<p>2:21 <i>Was not Abraham our father justified by works, in that he offered up Isaac his son upon the altar?</i>- James goes on to show how Abraham's faith brought works as a natural by-product. The phrase &quot;Abraham our father&quot; looks back to Mt. 3:8,9 and Jn. 8:33,39, where the Jews who said this were told to &quot;bring forth fruits (works) meet for repentance&quot; and to &quot;do the works of Abraham&quot; respectively. Thus James was telling his readers to do the works of Abraham. The fact they were doing works already shows that the real 'work' of Abraham they needed to develop was his faith. &quot;This is the work of God, that ye believe&quot; (Jn. 6:29), Jesus had said. The Biblically minded would have spotted the apparently flat contradiction between &quot;Abraham our father (was) justified by works&quot; and Rom. 4:2, which stresses that Abraham was not justified by his works but by his faith. Thus again the &quot;works&quot; which James says Abraham was justified by were his faith <i>and</i> the practical outworking of it in being prepared to offer Isaac. Abraham's &quot;works&quot; were that &quot;he had offered Isaac his son upon the altar&quot; (v.21). Notice the past tense of &quot;he had offered&quot; and that it does not say 'he bound Isaac...'. Because of Abraham's faith that God would resurrect Isaac on behalf of the perfect lamb sacrifice that he believed was to come (Gen. 22:5,8,14), it was reckoned to Abraham as if he had performed the 'work' of offering Isaac even though he had not physically performed it. Thus the Biblically minded would be able to see from these allusions to other Scriptures that the spiritual attribute of faith and the concept of works are almost indivisible. This is confirmed by noting that the one act of offering up Isaac is described as &quot;works&quot; in the plural- because it involved many separate decisions of faith. And in our lives too, God may count something to us as a completed work when we have only summoned enough true faith to do it, and have not actually performed it in reality.</p>