With the faithful You show yourself faithful: Undeserved grace or merit?

Before I came to faith, studying at school felt easy for me. I did not have to think about it but just got on with the tasks at hand. However, when I became a Christian in my teenage years, I began to find it more difficult to motivate myself. This was because my church emphasised so much the doctrine of grace and that we should not try to earn salvation or God’s favour, that studying hard felt like relying on my own efforts too much. Wouldn’t such an attitude lead to self-righteousness, proud thinking that I earned my good marks and so on? While I came to realise that these thoughts were a distortion of the gospel, I believe that the tension between undeserved grace and living a godly life do exist for many Christians. As a Catholic friend once said to me, if it is all about God’s grace then why would anyone want to do good? As Protestants, we maintain that doing good should be a grateful response to God’s saving grace, but in practice, many Christians almost sneer at ‘good works’ and do not see the importance of right living.

Undeserved grace

Thus, David’s self-assurance in the psalm that God rescued him as a reward for his righteousness (2 Sam 22:21-25) sounds a jarring note for us. Commentators are quick to point out that salvation cannot be earned and they take David’s statement as that of a cocky youth – and look what happened to him in later life! However, this seems to me a misunderstanding. First, as Firth points out, David is not claiming general sinlessness or a perfect life but innocence of wrongdoing in a specific situation.[1] When Saul persecuted him, he refused to kill the king and seize the throne, so in this sense he showed integrity. Second, it confuses the issue to bring eternal salvation into this claim because David never claims that his relationship with God was a reward for his faithfulness. In fact, the Old Testament testifies to God’s undeserved salvation and call on people’s life just as the New. Thus, Abraham is called by God and Israel is redeemed from slavery and made into God’s people for no merit of theirs (and before the Law was given).

God responds to our actions

Nevertheless, Scripture repeatedly testifies that God responds to how we act. The psalms, in fact, frequently make this connection (e.g. Ps 7:8; 24:3-5; 26:1-7). God Himself affirms it by promising to deliver those who love Him (Ps 91:14), and love in the OT is never purely emotion but refers to attitudes and ways of living that demonstrate commitment to God (cf. Deut 6:5; 10:12-13). Actions have consequences and particular behaviour leads to blessings, though not necessarily in material terms or immediately. As we have seen, David was vindicated and received the kingdom (though after a long time) when he consistently relinquished his right to it and waited on the Lord. On the other hand, he experienced ongoing struggle and strife in his family and as king after he abused his power.[2]

Humility and God’s faithfulness

Making this connection between our actions and God’s, however, cannot mean that we feel smug and self-righteous as if this were nothing more than a business transaction: God pays us for our service of Him. Our actions matter not as a bargaining chip in negotiating with God but because of what they reveal about our heart. David points out that God saves ‘the afflicted’, a word that also means humble or lowly, while He abases the proud (lit. ‘makes the proud fall’; 2 Sam 22:28). Thus, his emphasis cannot be about his own merit because that will lead to the kind of pride that God knocks down. Rather, the stress is on God’s character. It simply cannot be that the faithful are abandoned by Him or that people of integrity will find Him unreliable (2 Sam 22:26-27).[3] In fact, God is faithful even when we are faithless (2 Tim 2:13) and the testimony of both Old and New Testament is that He even defers judgment at times so as to make room for our repentance. May we be people who seek Him from the heart.

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[1] David G. Firth, 1 & 2 Samuel (Nottingham: Apollos, 2009), 519.

[2] This principle is also present in the New Testament. Jesus teaches that it is the pure in heart who see God (Matt 5:8) and the meek who inherit the earth (Matt 5:5) and many other statements that draw connections between actions and consequences. Likewise, He says that those who confess Him, He will confess in heaven and those who deny Him, He will deny (Matt 10:32-33; see also 2 Tim 2:11-13). Whatever the exact meaning of the actions, grace is nevertheless operational even here because Peter, who denied the Lord three times but repented was later restored.

[3] Several translations (including NASB) render the first descriptor in 2 Samuel 22:26 as ‘kind’, because the Hebrew ḥasid (same root as ḥesed) has connotations of love, kindness, even mercy. However, the word also means ‘faithful’ or ‘loyal’ within a covenant relationship, which seems to me a better fit here given David’s summary of his behaviour earlier that reflects his faithfulness to God’s principles (2 Sam 22:22-23). The second adjective, tamim (NASB ‘blameless’) is primarily used of sacrificial animals without obvious blemish or defect (e.g. Lev 1:3, 10). When applied to human beings, the word refers to their integrity. The last pair of words in 2 Samuel 22:27 is the hardest to make sense of. It uses a different word for humans (‘iqqesh ‘twisted, perverse’) compared to God and the word about God (root tpl) only occurs here. It is thought that two letters got mixed up here and the root of the word should be ptl, which means ‘crooked, twisted’. The same two words/roots are used in Prov 8:8 (ptl and ‘iqqesh), where both have negative connotations. However, when speaking of God, the meaning cannot be negative, hence translations often render it ‘astute’ or ‘shrewd’.

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