²¹Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up Isaac his son on the altar?

God is one (Deut. 6:4), completely unified in Himself and thus, by definition. He cannot contradict Himself, for that would be an inherent contradiction in reality. His coherence is our beginning point for any thoughts we have about Him and about life. And this extends to His Word, which is “God-breathed” (2 Tim. 3:16). Some people, when they run into a passage like ours today, are shaken to the core of their beliefs. On the surface, this verse of James seems to contradict what the apostle Paul wrote:

For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law. (Rom. 3:28)

But to the one who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness, just as David also speaks of the blessing on the man to whom God credits righteousness apart from works . . . (Rom. 4:5–6)

For Christ is the end of the Law for righteousness to everyone who believes. (Rom. 10:4)

As mentioned earlier, the sixteenth-century reformer Martin Luther had great difficulty with the book of James because of contrast. Others have used James to justify their interpretation that a person must live up to the law in order to be saved. So how do we reconcile James and Paul?

Do we need to stretch the definitions of words beyond their acceptable field of meanings or distort one writer’s teachings to make them fit with that of the other? No! But we need to look carefully at what James teaches because he uses the word “justified” differently than Paul does. In English, we use words differently based on the context of where they are found. For example, we would not accuse authors of contradiction when one refers to a trunk as the back part of a car, another as the middle part of the body, a third as the trunk of a tree, and still another, using it in the plural, as men’s apparel for swimming. Likewise, the word “saved” is often used in Scripture for eternal deliverance from sin and judgment—to be with God in heaven forever—yet sometimes it simply means deliverance from a particular calamity (e.g. Acts 27:31). So Paul and James use the word “justify” with different connotations, but their teaching on dovetails perfectly.

Lord, help me to carefully understand the words You use to convey truth.