- WORKS RIGHTEOUSNESS 'wərks raɪ.tʃəs.nəs noun. A right standing (with God or others) achieved through good deeds.
Works righteousness is how the world works. We tend to call it karma: If we want people to think of us as good, upstanding, deserving, even holy, we’ve gotta publicly do good deeds. Like doing charity work, making big donations, rescuing needy people, doing stuff for the public good. Not just the stuff ordinary citizens do, and should do, like follow the laws and not be jerks. It’s gotta be actions which go above and beyond.
Or (and this is the much harder way, although many people prefer it ’cause it’s quicker and passive) we’ve gotta suffer a catastrophic loss. One which totally doesn’t seem to fit our circumstances. Like getting a deadly disease, surviving a disaster, losing all your stuff in that disaster, losing all your family in that disaster… basically, Job’s story. He was a really good guy, yet lost all his kids and stuff in a single day. Jb 1 Stuff that’ll make people sympathetic, or even cry.
See, people presume the universe oughta balance things out. Good things should happen to good people, right?—and bad things to bad. When circumstances expose the truth—that the universe is random and meaningless—people are outraged at this illusion getting shattered, feel things are just wrong… and frequently take it upon themselves to fix things. (Then claim, “See? The universe balanced things out.” Yeah, not without human help.) People pour out support to the needy… and y’notice it’s sometimes entirely out of proportion. More than once I’ve seen a news story in which someone’s in need, and the public donated so much money, 100 other people could’ve been helped by it. Sometimes the needy people pass some of that generosity along; sometimes they don’t, but that seldom makes the news.
But as you can see, the world runs on works righteousness. On karma.
The kingdom of God, by contrast, runs on grace. God’s people don’t get what we deserve, much less what people think we merit. Instead we get what God wants to give us, and that’s a lot. Way more than we can ever ask or think. Ep 3.20 He wants to give us his kingdom.
For a whole lot of Christians this idea hasn’t entirely sunk in. When we come to Jesus, we bring our existing ideas, including our existing wrong ideas, with us. One of ’em is the idea we owe God big-time. After all, look how much he’s done for us! But we often conclude we gotta pay him back. You’ll even hear Christians claim this is why we’ve gotta do good deeds: We owe God. We’ll never ever be able to make it up to him; not even after a trillion years of good deeds… but we should try.
Which is simply nuts. And goes against everything God’s trying to teach us about grace. We’re supposed to give without expecting anything back, Lk 6.35 because that’s how our Father gives.
But karma is so pervasive in every human culture, even those of us who know God does grace instead of karma, try to make it up to him in big or small ways. We don’t always do stuff for God out of pure gratitude. We’re still trying to balance out our infinite karmic debt to an infinite God. Good luck with all that.
Nah. The reason we Christians are to be holy and good is because it’s what God instructs us to do. It’s not to earn anything, not to pay anything back, not for any other reason than love. If you love God, do as he says. Jn 14.15 If you don’t really, you won’t really. But forget about earning his love; you already have it. Forget about earning his favor; you already have it. That karma stuff only works on humans. Not God.