Does Scripture Teach Salvation By Good Works?

Bronze sculpture by Alan Collins, at the Loma Linda University
and Medical Center

When an expert in religion asks Jesus about what one must do (emphasis mine) to inherit eternal life, he responds with a question, "What do the scriptures say?"

When the man responds with "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength," and adds the less familiar"Love your neighbor as yourself," Jesus commends him with "Do this and you will live."

Jesus then tells the familiar story of the Good Samaritan, clarifying what kind of fellow humans are to be seen as our "neighbors", and then adds, "Go and do likewise."

So is Jesus saying we gain our right standing with God by doing? Where does God's amazing grace come in?

This question at first troubled me, but I now see the passage as being all about grace.

In the first place, the mortally wounded man left to die by the roadside is completely dependent on having unmerited grace extended to him, and through a most unlikely person, an avowed enemy. Without receiving first aid in the form of having his bleeding stopped and his wounds dressed, and without his being transported to an inn for ongoing care, he would have never survived. He couldn't have even been able to dial 911 for help.

That's how God's pure, unadulterated grace works. God rescues us at the point of our greatest helplessness and hopelessness, without our earning or deserving it.

But the Samaritan in the story is the recipient of the identical kind of unmerited favor. Among Jesus's peers, there were no "good" Samaritans (except for dead ones). This heretical and hated outsider would have been seen by Jesus' listeners as the least deserving of God's favor, as the least likely candidate to be the designated hero in the story--as the person who was truly "right with God".

So in working through this unlikely 'Shiite', God shows his unmerited grace to both the one helping and the one being helped. Whenever any of us allows ourselves to be channels of God's mercy, without any thought of reward or merit of our own, that's grace. That's "amore". That's God's unconditional and extravagant agape love.

In God's economy, grace is what it's all about. And it is awesome and amazing indeed.
                                                                           
And it's what saves us.

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"For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life."

 - the apostle Paul, Ephesians 2:8-10 (NRSV)