FAITH AND WORKS

“Should not your piety be your confidence,  and your blameless ways your hope?” (4:6)

Just six verses into his opening harangue, Eliphaz inadvertently broaches an issue that happens to be of signal importance to Christians: the debate between faith and works. Tipping his hand as to which side of this age-old question he is on, Eliphaz blithely advises Job to place confidence in his own “piety” and “blameless ways.” But this is exactly where Job’s confidence is not, and anyone whose life has fallen to pieces will understand why. To put any stock in one’s own virtuous conduct, whether past or present, is like trying to use a sieve as a bucket. We humans cannot contain anything good; we can only channel what is good. Even the matchless Son of God confessed, “Why do you call me good? No one is good—except God alone” (Mark 10:18). Christ knew that in His human nature He was a conduit for the goodness that is inherent in God alone.

Whenever faith tries to base itself on good living, whether the focus be on external morality or on inner spiritual purity, the result is the most sophisticated of all pagan religions. Though it claims belief in God, in practice such religion places no trust in the Lord Himself but only in its own theology. As thoroughly orthodox and Biblical as this theology may be, it does not represent faith in the living God but in faith itself. Heaven help this religion of good works when it falls on hard times. For according to this view, hard things can only be explained as the chastisement of an angry God, and therefore good works must be done with the subliminal motive of appeasing God’s wrath. By the same token, when all in life is going well such theology shows itself more pitiful than ever, for subtly and insidiously it takes all the credit to itself.

True faith depends not at all upon itself, nor upon its own system of piety, but rather upon the Lord alone and His faithfulness. It knows that our faith in God is only a reflection of God’s faith in us. For our Father does believe in us; He faithed us into existence in the first place, and He continues day by day “sustaining all things by his powerful word” (Heb. 1:3). To have faith is to have trust in the faithfulness of our God, knowing that faithfulness is first and foremost not a human but a divine attribute. All we human beings can do is to become empty, in order that God’s character of perfect faithfulness may flow into us. Genuine faith is not the faith to do anything at all, except to fall to the ground and die.

To be sure, as James famously contends in his epistle, true faith necessarily issues in good works. But the focus of the believer is not to be on the work itself, but rather on the One who in fact does the work. As Jesus testified, “It is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work” (John 14:10). When teaching about almsgiving and other charitable activities Jesus declared, “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matt. 6:3). The left hand of faith, in other words, must not be distracted by what the right hand of work is doing. For the moment this happens, the work in question falls short of being fully a work of faith. And “everything that does not come from faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23).

Consider the roots of a plant. Do the roots worry, or think at all, about producing flowers or fruit? No; they never see what happens above the ground. They never even see the sun or the sky. All they see is the dark womb of the earth, and their only job is to soak up moisture and nourishment from it, to feed in the dark underground of faith.

The essential error of Eliphaz, and of Job’s other friends, is in trying to shift Job’s focus away from the roots of faith and onto its flowers and fruit. Even as they talk loftily of God, what they are really doing is distracting Job’s full attention from the Lord and tempting him to concentrate instead on himself and his sin. Without realizing it, they number themselves among those whom Paul describes as “taking pride in what is seen rather than in what is in the heart” (2 Cor. 5:12). Assuming that the opposite of sin is virtue, they conclude that a righteous life is one that will always be producing the visible fruit that is its own reward. Yet in the vocabulary of the gospel, the opposite of sin is not simply virtue but grace. As Paul puts it in Romans 5:20-21, “Where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Mason, M. (2002). The Gospel According to Job: An Honest Look at Pain and Doubt from the Life of One Who Lost Everything. Crossway.