On the Spirit and the Letter...

Texts:

Psalm 77

Job 4:1-21

Ephesians 2:1-10

"But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ - by grace you have been saved - and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.  For by grace you have been saved through faith, and htis is not your own doing; it is the gift of God - not the result of works, so that no one may boast."  The text goes on to say, "For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life."  What?  All of that about being saved by grace through faith... and that it is not the result of works, and then an indication that we were created to do good works?  How does this work?

I think the distinction here is that it is not our works or our lists of the good we have done or the times we have chosen to do otherwise that bring our salvation.  Though we have been created to live in harmony with the earth and with our neighbors, we are unable to maintain these relationships of our own accord.  We are in need of reconciliation to ourselves, to the earth, to our neighbor, and to God.  We fool ourselves, however, if we think this is something we are able to will ourselves to do.  "By grace you have been saved through faith..." is something Luther comes to again and again in his writing.  He does not gravitate toward this because he is an antinomian (one who is against adhering to the law or keeping the 10 Commandments); he gravitates toward this because, for Luther, anything that would suggest that we are able to make ourselves righteous apart from the free gift of God in Christ trades salvation for self-righteousness.

On the one hand, "It is impossible for someone who does not first hear the law and let himself be killed by the letter, to hear the gospel and let the grace of the Spirit bring him to life," but on the other hand, "Wherever the law alone is preached and only the letter is dealt with, as happened in the Old Testament, and where the Spirit is not preached afterword, there is death without life, sin without grace, and misery without consolation," ("On the Spirit and the Letter," Martin Luther's Basic Theological Writings, p. 83).  To preach both the law and the gospel is to tell the truth about humanity and about God.  The truth is that we often prefer self-sufficiency to relationship, convenient gods of our own making to a God that we cannot control.  It is also true, however, that we have a God who will stop short of nothing to draw us all to Godself.  Knowing we would try to pay for whatever gift we received, God has given it freely in order that we might know what it is to be in relationship, what it is to be sustained, and what it is to be loved.