and the orphan. Speak the truth in love. Forgive as you have been forgiven. These works are neither mysterious nor inaccessible. The simplest Christian, with the simplest understanding of Scripture, can know what God requires and set about doing it. The complexity and obscurity that attend so much of human religion are not marks of its depth but of its departure from the clarity of God's Word. When the gospel frees us from the tyranny of human invention, it frees us for the joyful simplicity of divine obedience. Fifth, let your good works be done for the eye of God alone. If a good work is only that which God has commanded, its goodness is measured by His standard and its reward is from His hand alone. The work devised by men is always, at some level, performed for the approval of men. But the work commanded by God is performed for God. The mother who rises at night to soothe her crying infant does not need the congregation's applause. The businessman who refuses to inflate his expenses, though colleagues mock his scrupulosity, does not need his pastor's commendation. The private discipline of the tongue, the secret battle against lust, the costly forgiveness of an injury no one else knows about: these are the works God sees in secret, and He who sees in secret will reward openly. The religion of human invention is always, in the end, a performance. The religion of divine command is always, at its heart, a walk with God.

Prayer

O Lord our God, who hast shewed us what is good and what Thou dost require of us, we confess that we have too often devised works of our own and called them good, substituting the commandments of men for the commandments of God. We have trusted our sincerity when we should have tested it by Thy Word. We have been zealous without knowledge, running hard in paths that lead away from Thee. We have excused disobedience with good intentions, as though a right motive could sanctify a wrong act. Forgive us, we beseech Thee, for the vanity of our self-made religion. We bless Thee that Thou hast not left us to guess what pleases Thee, but hast given us Thy holy Word as a lamp to our feet. Grant us grace to submit every thought, word, and deed to the authority of that Word, neither adding to it nor taking from it. Give us hearts that tremble at Thy commands and hands swift to obey them. Let our good works be such as Thou hast commanded: works of justice and mercy, love to Thee and love to our neighbour, faithfulness in our callings and kindness to the poor, worship according to Thy Word and service according to Thy will. Keep us from the blindness of zeal not according to knowledge, and from the folly of intentions not submitted to Thy commands. And when we have done all that Thou hast commanded — which we never fully do, falling short in everything — let us say with Thy servants of old, "We are unprofitable servants; we have done only that which was our duty to do." For our good works are not the ground of our acceptance with Thee, but the fruit of that acceptance which we have in Christ alone. We ask all these things in the name of Jesus Christ, who fulfilled all righteousness on our behalf, who bore the curse of our disobedience on the tree, and who now lives and reigns at Thy right hand, interceding for us and sending His Spirit to work in us that which is wellpleasing in Thy sight. To Him, with Thee, O Father, and the Holy Spirit, be all glory and honor, world without end. Amen.