“Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”
This verse introduces the closing scenes of Jesus on earth with His disciples. It begins with the “last supper.” Jesus is sitting, in the painting, with His disciples before they had chairs. Actually, they lounged around the table, leaning into each other. It is here Jesus speaks privately to Judas who leaves before the meal is finished. After the meal, Jesus washes the remaining disciple’s feet telling Peter he need not be washed again, only his feet!
Good old Peter, faithfully portraying our mortality. Last week we saw our mortality as a doorway into God’s grace. We discovered riches in Christ Jesus come through faith choices made from within our mortality. Being born from above creates righteous discernment flowing into us out of Jesus our Lord. Our natural, temporal inadequacies reveal a mortality to be spiritually replaced in grace by faith.
We are seeded, in Christ, with faith connecting us into Christ’s resurrection power. Jesus augmented the 12 disciple’s faith with sign gifts of healing. Today, a person “born from above” is made whole with spiritual capacities and clothed in Christ’s own righteousness. Common to the 12 disciples, and us, is faith. Faith is our connector to God as it was for Abraham, Noah, David, Elijah, etc. Faith is the scriptural constant for abiding in God’s righteousness, Old Testament and New.
We should emphasize, however, faith for living is grown out from grace relationships through personal choices. Faith is a gift but is not a mature faith. It is given in measure and grown by consuming grace. Living an abundant Life in Jesus is consuming grace while growing faith.
Consuming God’s grace with choices of faith grows our relationship in God through our Lord Jesus. It is about our will to choose, receiving
eternal righteousness! We will see this detail next GN by our choices of “abiding” in the True Vine as required to produce fruit.
Faith and grace is what Paul’s letter to the Romans is all about. God responding to our faith restores the wholeness of man’s aching soul (salvation). Man constantly is striving to find salve to heal broken hearts and create righteous rule for our world gone astray. Romans deals with man’s plight of a corrupted human soul and God’s love solution in Jesus, the Son of Man.
Paul uses a phrase to both open and close his letter to the Romans, “obedience to faith,” Rom. 1:6, 16:26b. After describing our natural condition of unrighteousness in chapters 1 thru 4, he declares God’s solution in chapter 5, our righteousness (justification) by faith. In fact, chapter 5 leads us into the fullness of God’s grace, by faith, from an interesting Greek expression found in verse 17 of chapter one:
“for in it (the gospel) the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” (ESV)
The righteousness of God being revealed “from faith for faith” is a little awkward. A college background in koine Greek helps in checking out some of these ambiguities. This one is particularly interesting. It fits theologically into our understanding of scripture. The Greek tells us here, “faith” comes out of God and flows into more faith. The key words are “out” and “into” which are translated in our text “from” and “for.” This often happens when the translator is hindered by language structure to accurately convey the original language’s intent.
You probably won’t find this “interpretation” in your particular commentary but it flows nicely with the Greek translation of the next phrase also, “The righteous shall live by faith.” This Greek phrase also uses the specific word (εκ) “out,” as well. Our interpretation says, the one who is righteous shall be continually living out of faith. In the previous phrase we said, we live (ζαω – possessing vitality) out of faith into (ειs) faith, active tense.
We have here affirming grace as a continual gift from God to the one who is justified, so that, a believer constantly is able to respond spiritually with faith to consume God’s grace, out of faith into faith. That
is to say, out of God’s provision for spiritual believing (faith), our will is able to consume with faith what God is providing. Our growth into faith
is always seeded out of God’s provision of grace with our ability to respond (faith) to grace He provides. This is totally amazing and profound to this poor student!! Yet, does it not illustrate the character of our loving Father! There is no excuse for those who do not accept His provisions of grace. Our salvation is always “much more” than we experience (Check out Romans 5).
Our culture spins faith to fit man’s mores and feelings. The term Paul uses describes a deep seated passion of the heart, not a declension of religious rules. The faith Paul is talking about is organic and powerful. It is based upon a living rock within us Who is the same yesterday, today and forever. Faith is our entrance into the gospel of Jesus Christ. Paul speaks to it in the 16th and 17th verses of the first chapter of Romans:
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed (out of faith into faith), as it is written, ‘the righteous shall live by faith.’”
Paul designates faith as the key component to unlock God’s power to restore man’s sinless created condition. Man is born from above the second time, into a condition we discover in Romans 5 is “much more’’ than under the first Adam. The condition of man required by God is a holy righteousness, not our righteousness, but a righteousness flowing out of God Himself, a righteousness acceptable to His absolute truth flowing into us by faith. Our new creation in Christ Jesus provides not only His own righteousness, but, as Paul puts it, “so much more.”
In chapter three, we find a little deeper probing of scriptural righteousness and faith, v. 22cf:
... the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a covering by his blood, to be received by faith.
Whether we are Jew or Greek, Native American Indian or immigrated WASP (White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant), God has reconciled everybody to Himself. That being accomplished by God, we now must reconcile our
self into Him in order to be created new in Christ Jesus. This is the point of entry into the Kingdom of God. Those created new in Christ Jesus are in God’s Kingdom, faith being the mode of living for a spiritual life. He is indeed risen and Lord, but not yet sitting on His throne.
We can seen how meticulously Paul describes our faith coming out of God and flowing continuously (active tense) into the faith of the believer. This done, the process of living begins by abiding in Him (next GN) … by faith. This is the organic function of faith describing how we continue an abiding relationship in Christ Jesus. It is by the choices we may make if we are “in Christ” experiencing grace.
We can begin to see what a broad term Faith is in scripture. It begins with an expression of belief beneath our soul in the deepest reaches of our spirit where our essence has identity. It is here, in our spirit, new birth takes place, our spirit joined with the Holy Spirit of God, 1Cor. 6:17. This is where we are told our essence is “created” new. We know because we experience this new reality within us … “and the Bible tells me so!”
But faith is “so much more” than our new birth God creates within us, it is as John tells us, “life in His name.” It is being taken out of darkness and staked into God’s own Kingdom of Light. It is discovering God’s own culture of grace, seeing with new eyes the difference between good and evil.
The meaning of love now has a capital “L” and the peace surpassing understanding becomes part of who we are in Christ Jesus. We are children of God and experiencing the Shepherd of our soul.
We will continue this faith discussion next time with a look at John 15 where the dynamic of faith is a relationship in Jesus Himself. Here, faith is organic and participates in the risen Life of Jesus!
Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God, Romans 10:17.