Supererogation

Supererogation is the idea that one might do more than is required and bank the surplus as merit. Two passages — one prophetic, one from Jesus — cut against the idea from opposite directions.

Past Righteousness Banks No Credit

Ezekiel is told to address those who would lean on accumulated righteousness as if it carried forward against present sin: "The righteousness of the righteous will not deliver him in the day of his transgression; and as for the wickedness of the wicked, he will not fall by it in the day that he turns from his wickedness; neither will he who is righteous be able to live by it in the day that he sins" (Ezek 33:12). The principle is symmetrical: a wicked man's repentance erases what was, and a righteous man's iniquity erases what was. Neither column carries a balance.

The next verse hardens the point against the assumption supererogation requires: "When I say to the righteous, that he will surely live; if he trusts to his righteousness, and commits iniquity, none of his righteous deeds will be remembered; but in his iniquity that he has committed, in it he will die" (Ezek 33:13). Trust in one's own righteousness is itself the failure mode. Past good deeds, in such a case, are not remembered.

Total Obedience Is Bare Duty

Where Ezekiel denies that righteousness can be carried forward, Jesus denies that it could ever exceed in the first place. Closing a parable about a slave who serves his master, plows, and prepares the master's meal before eating his own, Jesus tells his hearers: "Even so you⁺ also, when you⁺ will have done all the things that are commanded you⁺, say, We are unprofitable slaves; we have done that which it was our duty to do" (Lu 17:10). The ceiling is set at "all the things that are commanded." Reaching that ceiling produces no surplus — only the recognition that the work done was already owed.

Together the two passages leave no ledger room for excess merit. There is duty, and there is failure to do duty; there is no third column for credit beyond it.