[Romans Study 4-3]
The Righteous Will Live By Faith [Romans 1:8-17]
What Is Faith?
‘A righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”’ What is faith? What does Paul mean by faith? We cannot understand the Epistle unless we are clear about faith, about exactly what it means.
Faith is not a simple word. It is a rich word that it can be described in many ways, but in its most characteristic Pauline definition, faith means total acceptance and absolute trust. Faith begins with receptivity.
To help you understand faith easier, consider this simple analogy: It is a freezing day, and yet there is warm sunlight shining. You are cold and have two options to choose from: one, turning your body toward the Sun and have your stiff body become warm, or two, curling up your body, distancing yourself from the Sun, and remaining cold. In the words of Paul, the first is called ‘faith’, and the latter, ‘unfaith.’ God does not give sunlight to only the select people, but His sunlight reaches anyone, anywhere, and anytime. It is I who choose to turn not towards the warm Sun, but to turn away from it. The sunlight is the love of God. Not turning away from the love of God that is always being rained down on me, but rather accepting it, that is faith.
Therefore, faith is in other words ‘grace’. It is in other words ‘love.’ In this rotting world, it is the power that has already entered in me. It is what God has already bestowed on me unilaterally. It is a gift of God. Though priceless, it is a free gift. Christians ought to live by this free gift, the faith!
“The righteous will live by faith.” Do you want to be a righteous person? Who are the righteous? They are those who live by the grace and love of God.
Christ forces no one. This Lord can only become Lord in the free obedience of faith. If there is one thing that cannot be forced, it is trust. To believe means to receive. Faith means receiving the love of God and He cannot force us to receive His love. We need only to trust His love and receive it in our hearts.
Faith is always the opposite of everything that is legalistic, though not the opposite of the law. Take what Paul says about himself in Philippians 3- he says he thought he was, as regarded by the demands of the law, perfect and righteous. That is the legalistic outcome: a man thinks that he has made himself righteous by his keeping of the law. Now faith is the exact opposite of that. Faith is the contradiction of everything that is meritorious in man. Faith is the contradiction and the negation of every tendency in man to say that his merit is enough.
Faith is simply the instrument through which we receive righteousness. If you then say our faith justifies us, at once you are contradicting Romans 1:17. Our faith does not justify us. It is the righteousness of Jesus Christ that justifies – and nothing else! It is Christ who is my justification! It is His righteousness that puts me right, but it comes to me through faith. Faith is merely the instrument or the channel whereby the righteousness of God comes to us, and we are enabled to receive this righteousness.
What God Has Done
Justification (dikaiosunē) is the right relationship between God and man. The man who is just (dikaios) is the man who is in this right relationship, and—here is the supreme point—he is not in this right relationship because of anything that he has done, but because of what God has done. He is not in this right relationship because he has meticulously performed the works of the law. He is in it because of the utter faith that allows him to grasp the amazing mercy and love of God. “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith–and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God-not by works, so that no one can boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9)
‘Just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”’ Oh, what an important statement! This is the very phrase that liberated Marin Luther, as he recalls to us. That expression, ‘the righteousness of God’, was his stumbling block. He called that the ‘abstract conception of the righteousness of God’, and he could not get past it; but then he suddenly saw this phrase, ‘The just shall live by faith’. ‘Oh’, he said, ‘There is such a thing, after all, as a just person, a righteous person! There is the abstract righteousness, but here is the concrete righteousness’.
He suddenly saw that this is the whole difference between the law and faith. The righteousness of God is not an attribute of God—it is righteousness that God gives, and that God ascribes to faith. Luther’s whole life was revolutionized. This is how he puts it: ‘When I saw the difference, that law is one thing and gospel another, I broke through! As I had formerly hated the expression “the righteousness of God” I now began to regard it as my dearest and most comforting word, so that this expression of Paul became to me truly a Gate to Paradise’. What a revelation! What a transformation! It came to him through understanding Romans 1:17. The abstract righteousness, and the concrete righteousness.
There is no more vital statement than this :“The righteous by faith, or the just by faith, shall live’.
“For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”” (1:17)
“Clearly no one is justified before God by the law, because, “The righteous will live by faith.”” (Galatians 3:11)
“But my righteous one will live by faith. And if he shrinks back, I will not be pleased with him.” (Hebrews 10:38)
Do we now understand that why the gospel of God is the good news for us?
[Questions]
1. Share your reflection on the following statement based on today’s message: “No one can ever even begin to save men unless he first believes in men. A man is a hell-deserving sinner, but he has also a sleeping hero in his soul, and often a word of praise will awaken that sleeping heroism when criticism and condemnation will only drive to resentment and to despair.”
2. Share your reflection on the following statement based on today’s message: “Debtor! Something to pass on; something to give. My friends, we must have this knowledge. And I cannot see that you need some special training in order to talk about it. If you are a Christian yourself – well, you must talk about it. You could not be a Christian without this knowledge. Therefore you have it in your possession, and you can pass it on. It implies, it postulates, this knowledge.”
3. “The opposite of works is not faith. No! it is the righteousness of Christ that is the opposite of works, and it is righteousness which comes to us through faith.” Define faith in your own words.
4. William Barclay puts it this way: “In the Authorised Version we read the highly compressed phrase, The just shall live by faith, but now we can see that this phrase in Paul’s mind meant this—It is the man who is in a right relationship with God, not because of the works of his hands, but because of his utter faith in what the love of God has done, who really knows what life is like in time and in eternity.” How would you interpret “The righteous will live by faith” (NIV) in your own words?
5. Why is the gospel good news?
6. So far in the opening of this t Epistle we have studied the significant seventeen verses, in which Paul foreshadows the whole purport of the Epistle that follows. Why do you think Paul wrote the Epistle to the Romans?
[Prayer]
Lord, we confess that Paul is such an amazing person of the Holy Spirit. Truly, each word he spoke was inspired by the Holy Spirit. The Epistle to the Romans is the letter of the Holy Spirit.
“I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes,” declares Paul. It is an amazing thing to think of the context of that statement. Paul had been imprisoned in Philippi, chased out of Thessalonica, smuggled out of Beroea, laughed at in Athens. He had preached in Corinth where his message was foolishness compared to that background, yet Paul declared that he was proud of the gospel. There was something in the gospel that made Paul triumphantly victorious over all that men could do to him. The gospel is the power, the power to bring salvation. Paul knew that everyone needed salvation, no matter where they came from, what they were, and who they were.
Paul was not ashamed of the gospel but he was immensely proud and grateful for the gospel. He was compelled to preach the gospel. He was ready to preach the gospel anywhere, at any time, to any individual. Paul wrote this Epistle to tell us what the gospel is.
Lord, we pose this question to ourselves: Do we also acknowledge the power of salvation? May we know more of your gospel as we further study this letter.
Today we have learned the most important truth in Christianity. We learned the meaning of “The righteous will live by faith.” Faith does not set a condition to salvation. Rather, faith is accepting God’s love, what God has already done for us. Faith is looking at amazing mercy and grace of God and accepting His love into our hearts. Therefore, faith cannot be a condition to our salvation. Faith does not justify us but faith is a channel to receive your unending love. May you preserve us from turning faith into works, and of trying to justify ourselves by our work.
Lord, we now learned that the righteous are the ones who live by grace and the love of God.
May we be the righteous of this era and preach this heart-trembling grace and love all over the world. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Republished with permission from Dr. Christy Tran, the author of “The Epistle to the Romans: Paul’s Love Letter from God.”