Devotional 85: The Imperfection of Works: Even the Best Are Mixed with Sin

The Confession Read

We cannot by our best works merit pardon of sin, or eternal life at the hand of God, by reason of the great disproportion that is between them and the glory to come; and the infinite distance that is between us and God, whom, by them, we can neither profit, nor satisfy for the debt of our former sins, but when we have done all we can, we have done but our duty, and are unprofitable servants: and because, as they are good, they proceed from his Spirit; and as they are wrought by us, they are defiled, and mixed with so much weakness and imperfection, that they cannot endure the severity of God's judgment.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 16, Section 5

Introduction

There is a story told of a wealthy merchant whose young son, eager to contribute to the family fortune, emptied his piggy bank onto his father's desk one evening — a small pile of tarnished coins amounting to perhaps three pounds and forty pence. The father, who had just closed a transaction worth ten thousand pounds, looked at the offering with a tenderness the boy could not have anticipated. He accepted the gift, thanked his son, and later that evening quietly returned the coins to the piggy bank with interest the boy would not discover until years afterward. The child's offering did not contribute to the father's wealth. It could not. The father's resources were already complete. The transaction was, from beginning to end, an act of paternal love, not a business arrangement. This is a close human analogy for the truth the Confession sets before us, and even it falls short. The distance between a child's pocket money and his father's fortune is measurable; the distance between our best works and the glory to come is infinite. The father could, in theory, be profited by a large enough contribution; God cannot be profited by anything a creature does. And the child's coins were genuine currency; our works, however genuinely good, are so mixed with imperfection that they could not survive the severity of God's judgment. The doctrine of this section is not a counsel of despair. It is the demolition of a lie that has burdened the conscience of every Christian since the apostles first preached that salvation is by grace. The lie takes many forms, but its essence is always the same: that our works — our prayers, our charity, our self-denial, our moral consistency, our doctrinal precision — somehow contribute to the ground of our acceptance with God, that they constitute a kind of currency with which we purchase, or at least partially subsidize, the eternal life Christ has won. The human heart, even the regenerate human heart, clings to this lie with a tenacity that ought to alarm us. We want to pay our own way. We want to stand before God with something in our hands that we have produced. We want the verdict of the final day to include some acknowledgment of what we contributed to the enterprise of our salvation. And the Confession meets this desire not with pastoral accommodation but with the sharp edge of theological precision, cutting away every ground of self-congratulation until nothing remains but the naked grace of God, and teaching us that the emptiness of our hands before the throne is not a tragedy to be mourned but the only posture in which a sinner can receive what God delights to give.

Scripture Foundation

The Apostle Paul, writing to the church at Ephesus, gives us a concentrated statement of this doctrine in Scripture, and he gives it not as a grudging concession but as the triumphant climax of a soaring passage he composed. "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9). Every word in these two verses has been weighed on the scales of controversy for five centuries, and yet their meaning is clear to anyone who will receive it without evasion. Salvation — the whole of it, from its origination in the Father's eternal decree to its consummation in the resurrection of the body — is by grace. The Greek word chariti carries the sense of unmerited favour, kindness shown to one who has no claim upon it, generosity that arises entirely from the character of the giver and not at all from the deserving of the recipient. The instrument by which this grace is received is faith, and even that faith — lest we should be tempted to make our believing a kind of work that distinguishes us from others — Paul immediately clarifies is "not of yourselves." The entire transaction is a gift, the Greek dōron, something freely bestowed with no expectation of repayment. And the reason Paul gives for this arrangement could not be more revealing: "lest any man should boast." The Greek verb kauchēsētai means to glory, to take pride in, to claim credit for. If our works contributed even one percent to our salvation, that one percent would be ground for boasting, and boasting is the one thing that has no place in the economy of grace. God saves in such a way that all the glory returns to Him, and the only way to accomplish that is to exclude human works from the ground of salvation entirely — not partially, not provisionally, not with the caveat that grace makes up what works lack, but entirely. Paul returns to this theme in the same epistle with a question that strips away every pretense: "Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law" (Romans 3:27-28). The Greek construction makes boasting actively shut out, not merely absent. The mechanism of its exclusion is the law of faith: faith being not a new kind of work but the precise opposite of work, the open hand that receives what Another has accomplished. But Paul is not finished. Two chapters later, he delivers a crucial verse on the subject of merit in Scripture, a verse that the Confession's authors must have had ringing in their ears as they composed this section: "Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness" (Romans 4:4-5). The language is drawn from the marketplace. Misthos is the wage a labourer earns by the sweat of his brow; opheilēma is the debt his employer is legally obligated to pay; charis is the gift that carries no corresponding obligation whatsoever. Paul reduces the entire question of human merit to an inescapable dilemma. If eternal life is a wage, it must be earned, and if it is earned, God owes it to the worker as a matter of strict justice. But if eternal life is a gift, it must be received, and the only qualification for receiving a gift is need, not desert. The God who justifies the ungodly — the word is asebē, the impious, the profane, those who have no claim upon divine favour whatsoever — is the God who justifies in a way that leaves no room for human boasting, because the objects of His justification bring nothing to the transaction but the very ungodliness from which they need to be rescued. To these great Pauline passages we must add a truth drawn from the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, a truth so fundamental that it underlies everything else the Confession says about merit. Elihu, speaking in the book of Job, asks a question that cuts through every pretension of human merit with a single stroke: "If thou sinnest, what doest thou against him? or if thy transgressions be multiplied, what doest thou unto him? If thou be righteous, what givest thou him? or what receiveth he of thine hand?" (Job 35:6-7). The logic is relentless and it cuts in both directions. Our sin does not diminish God, because God is not dependent upon our obedience. And our righteousness does not enrich God, because God possesses all perfection in Himself. The Creator is not a merchant who can be bargained into a better price; He is the self-existent, all-sufficient I AM, and the very category of "profiting God" is a category error that betrays a failure to understand who God is. The apostle Paul picks up Elihu's question centuries later and applies it to the doctrine of grace with an explicitness that leaves no room for evasion: "Who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen" (Romans 11:35-36). No one has ever placed God in his debt. No one has ever performed a work for which God must say, "Thank you — I owe you one." Every good work we perform is itself a gift from God, enabled by His Spirit, performed through His strength, and offered back to Him as a sacrifice of gratitude — but never, under any circumstances, as a payment that establishes a claim.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Assembly framed this section with two specific opponents in view, and the structure of the argument becomes clear when we understand what they were answering. On one flank stood the Council of Trent, which in its sixth session had anathematized anyone who denied that the good works of the justified "truly merit eternal life," not apart from Christ's merit, but as a secondary and subordinate ground of the believer's final acceptance. On the other flank stood the antinomians, who had taken the Reformation's recovery of justification by faith alone and twisted it into a license for the flesh, teaching that since works contribute nothing to salvation, they may be neglected without consequence, and that the Christian may live as he pleases since grace will cover all. The Divines had to chart a course between the Scylla of Roman merit and the Charybdis of antinomian license, and they did so by constructing a single, densely reasoned sentence that addresses three distinct aspects of the question — any one of which would be sufficient to demolish the notion of human merit, and all three of which together form a wall against which every attempt at self-justification must finally dash itself to pieces. The first aspect is what the Confession calls "the great disproportion that is between them and the glory to come." This is an argument from proportion, and its force is mathematical. Merit, in the precise theological sense the medieval schoolmen had developed, requires a certain equivalence between the work performed and the reward received, not a perfect equivalence, for the schoolmen acknowledged that no creature could merit strictly from God as from an equal, but a real proportionality nonetheless. A day's labour merits a day's wages because the value of the work bears a genuine, measurable relationship to the value of the compensation. But what possible proportionality can exist between a lifetime of stumbling, sin-mixed obedience and an eternity of perfect, unclouded communion with the triune God? The glory to come is "an eternal weight of glory," to borrow Paul's phrase — a participation in the divine blessedness, a sharing in the joy of the Lord, an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading. To suppose that any finite act of obedience, performed by a creature whose best love is lukewarm and whose purest devotion is distracted, could merit such a reward is to commit an error of infinite proportions. It is to imagine that a child's sandcastle, however carefully constructed, entitles him to ownership of the beach, or that a single drop of water, however pure, purchases the ocean. The second aspect is what the Confession calls "the infinite distance that is between us and God, whom, by them, we can neither profit, nor satisfy for the debt of our former sins." This is an argument from ontology: from the very nature of God as the self-existent Creator and of man as the dependent creature. God does not need our good works. He is not improved by them. His blessedness is not augmented when we obey, nor is it diminished when we sin. The relation between Creator and creature is not a relation of mutual advantage in which each party supplies something the other lacks. God lacks nothing, and the notion that a creature could confer a benefit upon the Creator — could add something to His glory, could supply something He needs, could place Him under obligation — is a category mistake so fundamental that it betrays a failure to understand who God is. The Confession sharpens the point by specifying the debt in question: "the debt of our former sins." Every good work we perform is already owed to God as a present duty, quite apart from the accumulated deficit of past transgressions. The servant who works a full day in the fields today cannot apply his obedience to yesterday's deficit, because today's labour belongs to the master by right the moment it is performed, and the master owes him nothing for fulfilling what he was bound to do. A debtor who makes his regular payment this month has not reduced the principal accumulated from years of default; he has merely avoided adding to it. The third aspect is the humbling aspect of the three, because it touches not the disparity between our works and the reward, nor the distance between the creature and the Creator, but the very quality of the works themselves. The Confession draws a distinction that was central to the Reformed understanding of sanctification: "because, as they are good, they proceed from his Spirit; and as they are wrought by us, they are defiled, and mixed with so much weakness and imperfection, that they cannot endure the severity of God's judgment." Every truly good work arises from a double agency: the Holy Spirit produces the good in the work, and the believer, as the instrument through whom the Spirit works, introduces the imperfection that clings to it. The same prayer that rises from a believing heart is genuinely good insofar as the Spirit prompts it; but it is also wandering, distracted, weak in faith, and mixed with self-regard insofar as it passes through the channel of a still-imperfect human soul. The same act of charity that relieves a neighbour's need is genuine love insofar as the Spirit enables it; but it is also alloyed with the desire for recognition, the calculation of advantage, the residue of reluctance that would not be present if the Spirit held unopposed sway over every faculty. The result is that our best works, examined under the severity of God's judgment — examined not by human standards but by the standard of the perfected law that requires flawless love to God and neighbour at every moment — cannot endure the scrutiny. They are good, truly good, for the Spirit who produces them produces nothing but good. But they are not pure, and the God whose eyes are too pure to behold iniquity cannot accept them on their own terms. Here the Confession echoes the words of our Lord: "when we have done all we can, we have done but our duty, and are unprofitable servants." The parable in Luke's Gospel from which these words are drawn had already served the argument of Section 4 against supererogation. Here it serves a different but related purpose: the impossibility of placing God in our debt. The servant who has plowed all day, who has come in from the field exhausted and hungry, does not expect his master to serve him dinner. He expects to continue serving, because service is his station and duty his natural element. The concept of having earned something beyond what duty requires simply does not arise in the relationship between a servant and his master — and the relationship between every human being and God, the Confession insists, is precisely that of a servant to his master. The debt of obedience is infinite, because the obligation to love God with all the heart and the neighbour as oneself is infinite, and no finite creature can discharge an infinite obligation.

Theological Depth

Calvin, in the Institutes, approaches the question from a more fundamental angle: he asks whether the very concept of merit has any place in a creature's relationship with his Creator. The word "merit," he observes, carries the assumption that a human being can place God under obligation, an assumption "too arrogant" to be entertained by anyone who has understood the nature of God or of himself. When Scripture speaks of reward, it is not describing a payment corresponding to the intrinsic value of the work. It is describing a gift God has freely attached to the work, not because the work merits the gift but because God delights to crown His own grace with further grace. A father promising his child a treat for completing his chores is not paying a wage; he is giving a gift freely attached to the duty, and the child has no basis for boasting. So God's rewards are gifts, not payments, and the language of merit obscures this by importing into the divine economy categories drawn from human commerce that have no place there. Turretin develops the argument with scholastic precision. He identifies three kinds of merit the medieval doctors recognized: meritum de congruo, merit of congruity, by which works make it fitting for God to grant grace; meritum de condigno, merit of condignity, by which works performed in a state of grace truly deserve eternal life as a matter of strict justice; and the merit of Christ, which alone is properly meritorious because it alone proceeds from a person of infinite dignity and a nature perfectly sinless. Turretin demonstrates that the first two categories collapse under their own contradictions. Merit of congruity assumes a sinner can do something that makes it appropriate for God to be gracious — but grace, by definition, is given because God is generous, not because it is appropriate. Merit of condignity assumes a proportionality between the work and the reward that cannot exist, for all the reasons the Confession enumerates: disproportion, distance, defilement. And even if these obstacles could be overcome, every good work the believer performs is itself a gift of grace, enabled by the Spirit, and one cannot merit by using borrowed capital what one could not merit without it. Hodge, whose commentary on the Confession brings these doctrinal heights down to the level of daily Christian experience, draws attention to a pastoral truth that is easily overlooked in the heat of theological controversy: the doctrine of non-merit is the great leveler of Christian pride, and pride is the sin that most easily besets the religious heart. The man who understands that his best works cannot merit the smallest particle of God's favour will not compare himself favourably with his brother whose sins are more visible than his own. He will not congratulate himself on his doctrinal precision, his moral consistency, his sacrificial giving, or his patient endurance of trial, as though these constituted a claim upon God that his less consistent brother could not make. He will see, with a clarity that humbles every pretension, that every Christian stands before God on exactly the same ground — the righteousness of Christ received by faith alone — and that the differences in sanctification that distinguish one believer from another, while real and significant for many purposes, are entirely irrelevant to the question of acceptance. The most mature saint in the congregation has no more merit before God than the thief on the cross. Both are accepted on the basis of Another's righteousness, and both will spend eternity praising not their own works but the grace that saved them despite their works. This truth, Hodge insists, is not a counsel of despair but the foundation of genuine humility and the death of every form of spiritual competition. A church that truly believes this doctrine is a church where the strong do not despise the weak and the weak do not envy the strong, because both know that they are debtors to grace alone. Shaw adds that this doctrine demolishes the instinct to read our circumstances as a ledger of divine approval. If our best works cannot merit the smallest blessing, then our seasons of trial are not a simple wage paid for specific sins — the whole framework of merit and demerit measured on a human scale has been swept away by the cross. The connection between obedience and blessing is gracious, not mechanical: the connection of a Father who delights to give good gifts to His children, not an employer who pays wages to His workers. Owen traces the damage the doctrine of human merit inflicts upon Christian assurance. If good works truly merit eternal life, even secondarily, then Christ's merit is, by definition, insufficient, and the believer can never know whether his own contribution has reached the threshold. The man who believes his works contribute to his acceptance will spend his life asking a question that has no satisfying answer: "Have I done enough?" Owen contrasts this restless uncertainty with the liberty of the gospel, in which the believer knows Christ's merit is complete and his own imperfect works are accepted not for their own sake but for Christ's. This is the secret of Christian peace: not accumulating enough merit to quiet conscience, but resting conscience on a merit already perfect and already sufficient. The believer who has grasped this goes to bed each night confessing, "I was not good enough, I will never be good enough, and Christ was good enough in my place."

Puritan Application

First, make the deathbed test the measure of your theology. Every Christian ought, from time to time, to ask himself a question that strips away every secondary consideration and exposes the true ground of his hope: on what will I rest when I come to die? The answer that the doctrine of this section requires is not, "I have lived a decent life," nor "I have been faithful in church attendance," nor "I have loved my family and been honest in my dealings," nor even "I have seen real growth in holiness over the years." All of these may be true, and all of them are genuine evidences of grace for which the believer may properly give thanks. But none of them can bear the weight of a dying man's hope, because none of them can survive the severity of God's judgment. The only answer that will hold when every earthly prop is kicked away is this: "I rest on the righteousness of Jesus Christ, counted as mine through faith, and on nothing else." The man who has learned to give that answer on an ordinary Tuesday, when health is good and death seems distant, will be prepared to give it on the day when it is the only answer that matters. The man who has spent his life accumulating a mental ledger of his own righteousness will discover, when the ledger is laid alongside the law's perfection, that he has been saving pennies to pay a debt of billions, and the discovery will be too late. Examine your hope now, while there is time to adjust it. If you find that your confidence before God rises and falls with the quality of your daily performance, you have not yet learned the doctrine of this section, and you are building your eternal dwelling on ground that will not hold. Second, let this doctrine free you from the exhausting treadmill of spiritual performance. The natural instinct of the religious heart is to treat the Christian life as a kind of transaction in which obedience is rendered and blessing is received in something like a proportional exchange. When the obedience is plentiful, the conscience is quiet and the heart is light. When the obedience is sparse, the conscience is troubled and the heart grows heavy, and the immediate response is to redouble one's efforts, to pray longer, to serve harder, to try again — not from gratitude but from a desperate need to restore the balance that sin has disturbed. But the balance, the Confession teaches, is not a balance that our efforts can affect, because we are not in a transaction with God at all. We are children in our Father's house, and children do not earn their place at the table by their performance during the day. They sit at the table because they belong to the family, and their belonging was established before they performed a single chore. The Christian who has truly grasped this ceases to ride the emotional roller-coaster that carries him from elation on good days to despondency on bad ones. He does not love God more when he has been obedient, nor does he doubt God's love when he has failed. He rests in a love that was established before the foundation of the world, sealed at the cross, and confirmed by the Spirit — a love that his performance neither augments nor diminishes, because it was never based on his performance in the first place. Third, let the imperfection of your best works teach you a holy dependence that grows deeper rather than shallower with every year of the Christian life. The beginner in the faith often imagines that the goal of sanctification is independence: that the mature Christian is the one who needs the Spirit less because he has built up such a store of habitual grace that he can function on his own. The Confession's teaching about the "weakness and imperfection" that clings to every work performed through human instrumentality demolishes this illusion. You never outgrow your need for the Spirit's enabling. You never reach a point where your prayers are pure enough to rise to God without the incense of Christ's intercession. You never arrive at a plateau of holiness where your works can stand before the divine scrutiny on their own merits. The man who has been a Christian for fifty years must go to bed each night with the same prayer on his lips as the man who was converted this morning: "God be merciful to me, a sinner." And far from being a counsel of despair, this is the very shape of Christian maturity. The saint who has made the most progress in holiness is not the one who feels least dependent on grace but the one who feels most dependent, because he has seen enough of God's holiness to know how far he falls short, and enough of his own heart to know that every good thing in him is a gift, not an achievement. Fourth, take particular comfort from this doctrine if you are among those Christians whose sanctification seems painfully slow and whose good works seem embarrassingly meagre. There are believers whose growth in grace is so gradual as to be almost imperceptible, whose battle with besetting sin seems never to advance beyond the skirmish stage, and whose daily experience of obedience is shot through with so much failure that they hesitate even to speak of "good works" in connection with their own lives. To such a believer the doctrine of this section comes as balm to a wounded conscience. Your acceptance with God does not depend on the quantity of your good works, because even the greatest quantity could not merit a particle of His favour. Your acceptance depends on the righteousness of Christ, which is perfect and complete, and which belongs to you not because you have earned it but because you are united to Him by faith. The weakness of your sanctification is a real problem, and you should grieve over it, pray about it, and strive against it with every means of grace at your disposal. But it is not a problem that threatens your standing with God, because your standing with God was never based on your sanctification. The ground of your hope is Christ's perfection, not yours, and Christ's perfection does not fluctuate with your daily performance. Rest in that truth, and let the rest become the soil in which genuine, unhurried, joyful obedience begins to grow — the obedience of a child who already has his Father's love and obeys not to earn it but to enjoy it. Fifth, let the impossibility of meriting anything from God become the engine of the deepest gratitude your heart has ever known. The natural heart is ungrateful because it believes, at some half-conscious level, that it deserves what it has been given: that its comforts are earned, its blessings are merited, its very existence is something to which it is entitled. The doctrine of non-merit strips away every ground of entitlement and leaves the sinner standing before God with absolutely empty hands and an absolutely full heart, knowing that everything he receives is grace upon grace, gift upon gift, mercy upon mercy. The breath in your lungs this moment is unmerited. The sleep that refreshed you last night was unmerited. The food on your table, the roof over your head, the love of your family, the fellowship of the saints, the preached Word that fed your soul last Lord's Day — all of it is grace, all of it is gift, all of it is the overflow of a generosity that you cannot earn and could never repay. The Christian who truly grasps this will be a grateful person in any room, not occasionally grateful when some extraordinary blessing breaks into his life, but habitually grateful, constitutively grateful, grateful for the ordinary mercies that surround him every moment, mercies that would be astonishing if they were not so constant, and that are constant only because God's grace is constant, and His grace owes nothing to the merit of its recipients. This is not a duty to be discharged but the spontaneous overflow of a heart that has stopped trying to pay for what can only be received, and has learned that the only proper response to a gift is thankfulness.

Prayer

O Lord most high, who dwellest in light unapproachable and whose holiness is the standard before which the heavens are not clean, we bow before Thee in the confession that our best works are as filthy rags, that our most devoted obedience falls short of what Thy law requires, and that if Thou shouldest deal with us according to strict justice, we could not answer Thee one charge in a thousand. We acknowledge the great disproportion between our stumbling, sin-mixed works and the glory Thou hast promised to those who love Thee. We confess the infinite distance between Thy majesty and our creatureliness, which makes it impossible that we should ever place Thee in our debt or profit Thee by anything we do. And we own with sorrow that even our best deeds, as they pass through our hands, are defiled with so much weakness and imperfection that they could not endure the severity of Thy judgment. We bless Thee that our acceptance with Thee does not rest upon the merit of our works but upon the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ, counted as ours through faith alone. We thank Thee that His merit is so complete, so infinite, so divinely sufficient, that nothing can be added to it and nothing can diminish it, and that the weakest believer who clings to Christ is as fully accepted as the strongest saint who ever lived. We praise Thee that when our consciences accuse us and our works condemn us, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, whose intercession is the incense that makes our prayers acceptable and whose blood cleanses our service from the defilement that clings to everything we touch. Grant us grace, O Lord, to live in the freedom of this truth. Let us never imagine that our good days have earned Thy smile or that our bad days have forfeited Thy love, for Thy love was set upon us in Christ before the foundation of the world, and no change in our performance can alter what Thy sovereign grace has established. Keep us from the pride that would claim merit where none exists, and from the despair that would deny Thy mercy when our works are weak. Teach us to walk in humble, joyful, grateful obedience, not to earn what is already given, but to enjoy the Giver who has given us everything in His Son. And when our race is run and our course is finished, and we stand at last before Thy throne, let us not present our works as a claim upon Thy favour but receive Thy welcome as the gift it is: purchased by Christ's blood, applied by the Spirit's power, flowing from the Father's everlasting love. We ask it in the name of Him whose merit alone avails before Thy judgment seat, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.