p. 275 | FAITH AND WORKS

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 15, 1868

FAITH AND WORKS.

[BRO. SMITH: The following, extracted from an article entitled “Identity of Religion, Morality and Politics,” published in the Church Union, is so much to the point of the subject of Faith and Works that I send it to the REVIEW, if you deem it worthy of an insertion. S. B. WHITNEY.]

Inasmuch, therefore, as no religion is complete or perfect without the moral element—for God will not be “mocked” by mere belief in himself, and adulation; he is not a child to be “pleased with a rattle and tickled by a straw!” he demands virtual compliance with his will, his law, his commandments. And fearfully has Jesus given the fact to all his church, with encircling nations, which is the only key to an understanding of even Paul’s Epistle to the Romans—which, in the eyes of numbers, gives birth to faith as only justifying to salvation and introduces predestination—when he remarked, “No man can enter Heaven except he that keeps, or obeys, the commandments of the Father.” And the explanatory commentary on this verse is consecutive in the immediately following declarations in the same chapter.

Here we have the will of God declared by the Fountain Head of the church, and there is no resource of artifice, sophistry, or logical legerdemain, that can exonerate the soul from the tremendous obligation to obey the commandments, which, added to faith, complete the character of the Christian. And who can dare limit the circle of the commandments? They are as illimitable as Omnipresence. They bind in harmony nature among the stellar worlds; they are the ligaments of concord among spiritual agencies. When Jehovah spoke order as the first law of creation in the physical, he also decreed the same regularity for the moral and the mental. The commandments are his exercitative will, and must reign absolute and peremptory, or all will perish. They comprise life; they are the gist and gravamen of vitality! This law, issuing from the throne, was spoken to Adam in Eden for his good—reason being allowed on the principle of free moral volition. It censured Cain for cutting off the innocent Abel; it charged the righteous Noah to build the ark; it tried the faith and confidence of the holy Abraham; it was promulgated amid the solemn splendor of Sinai; it identified Israel as the holy people, and would have consecrated Judea as the mightiest, the happiest, and foremost, of all nations, had the Hebrews trenched firmly upon obedience to this moral law, instead of incongruously showing their mere faith in the temple service, which Isaiah denounced, as vide his book, chapter first, inclusive.

By disobedience to this moral, and, of course, to political law—a complaint every prophet, from Samuel to Malachi, utters with doleful lamentations—the Jews became so incorrigibly callous as to be in the dismal, cheerless category of rejecting the God their father Abraham had obeyed to all extremity, as witness the history of Isaac. Had they only been in sincerity and simplicity zealous for the will of God, and morally dutiful in things domestic, social, and political, as well as things pertaining to worship in the “temple,” they would never have had the heart to discard the Saviour, and to their ruin and dispersion. They would have carefully and diligently “searched the Scriptures” instead of the Talmud, and would, with the traditions, not have made the word and will of God of none effect. See now what mere faith, attending scrupulously to religious things, could do without works; or as it ought to have been translated, obedience to God’s moral will. This singular people is scattered everywhere, idolizing gain and trade, and hating the haughty Edom, whom they regard as all Gentiles; but our Lord hath predicted their fate, and relying on the truth of Christianity, I defy all Jewry to return as unbelievers to Jerusalem! In no character will they be “gathered” save as Christians. “Thou shalt never return till thou sayest, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord!”

And Christ, when he came down to earth to be the propitiation for our sins and those of all mankind, did he not invariably carry the moral law and the political as identical upon every stage of his action, and into every precept? Why, the whole of the sermon on the mount is one tissue of moral enjoinments. The moral law, as given on Sinai and illustrated in the history of Israel, is still intact and obligatory on Christians. What! can you deny a truism so plain? If you are saved only by faith—and “no man can be justified by the deeds of the law,”—is murder, robbery, or arson, to be overlooked in man’s faith? Does faith consecrate them? It would, to follow from your conclusion, or the drift of it, in unsophisticated minds! Moral law, or the observance of it, is irrevocably obligatory, or all will be confusion and death. Come, let us look into the matter as Christian philosophers. “The just are saved by faith,” said the prophet, and after him the apostle. It is the JUST, not the unjust! NONE IS JUST BUT THE OBEDIENT to the commands, for they are the standard of justness. So, if no one can be justified by the mere deeds or doings of the law, without belief in the divinity of Jesus—which is the distinct meaning of the text, neither can any that obeys not the commandments. It is because of the identity of religion and morals, or of faith and works. They are inseparable, —ARE ONE; to separate them is to destroy religion as effectually as the separation of soul and body will any man.

I will anew in confirmation of this, point to the scene of the last Judgment, when the Lord will commend some and condemn others according to their “works,” or obedience to the commandments. How remarkable it is that he says there nothing about faith, however indispensable in the pious character! All the whole stress of his observations in judgment is leveled on works—“Depart, ye that work iniquity!”

How is this, that while Christian communities are so intent on consecrating faith and praying and singing, and neglecting the necessary vigilance and diligence of obedience, the Lord should vaticinate it as the governing principle of the last day?

It is, I believe, because all do believe—the very devils in hell believe and tremble—but few square their action with the divine injunctions! All worship mammon and riches; and this, for one item, is a gulf-wide separation from obedience! It is covetousness under a more graceful illusion. No nation, politically, obeys God; for evidence see the wars and armaments of Christendom!

My own “institutes” of the Christian religion, without consulting either Calvin, or Arminius, are, that, though faith in Jesus Christ is vitally important, the sine qua non of salvation, to go before all other obligations as the ever-living principle, and salvation is by his merits alone, not by ours in anything we can or may do, still he hath affixed a condition, and made it a sort of STANDARD, that we be harmless; slay no one; rob no one; burn no one’s house; cheat no one; violate no one’s daughter, or wife—in fact, that we be “harmless as doves.” The law, the commandments, demand nothing more. When, therefore, any one believes and worships in the church, he must also be innocent; for how else can the religious community “get along” unless all be innocent obedience. Thus, it logically follows that though by our action, and even body or prayers, we never can save our souls, still if we do them faithfully God will endow our souls with wings, provided we have faith to know our destination, and to know him to whom we are going to find the way.

That this is the sum total of all religion without the garnishing of multiples of speculations, I believe. On this will I trench; on this live and die; for what else is the Bible?