Confess and Believe and You Will Be Saved

In the epistle this morning we heard: “If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”  This verse has been used by many to suggest that if you want to go to heaven and not hell, all you need to do is believe in and confess Christ; but is this really what this verse means?

To begin to answer that question, consider the gospel reading we heard this morning, in which our Lord entered into the country of the Gergesenes and two demoniacs met Him. The demons said to the Lord: "What have we to do with Thee, Jesus, Thou Son of God? Art Thou come hither to torment us before the time?" In these two short sentences, the demons demonstrate that they believe and even publicly confess that Jesus is the Son of God. By asking if He has come to torment them before the time, they show that they believe and confess also that His coming is the beginning of God’s victory over evil hostile powers which will ultimately be fulfilled in the Resurrection. The demons, therefore, would fulfill the conditions for salvation that Saint Paul is supposedly putting forward. So can it really be that this is all that is needed for a human person to be saved?

If we look at the context of the epistle to the Romans, Saint Paul addresses both Jews and Gentiles since the Roman Church is a mixed group in which there is a certain tension. Saint Paul is here speaking to the Jews. He says of them that they “have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God.”

The righteousness of God is not some quality that God possesses, it is not simply God’s way of acting in the world, rather the God-man Jesus Christ is the righteousness of God of which the Jews were ignorant, and to Whom they had not submitted. We heard Saint Paul say this morning that “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” He is the end, not in the sense that the law will cease because of Him, but rather in the sense that He is the purpose, the reason for the law, that the zeal of those under the law might be directed toward knowledge of Him and submission to His will. He is the law-giver, the one who fulfills the law in Himself, and therefore He is God’s righteousness.

Saint Paul is telling the Jews to couple their zeal with faithfulness and confession of Christ Who is risen from the dead. The Pharisees in particular saw the enforcing of strict adherence to all of the Law as the necessary condition for God to send them a Messiah. So anyone breaking any commandment was an obstacle to their deliverance. Saint Paul said: "Do not say in your heart, 'Who will ascend into heaven?' (that is, to bring Christ down from above)” He is saying that they could not make the Messiah come by their righteousness. He continues: "'Who will descend into the abyss?' (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead).” He is saying that the defeat of death by Christ is not of their doing. It is God’s righteousness, it is Jesus Christ who has delivered His people and raised them up.

The righteousness that the Jews practiced was not wrong, it was self-willed and incomplete. Indeed Christ said of the Pharisees: “whatever they tell you to observe, that observe and do, but do not do according to their works; for they say, and do not do.” Again Christ said, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. These you ought to have done, without leaving the others undone.” It is like the husband that goes out and buys flowers and candy for his wife for Valentine’s day even though that’s not what she wants. It might be a nice gesture, it might check a box, but it is not what’s really pleasing to his wife. To know Christ is to love God and love your neighbor to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, to welcome the stranger, visit the sick and imprisoned, to care for the orphan and the widow. God doesn’t look for us to blindly follow a prescription, but to demonstrate real love borne out of the love we have for God and His creation. Without knowing Christ, the Jews had some of the form of righteousness because it is embodied in that law, but because they didn’t love Christ, they had none of the heart of that law.

They needed to know Christ and to have faith in Him, not because that’s all that is necessary for salvation, but because that is what was primarily lacking in them. When Christ came to the Gergesene demoniacs, they knew Who He was, but they were not living righteously. Blessed Theophylact said that “where there is swinish life, it is not Christ who dwells there, but demons.” The reason that there was a herd of swine nearby was that they were not keeping the commandments of the Law, these two men were living near uncleanness, they were living among the dead in their tombs, they were naked of any righteousness, and they were bound with the chains and fetters of sin. So their confession of Christ was of no effect even though it was true.

The townspeople, having been freed from the terror that the demons visited upon them, having seen the power of God manifest among them in the works of Jesus Christ, were more worried about their livelihood and way of life being disrupted, and so even though they saw, they didn’t believe, and they didn’t confess Christ. Instead, they begged Him to leave them to the life they had been living.

So how will we draw near to Christ? Will we have faith, and if so, what kind of faith will we have? How will we live in this world that we might find eternal rest in Him? We must, of course, come to know God. Some of this comes from the Scriptures which testify of Him. But even the law and the prophets pointed to Him, and yet He was not known by those who made it their mission to know the law and the prophets. We know Christ by focusing outside of ourselves and our desires and appetites. We know Christ through thankfulness for His providence in our lives. We know Him by getting to know those who know Him best. But primarily, we know Him in the sacramental life of the Church in which He offers Himself to us fully.

Our faith must not be merely rational, but a kind of clinging to the Truth Who is Jesus Christ. We must live faithfully, doing those things that Christ has told us are important, because to love God is to keep His commandments.

We must put off our swinish lives, reveling in uncleanness, harboring resentment and hatred, showing disdain for those most in need of our help. We can’t just avoid sin, however. We must replace those evil things with good things. Like the Gergesenes, you can push the demoniacs to the edge of town, but if we do not seek to love God and keep His commandments, uncleanness, hardness of heart, and all manner of evil will wait to rush in to replace them.

Salvation is not a matter of changing your eternal fate; it’s a matter of being changed, of being transformed through encounter with God. We don’t do good works to impress either man or God; we do them because we are joined to God and love others as He loves us. Saint John Chrysostom commenting on this epistle said, “In order to stop anyone from asking: ‘How can we be saved without contributing anything at all to our salvation?’ Paul shows that in fact we do contribute a great deal toward it – we supply our faith!” This faith is alive and active, it is a transforming faith, a following of Christ, which refashions us into the likeness of Jesus Christ, the Son of righteousness; which makes manifest Christ to those around us. We cannot be saved without righteousness, because that righteousness is Christ, and He must live within us.