Faith With Works Is Dead, Part 1
Before panicking about my title, consider it may take two weeks to understand it fully. In the past month, I have finished another readthrough of Exodus, the second book of Moses, as he recounts his personal experience of guiding Israel out of Egypt and into their forty years of wandering in the wilderness. During this time, God gave Israel their centuries-long form of tabernacle/temple worship. In the past twenty-four years, I have used more sermon time on tabernacle worship than any other single subject. Of course, the tabernacle was not a single subject as it affects nearly every Bible doctrine, especially soteriology which is the Bible’s most important.
The lessons gleaned about how God works in this world are abundant. I remember our first foray through the tabernacle in 2005. In those days, it was new to the congregation and perhaps a bit puzzling. To some it was overly redundant, and yet the redundancy is one of the Bible’s primary emphases. God never changes. He will not act differently from one situation to another. At times, it may appear so, but these are accommodations for human understanding. Remember, we sit beneath an incomprehensible God. His ways are past finding out, and neither does He require us to inquire beyond what the Bible is pleased to tell us.
As I read the middle chapters of Exodus, Israel had escaped Egypt by God’s powerful miracle of parting the Red Sea. Who in modern times has not read this with the vision of Charlton Heston (Moses) holding his staff with arms outstretched over the sea and the wall of water standing on each side as Israel passed through on dry ground? A column of cloud/fire held Pharaoh and his army back until Israel was safely across. Pursuing after them, Moses closed the sea upon the Egyptian army. The path vanished, and men, horses, and chariots struggled beneath the surface as they drowned in the catastrophe. Exodus 15 is Moses’ song of deliverance that praises God for the miracle of Egypt’s death and Israel’s survival.
Beginning here after seeing the mighty hand of God working in their lives, comes years of doubt and disobedience finally culminating in the death of the entire generation that left Egypt before Joshua completed the desert sojourn. This failure of faithfulness came amidst the most demanding and symbolic representations of the holy God that any civilization has seen. There is as much outstanding doctrinal teaching here as any place in scripture. The extreme radical depravity of the human heart is set against the incomparable righteousness of the holy God. It underlines a critical truth of scripture: “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”
In the wake of this inescapable conclusion, stands a claim that salvation in the Old Testament was different than in the New. The claim says Israel labored in a dispensation in which faith and works were both requirements for salvation. Only in the new dispensation of the New Testament is faith the only requirement. I plan to refute this woeful misinterpretation and prove it destroys the gospel. Sadly, I have worked my way to the limit of bulletin space. I need to return in the second part to finish what I began. Since the immutability of God and the consistency of His salvation has headlined so much of my ministry of nearly a quarter of a century, I feel like a failure if this teaching were to gain any standing in this church. Israel’s glaring fifteen-hundred-year failure accentuates the accomplishments of Christ at the cross.
Pastor V. Mark Smith