Fruit Inspection

With deference to Ken Jones for the analogy, I hope to flesh out a point of view of works, building on the last two posts.  Working backwards from judgment and salvation, how can we envision that encounter with God?  Let us consider the various conceivable categories.  Let's start with the idea that all men are resurrected on the Last Day to stand judgment.  There may be some argument that various dispensations are handled differently, but remember too that I am not a dispensationalist.  Therefore, my operating assumption, or my paradigm, is that all men appear before God on the Last Day for judgment.

The easiest to consider is the atheist.  The atheist who denies the existence of God, in other words suppresses the knowledge of God's existence as revealed by natural revelation, views judgment in a state of shock.  All that he has spent his life suppressing comes roaring home at once.  First of all, if he was dead, now he is arisen again, a point that will be racking him with incalculable fear as the reality of the situation sets in.  He wasn't expecting that.  So, as the oddity of second awakening washes through him and leaves, what is left over is the question "why?" Secondly, his realization of the context of the moment will leave him with a profound dread.  If he has heard the Gospel and denied it, his sentence will in essence already be levied, his eternal suffering and separation from God apparent.  There is another group, though who may not have heard the Gospel.  These will be clearly puzzled by the happenings and made fearful by the conduct of others, if indeed we are aware of one another prior to our individual judgment.  The certain knowledge of what is happening will be revealed eventually and judgment passed.

The next group is the true believer.  In each of us, as devout and convinced of Biblical truth as we might be, there lingers a doubt.  There will be that wondering if our fruit was sufficient.  We will place our hope in Salvation into the hands of Jesus and wait.  I believe we will receive our just reward though Christ.  The possibility of varying degrees of reward based on the quality of our fruit does not fit with the redemptive history as revealed throughout the Bible.  There are only two possible outcomes: heaven and hell.

The next group is the self righteous person of a works based theology.  This person is the pompous and pious guy who makes fruit inspection into a higher art form.  His belief in his salvation is based on his self righteous opinion of his own fruit, and is made obvious to him by his low opinion of the fruit of his neighbor.  These are the guys out to change the world by legislating ethics.  These are the guys who preach about the moral decay in society one minute, and then get caught with their hands in the cookie jar the next.  Judgment Day for this unfortunate soul begins rather well and then darkens in a sudden loss of redemption for which he was not prepared.  He didn’t expect it.  He doesn’t think that he has received justice.  He doesn’t understand.  He was unlikely to repent in life, and from death he is unlikely to escape.

There might be a fourth group.  This is a group that hasn’t actually heard the Gospel.  Even if they have, they have never been Baptized, always living outside of the church.  But they have had an unusual, renegade if you will, visitation by the Holy Spirit.  They are not necessarily able to articulate the Gospel, but they believe in the promise.  They may not know all of the proper Biblical categories, but they understand the Word, the Gospel and the Law, seemingly instinctively.  We don’t know if this person exists now, but it can be argued that all of the Old Testament Patriarchs and Covenant makers were believers of the promise despite there being no articulation of the Gospel at those points in redemptive history.  And so their encounters might be generally congenial affairs with polite introductions of Jesus and moments of realization of the manifestation of the promise. 

Now let’s extrapolate back to the lives of prototype persons from each category for completeness.  The first person may have a moral or ethical code, but has no interest in the Gospel.  Civic righteousness and legislation of ethics is as far as he is willing to push his theology.  His interest is solely in an orderly world, at least for him, and he has little regard for the eternal consequences of his actions.  The second person is exactly opposite.  His interest is squarely on actually helping his fellow man.  He cares for his family, his church and the community at large, in that order, and believes that he does so because he is acting in obedience to the Law.  He worries often about whether his actions were the correct actions to take, but ten seconds later he lays those worries aside and acts.

The third person evaluates his actions in the terms that he has rationalized are most consistent with the Law.  He firmly believes that he follows the letter of the law in all issues.  He also believes that the Law is purposely vague in order to allow for interpretation, so that he can actually pull off the Law thing.  He is very critical of the behavior of others.  Ironically, given the right social issue, he can just as easily be on the same side of a debate as the first man as he can be in profound opposition to that same man.  If this guy ever realizes he has made a mistake, he will likely take a defeatist attitude and proceed to make it a huge mistake instead.  He figures that now that he has broken a commandment, he might as well really break it properly.  The fourth guy’s life looks remarkably like the second guy’s life.  He just lacks the categories necessary to organize his prayer life.

And what was the purpose to this exercise?  There is a slick and steep slope between the habit of fruit inspection and the self righteous piety of the third man.  The real discussion is how do we live in Christ and avoid the pietistic error of the fruit inspector.  The answer is in grounding our lives in sound doctrine.  True faith and good works is the byproduct of good doctrine.  Works flow from doctrine.  Doctrine is not deduced by evaluation of works.  Doctrine derives solely from the Word of God as revealed in scripture.

--Troll--