PAUL TEACHES SALVATION WITHOUT GOOD WORKS IN HIS LETTERS

Protestantism teaches that if God has chosen you for salvation, he will ensure that you will believe that Jesus died for your sins and rose again to be your Lord. Good works result from trust. They have nothing to do with helping you gain salvation. They are the fruit of already being saved.

ROMANS 3:20

Paul, the first apostle of Jesus to write, is alleged to have been the paramount theologian and apostle of the doctrine of justification by faith alone without good works or obedience. Was he really?

Paul taught that if the Law God gave Moses were obeyed perfectly by you you would obtain salvation (Romans 2:13) for this was the doctrine of the Law itself (Leviticus 18:5). He said that the reason nobody was saved or justified by obeying it was because nobody could obey it right (Galatians 3:21,22) for all are sinful (Romans 3; Galatians 3:22). He declared that the Jews had zeal for God but they didn’t know how to serve him properly despite their sincerity for they tried to be righteous their own way by keeping the Law instead of being righteous God’s way (Romans 10:2,3). This clearly suggests that though the Jews asked God to help them keep the Law and were sincere and did their best God was not satisfied. So obedience did not please him for he wanted them to avail of imputed obedience. That is the only thing the Bible could mean here. Imputed obedience would be like Jesus or someone obeying the Law for you and you get the credit for it. The Bible teaches salvation by imputation not obedience so it supports the reformation dogma of salvation by faith alone without good works.

Paul said that the observance of the Law does not save or justify anybody before God in Romans 3:20. It did not justify or save the Jews for justification and acquittal are gained by faith alone and the Law was given to make people aware of sin and what was sinful not to justify. By the way, the Law promises justification by obedience but only to those who obey it perfectly and such do not exist which is why it was not intended to justify. God could give a Law to justify the perfect but which is not given to justify his people for they would never be perfect. “No person will be justified (made righteous, acquitted, and judged acceptable) in His sight by observing the works prescribed by the Law. For [the real function of] the Law is to make men recognise and be conscious of sin”.

Romans 2:6-13 has Paul writing that God "will repay to every man according to his works ... For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified." He is not talking about good works being able to earn salvation.  He is only saying that violation of the law costs you your salvation and thus you will not enjoy an eternal relationship with God unless you repent.  Having to obey a law to be saved does not imply that you need to do good works to earn salvation.  It is not the same thing.

Protestants understand he means salvation is without the Law and that you can be saved without obeying God. In short, they think he is saying that once you are saved you need no longer obey to get saved but will remain saved no matter how you sin.
 
ROMANS 5:20

Paul said that the Law came in order to increase sins so that grace would be increased.

This sounds terrible. God told us what right and wrong were to make us sin more so that he could save us. But if God did not do this then he would be sinning for it is a sin to let a person do wrong and not tell them. That is like using a person to commit a sin by them. So, God had no choice. Paul would have given this answer and those who were as evil as himself would have propagated it even though the hypocrisy of what they were doing in preaching about morality to the ignorant proved that it was a big lie for the ignorant needing to be taught would show that God must have let them be ignorant and thus to have sinned through them. The only solution is to argue that everybody believes in the Law and won’t admit it.

Anyway, this is a digression.

Paul said that where sin was plentiful grace was made even more plentiful.

After, Paul said, “What shall we say to all this? Are we to remain in sin in order that God’s grace favour and mercy may multiply and overflow? Certainly not! How can we who have died to sin live in it any longer? Are you ignorant of the fact that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?”

What is this about? The people he criticises think that the more you sin the more grace you get without you abandoning your sin. He condemns this view and tells us that we don’t have to sin anymore. He says that you get more grace the more sin you cast off. He is condemning the view that justification is a licence to sin all you want for the justified is dead to sin – doesn’t need to sin.

The doctrine of justification by faith alone does not teach that the more you sin the better but it does teach that unrepented sin need not cost you your relationship with God. Since goodness is imputed to you though you are evil this imputation cannot be increased for it is just a declaration and not a quantity of grace. The more you sin the more grace you are offered to get you out of sin but that does not mean justification is a license to sin. The grace of imputation is different from sanctifying grace because the first is like a blanket over a manure heap and changes nothing while the latter changes you if you let it. The first is God pretending you are good and the latter is God making you good.

The people would not have been claiming that the more they sin the more grace they get if they meant sanctifying grace therefore it is just the grace of imputation or justification that they meant. They thought the more you sin the better for it increases goodness in the sense that God has to correct the badness by balancing it with the goodness of the saviour Jesus Christ. But imputation is only a reaction to a bad situation that should not happen in the first place for people should not sin. Imputation should not be abused for it should not even be necessary.

Paul meant the grace of imputed righteousness when he said that sin increases the grace of righteousness and that those who thought it makes the other kind of grace abound were wrong.

This fact alone proves that Paul did indeed teach the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith and that the Catholic Church has departed from Christianity in many things.

The difference is that in Protestantism justification leaves you exactly as you are and in Catholicism it makes you really righteous and not just declared righteous.
 
ROMANS 5'S LOGIC
 
Paul in Romans 5 says that God proved he loved us when Jesus died for us when we were still sinners. This shows that he believed nobody was saved until after Jesus died. It shows that the trendy Christian lie that people were saved before the death of Jesus but by it though they didn't know what was happening up for what it is, a lie.

Paul asserts that Jesus has made us righteous by dying for our sins. He argued that since Jesus did this it is likely that he would save us from God's anger. Study this carefully. If Jesus has made us righteous by dying for our sins then God isn't mad at us any more. So how can Paul say he is? The answer is that though Jesus has made us holy and righteous we are still sinners. Jesus was holy and righteous for us, in our place. He did the good works for us so God credits them to our account. So God is not angry with us because the debt of goodness we must offer to him is paid. But he is angry that we are still sinners. The only way you can be a righteous sinner is by a legal fiction.

Paul then declares that since we have been reconciled to God by his Son's death we can count on being saved by the life of Jesus. Paul teaches that we can count on this not just because Jesus has reconciled us with God but also because we are filled with joyful trust in God through Jesus.

Does he mean that our joyful trust is evidence that we are being saved by the life of Jesus?

But to say we can count on being made whole or saved because we trust makes no sense. It is like saying we trust because we trust.

He means the trust is not natural trust. It is not ours. It is trust infused into us by Jesus. It is supernatural. Only magical trust can be a sign to us that we can count on God.
 
EPHESIANS 2:8-10
 
Ephesians 2:8-10 goes: “For it is by free grace (God’s unmerited favor) that you are saved (delivered from judgement and made partakers of Christ’s salvation) through [your] faith. And this [salvation] is not of yourselves [of your own doing, it came not through your own striving], but it is a gift of God; Not because of works, lest any man should boast. For we are God’s [own] handiwork.”

Rome interprets this section as being right that we are saved by grace not works. It says the works that don’t save are the works we are obligated to do without grace by the Law of Moses so this section does not deny that we are saved by works done by grace (page 116-117, Born Fundamentalist, Born-Again Catholic).  They say that Paul uses the word work to mean graceless work while Jesus and James (James supposedly said we are saved by works and not faith alone) mean graceful work by the word.

If the writer of this letter really meant that then why did he not make it clear that he meant graceless works? He should have for graceful works are still works.

He was writing to Greek converts more than ex-Jews. To the Greeks works would have been understood as any works. If it is true that Paul believed that only graceless works have nothing to do with salvation and that was why the Law of Moses didn’t save, then the Greeks would not have been familiar with this usage. They were not Jews and had never known the Law of Moses. The issue about grace and the law was a Jewish-Christian one. Works just meant works here.

If Paul had meant graceless works he would have said so. The readers were not experts in his theology for he had to tell them a lot so they wouldn’t have understood if he meant what the lying Catholic Church says he did. Who would embrace a theology that said good works could not save and then said they could if they were done by grace and were not your works? That makes no sense.

If you get grace and even if it is free and you get it by going to sacraments or doing good works you can boast. This shows that the passage clearly teaches salvation or justification by faith alone and even this faith is God’s work not yours so you have nothing to feel superior to anybody else about.

PHILIPPIANS 3:9

“And that I may [actually] be found and known as in Him, not having any [self-achieved] righteousness, that can be called my own, based on my obedience to the Law’s demands (ritualistic uprightness and supposed right standing with God thus acquired), but possessing that [genuine righteousness] which comes through faith in Christ (the Anointed One), the [truly] right standing with God, which comes from God by [saving] faith” (3:9 AB).

Paul’s righteousness is not his own.

Catholics say that it is not his own in the sense that God influenced him to be holy.

But then he would have written “not just my own”.

Then they say that all we do is God’s doing in the sense that God holds us in existence, keeps us existing and acting and gives us help apart from this to do good. But Paul says he no longer has his own righteousness but God’s. If Paul meant what Catholics say then he could not have said that his new righteousness is different from the old righteousness he once had.

So, Paul meant that he was regarded as righteous in the sight of God by a legal fiction and not that he really was righteous. It is like God pretending that a sinner is holy and declaring that he is not a sinner in the legal sense.

This makes the verse an important one in relation to the dispute between Catholics and Protestants regarding whether or not we are saved by faith without good works or obedience.

Catholics would say that Paul would not be made righteous merely by obeying the Law if he meant to earn salvation by it. He could only be saved by obeying the Law in faith, that is, the faith that comes from God, and shows that one has his grace and is right with him. Paul meant he really was righteous according to the Law and gave no hint that he meant he was righteous his own way and by his own standard based on the Law which would not be following the Law in reality.

If Paul believed that then why did he not say that his righteousness was no good because he obeyed without the grace of faith? The only reason is that he did not believe the Catholic doctrine.

The righteousness Paul had was the good deeds of Jesus covering over his sins for which they made up. God has to look on the good side all the time that is why he can stop looking on our sins and just concentrate on the righteousness of Jesus which to him is our own. It is like somebody earning you a coat and when you put it on and they give it to you it is yours. The righteousness of Jesus is Jesus’ gift to me so it is mine but it is not my righteousness in the sense that I have done the obeying for I have not.
 
CONCLUSION:
 
Paul contradicted the Roman Catholic idea that salvation is by faith and good works to teach that salvation produces good works but you will be saved without them and that to depend on them is to indicate that God's grace is not in you.