Dead Works
By Brenton Ready
The blood of Christ shall purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? Heb 9:14
What are ‘dead works’? A ‘dead work’ is anything we do that is not included in God’s predestined plan for us, regardless of whether or not it has a good or noble outcome or intention. Dead works are not just the obvious sins like lying or stealing, but they are the fruit of our sinful default mode of trying to ‘name’ or define ourselves instead of being and doing what God designed for us. ‘Dead works’ are our attempts to live out our own ideas and ideals of what life should be like. The Lord does not help us to live outside His plan, nor can we achieve His plan for us without receiving power from Him every day. Only the Lord’s predestined works result in eternal life – nothing else. Anything that does not lead to life, leads to death.
It is the power of sin within us that demands the right to define ourselves independently from God, and drives us to establish our own goodness by what we do. The Bible says that the first foundational principle of the doctrine of Christ is ‘repentance from dead works’. Heb 6:1. How do we see sin’s power broken so that we are freed from the innate drive to do ‘dead works’?
By offering Himself on the cross, and pouring out His life in His blood, Christ destroyed the hold that sin has over us. When we turn from our independence from God and commit ourselves to Him, He brings us into His family as His ‘sons’, and we are set free from the power of sin. However, there still remains a process by which we cease from sinning. Our opening verse declares that this process involves the blood of Christ, which ‘purges our conscience from dead works’. In other words, the life that is in the blood of Christ is poured into us, releasing us to be set and settled on His works for us. No longer are we bound to vain strivings to attain our own outcomes from life, but we are free to fulfil God’s will. Such a purging is impossible for us to do on our own. It needs God’s continuous provision of the life that is in His blood, along with His word that proclaims our ‘sonship’, and the power of His Spirit.
All of this was provided in the Covenant that the members of the Trinity entered into before time began. Under this Covenant each of our names and identities was decided and proclaimed. Then the life of the Son of God was offered like the blood of a lamb upon an altar as the means by which the covenant could be fulfilled. This process was illustrated frequently during Bible times. Whenever two Israelites made a covenant, the offering of a blood sacrifice had to accompany it. It was like putting a signature on a document – but more significant. In the same way, before time, the Son of God was God’s Lamb whose life was offered so that the divine Covenant would be ratified and each of us could have a name and identity. This offering was then displayed in history when Jesus came into the world and was offered on the cross as the Lamb of God.
It is important to realise that the blood of the Lamb of God is not firstly about sin. It is about the activation of our sonship. He has made available the life and power for us to become sons of God. This power begins working in us as soon as we receive His word that carries with it the power to believe God. Then the power of His life is in us every step of the way as we begin to walk out our newborn sonship. He puts in us the heart of a true son of God that cries out, ‘Abba Father’- just as the Son of God did in the garden of Gethsemane where His blood began to flow in time.
By the power in His blood we can put aside our ‘dead works’ and reveal Christ in our daily lives. We can join Christ in His offering and be pleasing to the Father. We can be free from the futility of our ‘dead works’.
