We Are Unworthy Servants

Part One ended with a question that every honest reader has asked: can anyone actually keep the commandments? Before that question can be answered, one charge must be faced. It does not concern the commandments themselves, but the people who try to keep them.

The charge runs: “To receive everything by grace and then try to go back to the Torah is pride. When people say they are doing something, they fall into conceit and condemn those who cannot.”

Most of us have met the person this claim has in mind. He keeps a list, he knows who missed what, and he looks at everyone else from a little higher up. That person is real, and he is not pleasant company. Scripture warns against him too, as the end of this chapter will show. The claim, then, is not foolish; it points to a real danger.

But it makes a move worth slowing down for. It takes the danger of a proud keeper and turns it into a rule: keeping is pride. The question for this chapter is therefore a simple one. Where does the Torah itself place pride: on the person who keeps the commandments, or somewhere else?

Where the Torah Puts Pride

Moses spoke to Israel on the edge of the promised land. He knew that good houses, growing herds and flocks, and silver and gold lay ahead (Deuteronomy 8:12-13), and he knew what plenty can do to a heart, so he warned them:

Deuteronomy 8:11 Beware lest you forget the LORD your God, in not keeping His commandments (mitzvah מִצוָה mits-vaw') and His judgments (mishpat מִשׁפָּט mish-pawt') and His statutes (chuqqot חֻקָּה khook-kaw'), which I am commanding you (tzivvah צָוָה tsaw-vaw') this day;

Moses defines forgetting in a particular way. Forgetting the LORD is not a lapse of memory, as though His name could be mislaid like a set of keys. It is forgetting Him “in not keeping His commandments.” To forget Him is to stop keeping what He said.

Two Hebrew words stand against each other in this verse. To keep is shamar שָׁמַר shaw-mar', the word for a watchman on a wall or a shepherd guarding his flock, for careful and wakeful attention to something precious. To forget is shakach שָׁכַח shaw-kakh', which means to forget, to ignore, to leave behind. A garden is seldom lost in a single day; it is lost by being ignored, one week at a time.

Three verses later, Moses shows what lies beneath that forgetting:

Deuteronomy 8:14 And your heart be lifted up, and you forget the LORD your God, who brought you out from the land of Egypt, from the house of slaves;

A lifted-up heart is the Bible’s picture of pride. In the words of Moses it walks hand in hand with forgetting, and he has just defined that forgetting as not keeping His commandments. The proud heart is not the one guarding the commandments but the one that has let them wither.

The Recipe

Imagine that a master chef hands you the recipe for the dish he is known for. Every amount is measured, and every step is written in order. “Follow this,” he says, “and you will make something good.”

Suppose you follow it to the letter. No one would call that arrogant. Following it is a way of saying, “You know more about this than I do.” The arrogant thing would be to toss the card into the bin and say, “I will do it my own way. I do not need your instructions.” Pride lies not in following the recipe but in deciding that you have outgrown it.

The psalm says the same thing in one line:

Psalm 119:21 You have rebuked the insolent, the cursed, who stray from your commandments (mitzvot מִצוָה mits-vaw').

The word for “the insolent” is zed זֵד zade', which means the arrogant, the proud, the presumptuous. And the psalm identifies them as those “who stray from your commandments (mitzvot).” It does not call the one who keeps the commandments proud. It calls the one who wanders from them proud.

What the Keeper Says

The claim worries that anyone who says “I am doing something” will grow conceited. Yeshua answered that worry long ago. He told a short story about a servant who comes in from the field, and He asked whether the master thanks him for doing what he was told. The answer was no. Then Yeshua said this:

Luke 17:10 So you too, when you do all the things which are commanded you, say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have done only that which we ought to have done.'"

Yeshua assumes something here: “when you do all the things which are commanded you.” He speaks not of a few of them but of all of them, and He treats His disciples’ doing what is commanded as something that will actually happen.

Then He gives them the words to say afterward: “We are unworthy servants.” The word for unworthy is achreios ἀχρεῖος akh-ri'-os, useless or good for nothing, and the word for servant is doulos δοῦλος doo'-los, a slave. A slave who finishes his work has not built himself a monument. He has done “only that which we ought to have done.”

Yeshua, then, does not solve the problem of pride by telling His followers to stop keeping the commandments. He solves it by teaching them how to think of themselves once they have kept them. Keeping and humility sit in the same sentence.

Nothing to Boast About

There is a deeper reason why keeping leaves nothing to boast about. As we saw in Chapter 8, God promised through Ezekiel, “I will cause you to walk in my statutes” (Ezekiel 36:27). If it is God’s Spirit who moves a person to walk in His statutes, then the walking is His work in us, and no one takes a bow for a gift.

It is worth considering, too, who kept the Torah. Yeshua said that He had kept His Father’s commandments (John 15:10, which we read in Chapter 2). And when Paul came to Jerusalem, in the scene Book 1 described at length, the elders said this to him:

Acts 21:20; 21:24 And when they heard it they began glorifying the Lord; and they said to him, "You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed, and they are all zealous for the nomos νόμος nom'-os(law); … take them and purify yourself along with them, and pay their expenses so that they may shave their heads; and all will know that there is nothing to the things which they have been told about you, but that you yourself also walk orderly, keeping the nomos(law).

The elders spoke of “how many thousands there are” among the believers, and “they are all zealous for the nomos(law).” Paul himself, the elders said, would show everyone “that you yourself also walk orderly, keeping the nomos(law).” No one reading these pages would call Yeshua proud, or Paul, or those thousands of believers in Jerusalem.

The Other Word

Still, the claim is right about one thing. Scripture does forbid a proud and condemning spirit. Yeshua said:

Matthew 7:5 Hypocrite! First remove the beam from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.

He does not say that we must never deal with a brother’s speck. He says, “First remove the beam from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck.” The order is oneself first, and then one’s brother. Paul says the same:

Galatians 6:1 Brothers, even if anyone is caught in any trespass, you who are pneumatikoi(spiritual) restore such a one in a pneuma πνεῦμα pnyoo'-mah(spirit) of gentleness; each one looking to yourself, so that you too will not be tempted.

A believer who sees a brother fall is to help him up again, gently, remembering that he could fall too.

This is how the Bible holds the two together. The command not to condemn and the command to keep the commandments stand in the same Bible, and it does not tell us to throw away either one. The cure for a proud keeper is not to stop keeping. It is to keep humbly, as an unworthy servant who has only done his duty.

Pride, then, was never in the keeping. A quieter claim takes another road. It does not accuse the keeper of pride. It simply says that we must wait: God will act first, and only then are we to obey. That claim must be tested next.