Just by Faith

I started out in Romans 1 this morning but ended up spending much more time in Habakkuk 2 uncovering a number of revelations for me. I went there following the thread of faith that I picked up in Rom. 1:5 and linked to verse 17 which quotes Hab. 2:4. Then to better understand this verse I ended up perusing the whole chapter of Hab. 2 and found several more themes, some of which interestingly weave together several threads that I have written about over the past few days. I find it affirming when God does things like this – not affirming in the sense of flattering my wisdom but affirming in the sense that He is so kind to share His thoughts with me. Sometimes He causes me to start thinking about them ahead of the time that I read about them so that I will know they were not stimulated from what I read but from the Source that provided them to both minds. I love how God weaves things and people together to reveal Himself to us. In fact, that is some of what I find in this chapter.

As I often like to do, I opened up the interlinear feature on my computer for Hab. 2 so I could ponder over some of the original words to see what varied implications might be hidden from sight by the English translation. While I am certainly not an expert in Hebrew or any other language, I feel that God is able to share a lot of insights and inferences of His original intention in a passage if I take the time to expose myself to a little more research and keep my mind open to the influence of the Holy Spirit at the same time.

I started out wanting to flush out more meaning behind the phrase, “the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith”. That phrase has completely baffled me all of my life and I have not spent much time trying to unpack it until recently. I am not willing to accept stock answers for this but would like to uncover more clearly what God had in mind when this was conveyed to us through Paul. If this is the means by which “the righteousness of God is revealed”, then to understand better what the “righteousness” of God means I need to understand what “faith” means and even farther, what “faith to faith” means. Because Paul bases what he is trying to convey on the passage from Hab. 2:4, then to take a good look at that passage and its surrounding context would likely be of great help.

“I will stand on my guard post and station myself on the rampart; and I will keep watch to see what He will speak to me, and how I may reply when I am reproved.” (Habakkuk 2:1 NAS95) This is the beginning, the setup for the context of the faith passage. Some of the original language implies that I am peering intently into the distance to see what He will speak to me. This is a strong focus, an intentional and conscious focus of my mind, a hunger and an attitude of expectation to wait for what God wants to communicate with me. It is involves an awareness or analysis of how I may or should respond the I am reproved by God. That could take a lot of time to unpack just by itself, but I want to go on to the next verse that I feel picks up some of the things I have been thinking about over the past week.

“Then the Lord answered me and said, 'Record the vision and inscribe it on tablets, that the one who reads it may run.'” (Habakkuk 2:2 NAS95) The word for “tablets” means to to make it glisten, polished stone. Inscribe actually means to explain, to make it more clear. What this verse seems to be saying is that “the vision” needs not only to be put into written form (recorded), but it also needs to be made plain, more understandable and attractive. This brings together two things I have been pondering, writing and vision. Evidently, according to this passage, there is very good reasons to write things. Writing is a very useful tool for communicating and God wants us to do it. He also wants the vision that He conveys to us to be explained or translated through us in such a way so that others can understand it better, in a such a way that others are inspired and excited and enabled to run with it without so much hindrance. Hopefully that is what I am being trained to do.

Verse 3 has been widely applied to prophecy and particularly the great movement during the mid-eighteen hundreds. I am not going to spend time on this verse but would like to examine closely the next verse in which is found the famous phrase, “the just shall live by faith” made popular by Martin Luther.

“Behold, as for the proud one, His soul is not right within him; But the righteous will live by his faith.” (Habakkuk 2:4 NAS95)

As for the man of pride, my soul has no pleasure in him; but the upright man will have life through his good faith. (Habakkuk 2:4 BBE)

Gen. 2:7 gives the formula for the creation of a soul. You form dust into the image of God and then add the breath of life from God and lo, a human soul comes into existence. The soul is a balanced combination of these two ingredients. What I see in verse 4 in Habakkuk is an imbalance exposed in a soul due to pride. Then this imbalance is contrasted with God's solution for it – living by His faith.

With careful research some have come to the conclusion that this text is pointing primarily to the faith of God more than the faith of the just person. After thinking about this for awhile it became obvious to me why that should be the way to view this. God is the only source of life. If a person who is to be considered “just” is to have life it only makes sense that the life must come from God, not from his own faith in God. This exposes one of the more subtle problems in the teachings about faith popular in Christianity today. We are often in danger of putting more emphasis on our faith than we are on God Himself. This has the effect of depending on our ability to “work up” faith and makes God beholden to how much faith we can produce. I spent much of my life in this kind of thinking and still am working to undo the “hard-wiring” instilled in me by the deceiver. Just in the past few days I have been listening to some talks that explain this concept much more clearly which has helped greatly in unpacking this idea of “faith to faith”. The core of this issue is God's faithfulness far more that our faith in Him.

We cannot work up faith, contrary to what I and many around me assumed most of my life. Faith is spontaneous and reactive. This even ties back into verse 1 where my response to God's reproofs is considered. My ability to have a healthy, responsive, living faith in God is intrinsically linked to my beliefs about what God is like and how I perceive His attitude toward me. If I allow pride (self-dependence) to unbalance my soul, then I will not find pleasure in God or He in me. By extension I will not be found to be just (synchronized with God) because real faith that makes me right with God (justified) is totally a response to the faithfulness of God Himself.

Faith inspires faith just as love elicits love. This is possibly one of the most important yet most misunderstood foundations of real Christianity in personal life and the church. We hear very little about God's faith in us. Yet this is the reason that He has invested all of heaven and poured out His heart and His Son to save us – because He had faith that we would respond to His offers and attractions and cease our resistance to His love. This is what is meant by God's faithfulness. It is not just that He is consistent and always keeps His word, although that is part of it. It is the amazing and almost unbelievable idea that God actually has faith in sinners that they will sooner or later relinquish their rebellion and allow Him to transform them back into His own image. It is God's faith that we must live by to be just. It is God's faith that inspires all other faith. If we want more faith we must learn that it does not come by trying harder to work it up but by focusing on the greatest example of faith, God Himself. It is in beholding that we become changed. When we fill our mind with the reality of His faithfulness, His being full of faith in us, we will find faith awakening in response, even when we are reproved by Him because we will know in our heart that these reproofs are only from a heart full of love and designed to bring our hearts into harmony with His.

I know I need to spend a lot more time pondering this and allowing it's reality to awaken faith in my own soul. I want pride to be replaced with faith inspired by His faith in me. That still boggles my mind just to start thinking about it.

There is a lot more to be seen in Habakkuk 2 but I should stop for now and leave them for another day.

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