Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Ephesians 2:9

Copyright Ó 2012 J. Neely
Ephesians 2:9

9 Not [ou] of [ek] works, [ergon] lest [hina me] any man [tis] should boast. [kauchaomai]KJV-Interlinear

9 not as a result of works, that no one should boast. NASB

Man has no credit of any kind in his course toward salvation.  You cannot earn salvation.  You cannot do anything that would make you deserve it.  You cannot wish your way into eternity with God.  You cannot earn salvation by being sincere or righteous or emotional or by singing hymns or by attending church on Sunday’s or by hitting or cutting yourself or by suffering or by placing yourself in a position of suffering or abstinence or poverty.  There is absolutely nothing that you can do that will qualify you for salvation or even a better spiritual position with God.

Brownie points do not apply here.  Goody points with God do not apply.

God has defined only one way for salvation and that is through faith and faith alone.  Faith is a belief, a mere thought from within your mind.  It is not raising your hands, or walking out in front of a crowd or reciting scripture to others.  Faith is a thought which applies between your own mind and God.  God reads and hears all of your thoughts, so you cannot fool Him.

Works, ‘ergon,’ is a reference to all of mans plans.  Works of man are mans attempt to substitute his own plan in place of Gods plan.  To substitute ones own plan is to reject Gods plan, and to reject Gods plan means that you do not accept His plan and are making the presumption that your plan is a better deal for you.

To reject Gods plan means that you desire for God to compromise His perfect essence and adopt something lesser that you are offering, namely sin and evil, for the substance of your essence is dust and evil.  You cannot offer anything better than that.

If God allowed you anything of yourself as a credit for your salvation, then you could easily boast of your accomplishment.

However, the accomplishment of Christ, who is God by the way, is far superior than anything you can do or even imagine.  And to suggest that you need to do anything is an insult to God, implying that God somehow did not do enough or did not complete His work for Salvation.

God is truth.  God is perfection.  Anything beneath that is false and when you adopt the false then you adopt pretense, and that is committing yourself to a nothing life.  Pretending that whatever it is that you adopt for your life’s beliefs, is what you are doing when you substitute untruth for truth.  You have to pretend that your untruths are in fact true, and that is the disillusionment of a life without truth.

So, be sincere and fail, be a hard worker and fail, adopt a life of poverty or self-suffering and fail.

So, mans effort is out, and mans credit is out, and anything and everything that man attempts to do to somehow earn or do extra for salvation is a lie.

God gave every human being the same opportunity for salvation, which is faith.  Every human can accomplish a thought at some point in their life.  None of mans plans can be equally applied to every human being in all of history.

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