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Belief is the first act of faith! Wrap your mind around that. It can be very confusing, so Paul gives us the quintessential example from the Old Testament. “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.” On the surface it is easy to think this means, “Abraham had faith in God, and his faith made him right in God’s eyes.” But, there is a critical component missing from that interpretation; faith is a noun and believed is a verb. So, James takes on the responsibility to clarify how faith and belief operate in tandem. “Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered Isaac his son on the altar?” You can feel the action in James’ interpretation. At first blush it looks very different than Paul’s reference to Moses’ words. However, when you distinguish the parts of speech, nouns and verbs, it starts to come into focus. When Moses says Abraham believed and James says Abraham was justified by works—both resulting in righteousness, it can’t be a contradiction. There must be a viable explanation. James goes on to equate his position to exactly what both Moses and Paul said. “Abraham believed God” is expressed with all the verb energy of “justified by works.” He puts an exclamation mark on his interpretation when he says, “And thus the Scripture was fulfilled.” What Scripture? Abraham believed God. How was it fulfilled? Abraham was justified by works!
This can get very tortuous if we don’t define terms, especially since we learned earlier in Romans that, “By the works of the law no flesh will be justified.” And here again that, “To him who works, the wages are not counted as grace but as debt.” So, to avoid contradiction, we must conclude that “works of the law” is not to which James is referring. Paul uses “justified by works” in connection to what he previously established: “works of the law” is legalism. James uses “justified by works” to connect faith with belief. In other words, James explains how belief is expressed in an act of faith. From that perspective, James’ interpretation is consistent with what Paul teaches elsewhere… “For not the hearers of the law are just in the sight of God, but the doers of the law will be justified.” According to James, doing the law, not just hearing about it, is what Moses meant when he wrote, “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.” In Hebrews we are told that without faith it is impossible to please God, and that he who comes to God must also believe. Belief must follow faith, because God only rewards those who are diligent to obey Him.
Even though right here in Romans Paul denies that a man can be justified by works, James does a stellar job explaining the flip-side of the coin, the mishmash of seemingly contradictory information. “Faith was working together with his works, and by works faith was made perfect. A man is justified by works, and not by faith only.” James writes, “by works faith is made perfect.” Paul warns, “but not by the law of works because that would be legalism.” Paul equates the law of faith—works inspired by, motivated by, and empowered by grace, to what James claims is the perfect expression of faith. Paul previously elaborated on the contrast between these two concepts in this letter. You must understand this nuance, even if it takes repeating 10,000 times. It’s critical for a correct understanding of faith. Faith absent belief is dead on arrival because faith is not authentic without the works that testify to that faith. In other words, the noun without its accompanying verb is just gibberish. Maybe in an urban dictionary it’s good grammar—faith can remain just a thought atop the pinnacle of a wonderful intellectual ascent, but for Christians, without the verb you cannot produce a proper sentence!
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