One characteristic of a counterfeit is that it’s less than the real thing. It’s an imitation. It looks like the real thing, but something is missing. Counterfeit money looks real, which is why people are deceived by it. But it doesn’t have the authority of the U.S. Treasury behind it. So, in the end, it’s really just paper, with no value at all. A counterfeit dollar bill is not just worth less: a store won’t give you 50 cents worth of goods for a counterfeit dollar bill. Because it’s less than the real thing, it’s not worth anything at all. The thing that’s missing is the connection with governmental authority, the very thing that gives paper money value in the first place. So, counterfeit money is less than real money – there’s something essential that’s missing – and that renders it not less valuable, but completely worthless.
James is saying that this is true of what some in the early church were calling by the name “faith.” Their language sounds Christian; they use the right words and believe in the right doctrines. But something is missing. It’s less than the real thing. It’s a counterfeit. We saw in the last sermon that James is addressing the problem of antinomianism, the problem of saying that if we believe in Jesus for our salvation it really doesn’t matter what we do. Salvation is purely by faith, which means that as long as we have faith we are safe and don’t need to be concerned about the consequences of our actions. That’s antinomianism, and some in the early church were believing it. James’ argument is that this is a counterfeit. Genuine faith has both an inward and an outward dimension; both are necessary. If our faith has no outward dimension, if there are no works of obedience, it’s not the real thing. It has no more value than counterfeit money.
This is the section of James that caused Martin Luther to label it an “epistle of straw.” He never came to the point of saying that James doesn’t belong in the Bible, but because it seemed to contradict Paul’s teaching on justification by faith, Luther thought it was certainly of less value than other books in the New Testament. We saw, though, that this is a misunderstanding of James’ message. He’s not arguing against Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith. He’s arguing against a counterfeit version of that doctrine. Listen to what Luther himself wrote in his preface to Romans: “O it is a living, busy active mighty thing, this faith. It is impossible for it not to be doing good things incessantly. It does not ask whether good works are to be done, but before the question is asked, it has already done this, and is constantly doing them. Whoever does not do such works, however is an unbeliever” (quoted by Douglas J. Moo, James, p. 117). That’s exactly the point James is making: “whoever does not do such works... is an unbeliever.”
The first thing he says is that faith that has no deeds, faith that doesn’t affect the way we live our lives, is useless. It’s not good for anything. “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you?” The original language has a direct article with faith in the second clause, so translations like the NIV are probably right in translating, “can such faith save him?” It’s referring, not to faith in general, but to the faith of a person who doesn’t have works. The New Living Translation brings this out clearly: “that kind of faith can’t save anyone.”
He illustrates his point in verses 15-16: “For instance, you come upon an old friend dressed in rags and half-starved and say, ‘Good morning, friend! Be clothed in Christ! Be filled with the Holy Spirit!’ and walk off without providing so much as a coat or a cup of soup – where does that get you? Isn’t it obvious that God-talk without God-acts is outrageous nonsense?” (The Message). What is the value of expressing concern to someone in this way? Imagine being a person in need on the receiving end of words like that. How would you respond? If you didn’t say it out loud, you’d be likely to at least think something like, “what a lot of worthless, empty talk!” James is saying that if our faith doesn’t lead us to do good works, it’s empty and worthless, like pious words that don’t offer any tangible help.
I had a friend in high school who was a compulsive liar. He lied about so many things that we suspected everything he said. If he said he was planning to come over for a visit, none of us bothered to stay home, because we knew he wouldn’t show up. He was the most consistently untruthful person I’ve ever met. What if he had said, “I firmly believe in the virtue of truthfulness; I believe with all my heart that it’s important to tell the truth.” He might be perfectly sincere, but if he didn’t follow that up with a genuine effort to stop lying and to tell the truth, we’d say that his belief was worthless. We’d say something like, “what’s the value of saying you believe in telling the truth if you never do it?” And we’d be right. When we say we believe in the importance of telling the truth we’re committing ourselves to a certain way of acting. Faith is the same way. It’s not the sort of thing that we can confine to our inner lives without allowing it to affect the way we act. When we say we believe the gospel, we’re saying that Jesus is Lord, we’re claiming that He is our Lord. If we don’t begin acting in obedience to Him, James says our faith is worthless.
But he goes even further than this. We might be tempted to say, “well, maybe my faith just hasn’t yet matured into the kind of faith that results in actions. It’s a genuine faith; it’s just weak.” Or, we might be inclined to say, “yes, I know my faith isn’t worth much; but I’m not interested in becoming a saint. All I want is to get into heaven when I die; surely my faith is good enough for that. After all, salvation is by faith, not by works.” So James goes further and makes it clear that this thing he’s describing is not really faith at all. People are calling it by that name, but it’s not genuine faith.
He compares it to a body that’s been separated from the spirit. What do people commonly say at a funeral, when they’re viewing the body of a loved one? They say, “the person we loved is not here.” The person has gone and left behind an empty shell. A dead body is not a person. James is saying that faith that is divorced from action is not faith at all. It’s dead. Here’s how verse 26 reads in The Message: “The very moment you separate body and spirit, you end up with a corpse. Separate faith and works and you get the same thing: a corpse.”
He also compares this kind of faith to the faith of demons: “Do I hear you professing to believe in the one and only God, but then observe you complacently sitting back as if you had done something wonderful? That’s just great. Demons do that, but what good does it do them?” (The Message). Demons believe the truth about God. In the gospels, they recognize Jesus right away. They know the truth, but they hate it and refuse to submit to it. James is saying that a purely internalized faith is no better than the faith of demons. It’s not faith at all. It’s nothing more than a superficial recognition of the truth. Salvation does come to us through faith, but this is not faith and it won’t save us.
That’s the negative teaching. This thing that goes by the name “faith,” but which doesn’t result in outward deeds, is worthless. It’s not worth less than genuine faith; it’s worth nothing at all. It’s not genuine faith, and it won’t save us. It’s not any better than the faith of demons, who recognize the truth about God, even though they hate Him and want to escape from His presence. Having demonstrated this, James also states the positive teaching: genuine faith is always accompanied by deeds. It’s not that we’re saved by a combination of faith and works; we’re saved by faith, but genuine faith always leads to good works.
He points to two things that happen in the relationship between faith and works. First, faith is made visible by deeds: “Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.” He’s saying, “you claim to have faith but you have no works; how are you going to demonstrate your faith? You can see the evidence of my faith by the things I do.” So deeds serve to make faith visible; without them, there’s no evidence that it’s there. But that’s not the only thing. Faith is also perfected, or completed, by deeds: “Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was brought to completion by the works.” Faith and obedience are two parts of a response to God. They’re inseparable. The initial response is an inner one, a turning of the heart and mind to God, but that response is completed by concrete acts of obedience.
Here’s a good definition of faith: “Faith is the surrender of the finite person in his entirety to the infinite Person” (Hans Urs von Balthasar, Explorations in Theology: I: The Word Made Flesh, p. 149). Faith is surrendering to God, which involves our whole person. The inward act of surrender comes to completion, is brought to maturity, in concrete acts of surrender to the revealed will of God. James demonstrates this with two Old Testament examples of faith. Abraham, the father of the nation, and Rahab, a prostitute in Jericho, both demonstrated the reality of their faith by the things they did. Their faith was made visible by their deeds, and their faith was brought to completion by their deeds. They surrendered themselves to God and offered their lives to Him. Their obedience was a natural result of their faith.
As we saw in the last sermon, James is not arguing with Paul. He’s arguing with those who have distorted Paul’s message, who are saying, “as long as I have faith, I’m safe; it really doesn’t matter what I do, because salvation is by faith.” He’s saying that these people have accepted a counterfeit version of faith, that their faith is not really faith at all; it’s worthless, and it won’t save them. It’s like counterfeit money. There’s no authority behind it. The One who has the authority to save us won’t accept it as a valid response to the gospel.
A.W. Tozer, writing in the mid-20th Century, felt the need to remind Evangelicals of what genuine faith is like: “The faith of Paul and Luther was a revolutionizing thing. It upset the whole life of the individual and made him into another person altogether. It laid hold on the life and brought it under obedience to Christ. It took up its cross and followed along after Jesus with no intention of going back. It said good-bye to its old friends as certainly as Elijah when he stepped into the fiery chariot and went away in the whirlwind. It had a finality about it. It snapped shut on a man’s heart like a trap; it captured the man and made him from that moment forward a happy love-servant of his Lord. It turned earth into a desert and drew heaven within sight of the believing soul. It realigned all life’s actions and brought them into accord with the will of God. It set its possessor on a pinnacle of truth from which spiritual vantage point he viewed everything that came into his field of experience. It made him little and God big and Christ unspeakably dear. All this and more happened to a man when he received the faith that justifies” (“Faith is a Perturbing Thing,” in The Root of the Righteous, p. 46).
That’s a longer way of saying what Paul says in 2 Corinthians: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” (5:17). What James is saying is that if there’s no evidence of a new creation, if our faith is not leading us into a life of obedience, we have nothing but a dead, counterfeit faith that won’t save us. The way to respond to a passage like this is to examine ourselves. The important thing is not to find a way to justify ourselves so that we feel better. The important thing is to listen attentively to what God wants to say to us through His Word. When He convicts us of sin, He’s inviting us to turn to Him in repentance. Come before Him, using these words from Psalm 51: “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.... Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.... Then.... (vv. 1,2, 10, 13a); “then I will begin to order my life in obedience to your revealed will.” Turn to Him for mercy, and offer yourself to Him as a living sacrifice. Begin by offering yourself to Him and crying out for mercy, and follow up by offering yourself to Him each day with concrete acts of obedience, not because you expect to be saved by doing all the right things, but because you belong to His family and you want to bear the family likeness. “But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.... Those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act — they will be blessed in their doing.”
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