“What is the difference between good works and bad works?”

July/August 2025 – Grace & Truth Magazine

QUESTION: What is the difference between good works and bad works?

ANSWER: To begin with, let’s ask ourselves another question, a most important one: Whose standard are we going to use, God’s standard or man’s? A casual glance may not show us the difference, but in reality, the two are quite different, in fact, poles apart. Since people are creatures and God is God – holy, almighty, eternal, unchanging, our Creator to whom we must ultimately give account – let’s look first at His standard for what are good works and what are bad works.

Let us begin at the very beginning of the history of mankind, in Genesis 1. Human beings are presented there as the final and crowning feature of God’s creation. Verse 26 presents them as the beings to whom God was going to give dominion over every creature He had made on the earth. God blessed the first couple He made and told them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (v.28 NKJV). In Genesis 2:15, God put the man into the garden He had planted, telling him to “tend and keep it.” They were His managers there, and they could enjoy all that God planted there except that they were not to eat of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (v.17). Thus they had broad latitude as to what they could do day by day, but they were creatures and were responsible to obey their Creator. Obedience to God lies at the very heart of the question, “What are good works?” All that stems from obedience to Him is a good work.

In Genesis 3 we have the sad story of mankind disobeying God and becoming sinful beings. The woman was deceived by the serpent and disobeyed God, eating of the forbidden fruit. She then gave some of it to her husband and he ate. Nowhere are we ever told that he was deceived. Rather, 1 Timothy 2:14 declares, “Adam was not deceived.” When their eyes were opened to their condition, they tried to cover it up. The bad works had begun, and one followed another in rapid succession. Disobedience to God is at the heart of bad works.

From this beginning we see that even when we realize that what we have done is wrong, we almost instinctively do things we may think are good but these simply add to the bad works. The woman shared some of the fruit with her husband. Sharing can be a good thing, but her sharing contributed to his disobeying God. In Romans 5 our sin is attributed to Adam, for he sinned deliberately, in a sense loving his wife or at least doing what she wanted him to do rather than obeying God. Now that they had sinned, they did things together: making coverings for themselves of fig leaves, hiding from God, and pinning the blame on others rather than confessing their fault when God questioned them (Gen. 3:7-13). Doing things together can be good, but here it was not; they were adding sin to sin. To love one’s wife is good, but to love her or to listen to her rather than to obey God is bad. People may want to put a good construction on what Adam did, but God calls it sin. Obedience to God is always good, and disobedience to Him is always bad.

God condemns “those who call evil good, and good evil” (Isa. 5:20). God never calls disobedience good in Scripture. Man may look at the action of Daniel’s three friends in Daniel 3 as disobedience to the king’s command, but they were simply obeying God when the king was commanding them to disobey the commandment God had given His people in Exodus 20:1-6. Thus, obeying the highest authority is often treated by men as disobedience to a lesser authority, and may even be punished as such: the friends were thrown “into the midst of the burning fiery furnace” (Dan. 3:21). Being resolute in obeying God rather than obeying man may bring punishment from man, and we must be ready to face such consequences, for this world is in a state of rebellion against God, and Satan is its ruler and god (Jn. 14:30; 2 Cor. 4:4). We have many other examples of this principle in God’s Word.

Numerous passages of Scripture tell us that we humans are sinful from birth. In Psalm 51:5 David confessed: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me.” David further confessed, “The wicked are estranged from the womb; they go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies” (58:3). Romans 1–3 presents the evidence summed up in the words “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (3:23). Because our nature even before birth is sinful, we find it natural to do bad works. Even a Christian may have to own that “the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice” (7:19).

Jesus was once asked by some people, “What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” He answered, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent” (Jn. 6:28-29). This is what the Holy Spirit, working in the heart of an individual, seeks to lead him to do. No one is ever saved by his own good works. Salvation is by grace through faith, and even that is not of ourselves, for “it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast” (Eph. 2:8-9).

The very next verse tells us, “We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them” (v.10). We see thus that good works are the normal product or outgrowth of salvation. They give evidence that one is truly saved. The epistle of James emphasizes this, pointing out “faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (2:17). The apostle Paul wrote to his fellow-servant Titus: “This is a faithful saying, and these things I want you to affirm constantly, that those who have believed in God should be careful to maintain good works. These things are good and profitable to men” (Ti. 3:8). There are many, many passages in God’s Word that are in full support of this. Good works are a product of the new nature, which we received when we were saved. Peter in his second epistle told us that we have been made “partakers of the divine nature” (1:4), quite the contrast to what Isaiah says about us before we were saved: “All our righteousnesses are like filthy rags” (Isa. 64:6).

When it comes to distinguishing between good works and bad works, we are not always able to assess this properly because God alone knows the motivations of the heart. “The LORD does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart” (1 Sam. 16:7). Thus, while we should confess our own bad works and wrong motives to the Lord, we have no business judging the motives of others. But 1 Thessalonians 5:22 tells us plainly, “Abstain from every form of evil.” May we seek the Lord’s help ever to live with a good conscience before Him and as a good example to others around us! Titus, who was working in Crete among people with a very bad reputation (Ti. 1:12), was told to be “in all things showing yourself to be a pattern of good works … that one who is an opponent may be ashamed, having nothing evil to say of you” (2:7-8).

—Answered by Eugene P. Vedder, Jr