Torah Times Messianic Ministry

Breaking Paul's Works Code

If I say "Messiah" what do you think of? Do you think of Messiah Yeshua? Do you think of the Son of the Almighty? Or do you think of a false messiah? If I say Shepherd do you think of someone herding sheep or do you think of a Pastor or Teacher? If I say "the Spirit of Prophecy," and the "testimony" do you think of Ellen White or do you think of Messianic prophecies about Messiah in the Torah and Prophets? If I say the "name of Jesus" do you think about the label, the person, or the reputation of the person?

It all really depends on the context what these words and phrases mean. You have to be aware of the context. But sometimes we are not aware of the context and come to the wrong conclusion. This may be because our context has been formed by an unbiblical tradition that has become the narrative about the use of a word or phrase. Paul's negative use of the word "works" is almost universally misunderstood to mean putting forth any effort on our part as a requirement for receiving everlasting life. This is because Paul meant something else by the word, and false teachers have spun a new web of tradition that changed the meaning of the word as Paul meant it.

In Paul's usage, the unadorned use of the word "works" with the sense of disapproval of these works, means "imputed merit." So let me fill this out for you. An imputed merit is a merit that is thought to be applied to a person with a demerit so that God will be appeased and overlook the demerit. So a good deed done is a merit. Imputing the merit means that it gets transferred over to a demerit cancelling out the demerit.

In the Jewish thought, it is required to keep the Torah. So the merit of Torah keeping is said to be sufficient for the merit of the requirement. Therefore, just keeping Torah does not gain any merit that can be imputed. According to Jacob Neusner, author of over 900 books on Judaism, an imputable merit had to be going beyond the call of base-line Torah observance. So extra prayers, charity beyond that which was specifically commanded, and generally any loving act beyond what was actually commanded would become an imputable merit. The imputed merit, the deed, the works, could then be imputed to cancel out a demerit, or otherwise gain favorable treatment from God when he was taking account of one's sins.

This system in Judaism is called ZECHUT. Not all adherents of Judaism accept it, but it is common enough. I have even caught Jews arguing back and forth about it. Some say it is opposed to forgiveness. Other accept it. In truth, it is opposed to forgiveness, because imputed merit makes forgiveness something that can be paid for.

Imputed merit in Judaism comes from two sources. By virtue of being a Jew, one could gain imputed merit from Abraham's superabundance of merit. Or, if you were Jewish, you could gain your own extra merits on top of complete observance of Torah, and then you would be said to have imputable merit to gain favorable treatment if you had any demerits. That is, you were taught to expect God to cancel out the demerits because you did extra good works.

The idea of doing a good deed in the hope that a bad deed will be overlooked occurs commonly enough. It is not exclusive to Judaism. In Judaism, however, it acquired the traditional status of a formal legalism for dealing with sin. It also seems to have been transferred to Christianity under the doctrine of "penance."

O.k., so when Paul speaks of "works" in a negative voice, he is speaking of this system of imputed merit. Paul was one of those Jewish teachers who rejected the idea of imputed merit. Paul believed that imputed merit was in conflict with God's forgiveness of sin. Paul also believed that imputed merit was in conflict with genuine faithfulness to Messiah. This is because someone who was seeking to cover demerits by imputed merit becomes unbalanced in their faithfulness, placing emphasis on doing the things they perceive will square up their account with God. It is the same as those Israelites that brought sacrifices to the Temple and then when they returned from the Temple they continued the same injustices toward their countrymen as before thinking that the merit of the sacrifice would cancel their sin.

So the gaining of imputed merit is an idea equivalent to bringing vain sacrifices. And, in fact, after the destruction of the Temple, charity was considered a replacement for sacrifice. Faith in imputed merit was not faithfulness to Messiah.

So when Paul speaks of "works" in a negative sense, he expected his readership to be familiar with this Jewish concept of imputed merit. But later on the non-Jewish institutional Church, having a predisposition to disobey Torah, reinterpreted "works" to mean any particularly "Jewish" commandments, namely, the Sabbath, circumcision, and the food laws. Laws surrounding the Temple were also included in this.

An even more radical faction of the institutional Church, with a particularly gnostic pedigree, decided that "works" in Paul meant applying any effort whatsoever to the obtaining of everlasting life. Calvinism and Lutheranism are the modern teachers of this view in the legacy of Augustine, a former gnostic.

Matters were not helped by those Jews who taught imputed merit from Abraham. They taught that the ritual of circumcision connected the convert to the merit of Abraham.

The institional Church, however, was not to be outdone by the Jewish teachers of imputed merit. Eventually they came up with an equivalent system based on the same philosophy. Baptism replaced circumcision, and the merit of Christ replaced the merit of Abraham. Then they taught that baptism was the means by which one was connected to the merit of Christ. It was the same legalism.

So now that we undersand what Paul meant by "works" when he was condemning the concept, we can see that he did not mean the non-imputable merit of basic Torah observance. He was not giving a polemic against requiring Sabbath observance, or regard for the food laws, or even circumcision of male children on the eighth day. And further, he was by no means saying that seeking for everlasting life involved no repentance or good works. Indeed, on this last point, many institutional Churches have never gone this far. Only the gnostic influenced did, the hyper calvinists and the hyper dispensationalists, who carved Scripture up into time-bound boxes and paradigms so tightly that any passage which would seem to contradit this was ascribed to another age, or ascribed to the transition between ages, or explained away as a hypothetical for why one can't keep Torah, and should never try.

So lets survey a few texts where Paul speaks of "works" this way.

The classic text is Ephesians 2:8-9:

In vs. 9 Paul literally says, "not from works." What he means is not from imputed merits. God is rescuing us by his loving-kindness, through our faithfulness, and not through imputed merit. Since we are forgiven sin, there is no need for imputed merit. By "works" he means "imputed merit." Now, I have put the word "customary" in italic to help the reader a bit, because Paul does use a longer phrase "works of law," which also means imputed merit. NOMOS also means something pertaining to a legal custom.

But like I showed at the start here, a whole concept can be wrapped up in one word in one context that has a totally different meaning in another context. Works here means "imputed merit" or the customary deeds by which imputed merit is transacted in.

Two things in this context agree with this interpretation of matters. Firstly Paul is still upholding faithfulness. He says "through faithfulness," which is not "faith alone" without good works. And then he hastens to add that we are created for good works in vs. 10. He also points out that imputed merit lends itself to boasting. Obviously, if it is one's own extra merit to offset demerit it is trusting in self, and if it is Abraham's merit, then it is trusting in birthright or circumcision. So in that case one would be boasting in becoming Jewish.

Paul also mentions "works" and "customary works," by which he means works used to gain justification for demerit in Rom. 3:20, 3:27, 3:28, 4:2, 4:6, 9:11, 9:32, 11:6; Gal. 2:16, 3:2; 3:5, 3:10; Eph. 2:10; 2 Tim. 1:9; and Titus 3:5.

In all these places Paul means the doctrine of "imputed merits" and not repentence, faithfulness, or good works. Let's look at Rom 9:11

Here again the word "customary" is in italic, because Paul elsewhere terms imputed merits as "works of custom." But the word "works" in Paul stands alone for the concept of imputed merits. In Judaism the shortened phrase "zechut," which literally means merit is used. More specifically, the term "zechut" invokes the whole Jewish theology of imputed merits, without the need for the word "imputed" before it, or the words "of the fathers" after it. So the word "customary" in italic is simply a help to clue the reader in that we are talking about works in a special category, the same category as "zechut."

So you may wonder why Paul has thrown in a denial of works, that is, "imputed merit" into a commentary on Jacob and Esau. It is just this. If imputed merit were a true doctrine, then Jacob and Esau should have received equal amounts of imputed merit from Abraham and Isaac! Both were circumcised, yet God decided that Esau would become another nation than Israel. That would mean that Edom would not get any zechut, because according to Judaism you have to be Jewish in order to benefit from the merit of the fathers. I'm not saying Jews would never say there are any side benefits, but they would surely call it covenant appropriation for a non-Jew to claim it.

Ishamel clearly lost first place because he was the son of Hagar and because of his behaviour and Hagar's snotty attitutde. So he was disinherited. That left Isaac as the only kindred which Abraham loved. But when we come to Esau and Jacob, Esau is separated from Israel at birth by a prophecy, so it now becomes meaningless to say that imputed merit is applied based on either nationality or based on personal behaviour. Esau had circumcision. Esau had the right bloodline, yet he was not chosen.

Of course not being chosen in the case of Esau was not a salvation matter, but Paul is making a point that chosenness has no connection to the avaiability of zechut, imputed merit. He also implies that chosenness isn't a matter of physical descent. Later on chosenness become synonomous with salvation. The point Paul is making is that if the former chosenness wasn't based on imputed merit, then neither is the later salvific term. The perogatives of descent come into play at a lower level, but at the level of being chosen for salvation, they do not. So in essence Paul is saying that the choice of Jacob wasn't due to imputed merit (works) in the salvation sense of choice.

Since Paul is making a negative argument to illustrate his point, there is no sense in trying to find some positive doctrine of predestination in his teaching.