Jesus Came to Make Dead People Deified

Ravi Zacharias was Wrong

Ravi Zacharias used to famously say, “Jesus didn’t come to make bad people good; he came to make dead people live.” As it would turn out, Zacharias would proceed to sexually abuse and assault countless women over an extended period of time.

While one obviously cannot say that Zacharias abused women because of what he believed, there is a connection. If I think that Jesus didn’t come to make bad people good—good in the truest sense—and relegate that to a secondary category of “sanctification” as something annexed to salvation rather than integral to it, then it’s not exactly surprising that I would treat personal goodness in a similar way.

Jesus Came to Make Dead People Deified

Francis Turretin, a Reformed theologian, once wrote,

“Since good works have the relation of the means to the end (Jn. 3:5, 16; Mt. 5:8); of the 'way' to the goal (Eph. 2:10; Phil 3:14); of the 'sowing' to the harvest (Gal. 6:7,8); of the 'firstfruits' to the mass (Rom. 8:23); of labor to the reward (Mt. 20:1); of the 'contest' to the crown (2 Tim. 2:5; 4:8), everyone sees that there is the highest and an indispensable necessity of good works for obtaining glory. It is so great that it cannot be reached without them (Heb. 12:14; Rev. 21:27)…"Works can be considered in three ways: either with reference to justification or sanctification or glorification. They are related to justification not antecedently, efficiently and meritoriously, but consequently and declaratively. They are related to sanctification constitutively because they constitute and promote it. They are related to glorification antecedently and ordinatively because they are related to it as the means to the end."

Good works are the way and means to possessing salvation. That is, because salvation is the life of God in the life of man, salvation is more than just “justification”. Justification has to do with the forgiveness of sins. And it’s true: God makes us heirs of eternal life, forgiven and adopted into his family, by faith alone apart from any good works we do.

But this is only one aspect of salvation. If salvation, fundamentally, is ever-increasing union with Christ, then good works are not just “evidences” of salvation but the way and means through which we are increasingly and finally saved. That is, through Holy Spirit-wrought obedience, we develop habits and virtues which fit us for participation in the life of God.

William Forbes, a Scottish Anglican bishop of the 17th century, wrote,

“Certainly works, even the best of them, do not merit properly and of condignity, (i. e. do not equal by their own value) even the lowest degree of heavenly glory, much less the very heavenly glory in itself and life eternal; yet it cannot be denied, that on account of God's gratuitous promise even eternal life itself, and not merely more exalted degrees in it, is rendered to good works”

Our final salvation, where God completes the work of grace he’s begun in our lives, will organically grow out of our present striving after holiness (as Turretin says). This is not some concession to Rome; this is classic Protestant soteriology. Because glorification is the glory of God refracted in humanity, such that humans reflect God without sin, the work of glorification has begun in our lives as soon as we are in Christ. And at final judgment, God will render a verdict over our whole life which will eventuate in eternal life—our final resurrection and glorification—or eternal death.

God came to make bad people good in the truest sense. For goodness is nothing other than the life of God in the life of his creatures, and therefore God came to make bad people glow with the splendor of his own excellencies that shine forth in Christ. He came to make dead people deified.

And therefore, the work you and I have today is that work of growing in our share in God’s life through whatever trials and events the day lays out before you.