From Faith To Faith

2014-03-02

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith. (Romans 1:16-17)

I previously discussed the function of the gospel, which is in Romans 1:16. The function of the gospel is the power of God to save us: The gospel saves people. Romans 1:17 continues with this purpose, but alludes to the “how” of the gospel.

Therein is the Righteousness of God

We see that “therein is the righteousness of God.” We see the word therein... in what? In the gospel is the righteousness of God. This is discussed at length starting in Romans 3:21. So how is the gospel of Christ the power of God unto salvation? It reveals the righteousness of God. The righteousness of God is given to the one who believes. We must have His righteousness, because we will never have any righteousness of our own that can save us.

As sinners, we are people who have totally departed from God’s standards in practice. What is worse, however, is that we were born in a state in of being alienated and separated from God. We not only do unrighteous things; we are unrighteous by nature. We were born into the kingdom of Satan, and we needed to ripped out of there violently by God (Colossians 1:13). Our righteousness is not good enough; God reveals His righteousness to us, and imputes on us, His righteousness.

The Just Shall Live By Faith

We see that “therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith.” By trusting Jesus Christ, we receive God’s righteousness (Romans 3-5). However, by continuing to trust Jesus Christ, we learn the righteousness of God by experience (Romans 6-8). We cannot afford to change “from faith to faith” to just “from faith.” Being born again is a one-time event, but being transformed into the likeness of Christ experientially is a lifetime process, only complete on the Day of Christ (Philippians 1:6).

When Paul says, “as it is written,” we can expect an Old Testament quote. Habakkuk 2:4 is a famous quote, where Habakkuk questions God as to why wicked Judah was going to be destroyed by the even more wicked Babylon. While the LORD answers His question thoroughly, part of the answer Habakkuk received was “the just shall live by his faith.”

The phrase “the just shall live by faith” demands another look. Notice the subject is “the just.” The people referred to in this sentence’s subject are righteous already. How are they righteous? They have been made righteous by the righteousness of God. These people, saved by faith, now live by faith. They trust God when facing the unknown. The righteous Jews, on the eve of the Babylonian captivity, had to trust God that He promised to make everything right one day. Likewise, we must trust God’s promises when sojourning in this world. We will examine these promises throughout the book of Romans.

We may not understand all of what is going on in the Christian life, but we do know that God knows what He is doing. We may not be able to receive all what the Lord will do in one sitting. It takes years of walking the Christian life to learn the truths of the gospel in experience. At the time of this writing, I have been a Christian for 18 years, which is about half of my life. I have had some spiritual dearth and desert during many of those years. But by God’s patient teaching, I can trust him that “he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6).

Before we can get any more into the good news of the gospel, we now must look at some very miserable realities of the human race in the following verses.