I Am in Christ Jesus

“God’s Workmanship”

Ephesians 2:10 (NIV)

For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

The apostle, having shown that our salvation is only of grace, and the means by which we are made capable of all saving good in Christ, by faith, excluding all causes in man, and that from the end lest he should boast himself: he now gives a reason why God's grace is all in all, drawn from our redemption by Christ. As in the first creation there was no disposition in man to make himself a man, so no virtue in man now created to make him able to bring himself to eternal life; he confers nothing to the works of his new creation in Christ, no motion of man's will, thought, or desire, or any preparatory work; all proceeds from the infinite creating power of God, He gives all.

~ Paul Bayne

The metal is molten as it runs out of the blast furnace, but it soon cools and hardens. Paul's teaching about salvation by grace and by faith came in a hot stream from his heart, but to this generation his words are apt to sound coldly, and hardly theological. But they only need to be reflected upon in connection with our own experience, to become vivid and vital again. The belief that a man may work towards salvation is a universal heresy. And the Apostle, in the context, summons all his force to destroy that error, and to substitute the great truth that we have to begin with an act of God's, and only after that can think about our acts. To work up towards salvation is, in the strict sense of the words, preposterous; it is inverting the order of things. It is beginning at the wrong end. It is saying X Y Z before you have learnt to say A B C. We are to work downwards from salvation because we have it, not that we may get it. And whatever 'good works' may mean, they are the consequences, not the causes, of 'salvation,' whatever that may mean. But they are consequences, and they are the very purpose of it. So says Paul in the archaic language of my text -- which only wants a little steadfast looking at to be turned into up-to-date gospel -- 'We are His workmanship, created unto good works'; and the fact that we are is one great reason for the assertion which he brings it in to buttress, that we are saved by grace, not by works. 

~ Alexander Maclaren