The balance concept of works is one of the most bedeviling concepts in pop religion. The idea goes, if I do more good things than bad things, God will accept me. It’s essentially Karma stripped of its Eastern flavor. Lacking the despair of one’s own salvation that is ultimately necessary for salvation, the balance model makes a lot of sense to the unregenerate mind.

Unfortunately, even Christians all too often buy into the balance model. Not so crude a balance model as exists in pop religion – we take James 2:10 “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all” to mean that even one act of sin outweighs all the good works in the world. This is passably true on the surface, but it is still fundamentally a balance model. Ask most Christians if a person were to live a life entirely by the law, never breaking it and yet not knowing God, would be saved, they would say yes. It’s the loophole in their faith – an unattainable loophole, granted, but a loophole nonetheless.

Such a concept takes depravity as a matter of works, and salvation as a matter of belief: that we are lost because we act badly, and we make up for it by believing, since it’s impossible to right the balance by good works. God removes the sin from the balance, allowing us to effectually weight the other side with good works (if I’m not mistaken, Roman Catholic doctrine states – or at one point stated – this explicitly).

This conception, however, misses the nature of our salvation: neither depravity nor salvation are matters of works. There is no balance at all, even a balance irrecoverably weighted by sin. Our actions, both good and sinful, mean nothing in themselves, except as they indicate our nature. The essence of depravity is not that we do sins, it is that our desires are not for God, which leads us to sin. The essence of sanctification is not that we are freed to do good, it is that our desire is for God, which leads us to good.

That is not to say that actions are not significant as indicators of our desires; only that they have no significance in themselves. Thus our hypothetical man who lives by the entire law for its own sake is nonetheless unfit to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Though his outer face is clean, even completely clean, his nature is nevertheless fleshly. His desire is not for God. There are no loopholes.

That means that neither is our own salvation an ad hoc salvific loophole created by God for those who could not keep the law. It is not as if keeping the law is the preferred method of salvation, and barring that, God lets us get on with a salvation by grace through faith. There is no “option”, as if we could either keep the law or trust in Christ to the same effect. All salvation at all times is only effected by the apprehension of the value of God, even if that apprehension is imperfect here on earth. The law is only the outward manifestation of such a valuation, and is always powerless to save – even in its perfection.