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.

Idly scouring the internet as I sometimes do, I came across an article about 50 NES quotes one should know. I’m no gamer and have no emotional connection to the games of olde like most in gamer culture, but I (correctly) assumed most of the quotes would be funny, and was also keen on being able to make references to old school video games besides “Do a barrel roll!” and “Abort/Retry/Fail?”. And while the article was a success in that regard, the main revelation was gleaned from an offhand comment beneath the fourth page of the article:

Christianity says that people are inherently good and that deep down we all want to do the right thing. Video games prove the opposite is true.

This is not a nitpicky point. This is not a quaint theological issue. This is, quite literally, the first point in the Gospel message: people are inherently not good (Romans 3:10, Isaiah 64:6, 1 John 1:8, Isaiah 53:6). This is the very reason we need a savior (Hebrews 9:22, 1 Peter 3:18, Isaiah 53:5) – because we are unable in our own strength to bridge the gap of sin between ourselves and God – even to make motion in that direction (Romans 3:23, Romans 3:11). It is the foundation and purpose of the entire Christian faith that people are totally, though not irreparably, depraved.

This is the difference between Christianity and generic religion. This is the distinguishing feature that must be emphasized above all the self-help masquerading as trite religion, and the failure to communicate this point is the reason first of all that Liberal Protestantism is virtually extinct, and furthermore the reason for the continuing decline in the quality of what now passes in the Church: it makes itself irrelevant without this point. People see Christianity as just another self-help mechanism, and no one is telling them any differently – some false teachers have even exacerbated the problem by broadcasting from within that Christianity is about self-help (you may have culled from previous articles my scarcely concealed contempt for Mr. Osteen).

The Church loves to talk about “cultural relevance” – engaging the culture where it’s at. Unfortunately this misguided attempt at relevance just makes it indistinguishable from all the other voices. The Church must preach not only Jesus, but why Jesus. Relevance – not only cultural but trans-cultural – requires that we be unmistakably clear on the fundamental issue of depravity.

As Christians, we have faith that “God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). As straightforward as this seems, the concept of good itself is more problematic than it ought to be: what is good in the first place, and what does Paul mean by good here?

The prosperity gospel as preached by such luminaries as Joel Osteen and the aptly named Creflo Dollar is often criticized by orthodox Christianity for emphasizing the material as God’s means of blessing the faithful. It’s easy enough to renounce blatant Prosperitism as materialistic and fair-weather faith, but how often do the rest of us fall, more subtly, into the same trap?

I cannot count how many times I’ve heard prayers thanking God for placing us in a country where we are free to worship Him. It’s a favorite theme of Patriotic Evangelicalism. But what is this saying? Thank you, God, for a comfortable life where I don’t have to make a real stand for my faith? Jesus says in Luke 6:22, Blessed are you when men hate you, and ostracize you, and insult you, and scorn your name as evil, for the sake of the Son of Man. Is living in America really a blessing in this light? Why would we thank God for withholding the blessing of persecution?

There is none good but one, that is, God.
-Mark 10:18

Many times we read a verse like Romans 8:28 without an understanding of what “good” truly is. And without that understanding, we substitute our fleshly understanding of good. What is good then? Our pleasure. Our comfort. Circumstances. Materials. The eternal might be good too, but what use is that to me now? We thank God for indulging our misconceptions of our own interests, all the while consciously avoiding any sort of more painful but infinitely higher and more profitable blessing that may otherwise be bestowed.

The Bible leaves no room for duality here. The entire rest of Romans 8 sets up a dichotomy between the spirit and the flesh, and the valuation of the self and its comfort is unmistakably fleshly living. What good is suffering if comfort is our good? What good is mourning if a perpetual emotional high is our good? No, good is so much higher than that. Suffering does not bring about our comfort; it destroys it. Mourning does not bring about happiness; it is the very opposite thereof. But suffering and mourning bring about a much higher good than either of these things: drawing nearer to God.

This then is the promise of Romans 8:28: not that Christians will prosper, not even that we will be comfortable – It is not in any respect a material guarantee. Rather it is that for anyone who loves God, any and all circumstances can only serve to bring him closer to God. This, more than any thing or circumstance, is the ultimate blessing.

I was out driving the other day with the radio turned to a Christian radio station, when a song lyric jumped out at me: Because you would rather die / Than to ever live without me. Lines like this have never sat well with me, but I always attributed my discomfort to a question of perspective – a focus on God versus a focus on man, for example. It was only that day it dawned on me that there is a fundamental error in this song lyric – the same that thousands of Christian self-esteem messages spring from; the same that tickles our ears with popular notions of self-worth and esteem. The difference between a haughty spirit and a humble spirit before God ultimately lies in how you answer the question, why does God love us?

The explanation for why God created the human race that I always heard growing up hinges on choice. First the question is posed, would you want a spouse to love you because she had to – a robot, if you will – or because she wanted to? The argument then goes on to contrast our worship with that of the angels: the angels are simply programmed to worship God and can do no other, the reasoning goes, while we can choose to love God – therefore our praise is preferable to that of the angels because ours is voluntary.

So God loves us because we have choice? This runs into several problems (we’ll even ignore the fact that Lucifer and a third of the angels didn’t adhere to their “programming”). First, our choice is constrained by sin. In the flesh – in our own effort – we cannot choose God (Romans 8:7-8). We have no capability in ourselves to love God. He enables us to love Him by the Holy Spirit for the very reason that we cannot by ourselves do so.

Second, this reasoning would imply that God loves us because of some innate good within us, namely, choice. There is nothing good within us that would commend us to God (Isaiah 64:6, Jeremiah 17:9), and we are certainly not in an inherently better position before Him than the angels. The belief that God loves us because we are made in His image – because we have some “spark of the divine” – even so far as to say that God loves us because we (can) choose Him, is to say that at some level we deserve God’s love, and this is fundamentally no different from the pride of Lucifer.

But God obviously loves us, as we see throughout the Bible (John 3:16). Why then, if we have nothing to commend ourselves to God, does He still pursue us? The answer is not within us, but in God. God does not love us because of who we are, but because of who He is. One thing I am indebted to John Piper for is the proof and justification of a selfish God (Deuteronomy 6:15): If God, being at the same time omniscient and the highest good in the universe, had as His ultimate aim anything other than the highest good in the universe, He would no longer be a good or perfect God. Therefore God’s ultimate goal can only be His own glory. His duty is not to us, but to Himself.

So how does mankind factor into God’s glory? God’s love of and offer of salvation to mankind is not so He can enjoy the pleasure of our company, but in order to demonstrate His power to redeem that which had nothing good of its own to boast. Paul tells us that salvation is entirely the work of God for this very purpose: “Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:9). The glory is entirely God’s.

With this in mind, our focus shifts away from ourselves and towards God. Prayer becomes less of our will and more “Your will be done”, in faith that God makes all things to work together for the good of those that love Him (Romans 8:28). Father, forgive me, not because I’m coming to You, but because You have brought me to Yourself. This is a humble spirit before God: unpretentious gratitude that while we were yet sinners, while we were enemies of God with nothing worthy of love about us, Christ still died for us.