Yes, the Bible says we are saved by faith, and, yes, Jesus says, “Go in peace, your faith has made you well,” but we know from the larger scope of God’s Word that it is not really faith that saves us, but rather Christ, in Whom we believe. In other words, salvation by faith is biblical shorthand for salvation by Christ, through faith. Grammatically, that’s called an ellipsis, but the distinction is far from grammatical hair-splitting.
When I was a young Christian, I believed that faith was the condition of salvation. God provided the sacrifice for my sins on the cross, but I had to provide the faith. This sounded like a wonderful arrangement at first, but as the years rolled on and my struggle to surrender everything to God in faith—especially homosexuality—grew worse, I was faced with what I might call “the great soteriological irony”: salvation is a gift, but having faith to believe it is hard work. In fact, I remember musing on the adage, “a chain is as strong as its weakest link”, and thinking to myself, “What good is it that God has let down the saving chain if my pathetic faith is the weak link that will break it?”
So I set myself to strengthening my faith. I prayed and read my Bible three hours a day for two years. I fasted one day every week. I tried hard to avoid thoughts, sights and occasions of temptation. But before long, my concentration had shifted, imperceptibly, from Christ to my faith. Salvation had become for me a contract: God: “I’ll save you, if you believe.” Me: “Agreed.”
This experience is not, of course, unique to me. The flow of all human culture is ultimately to take salvation out of the hands of God and to place it within the capacity of man. This is man’s profound act of righteous paganism. The price is high.
There is no more psychologically devastating display of it than this act of turning faith into a condition of salvation. To make faith a condition is to make it a human act and therefore a human work. Thus, “salvation by faith”, which was meant to proclaim the staggeringly joyful news that after all our striving to get out of our mess, God has done the rescuing for us, comes to mean, instead: salvation is without works, except the hardest one: faith.
Exit the joy. Enter the anxiety: But is my faith good enough? Do I believe enough? Am I sick because I don’t have enough faith? Do I sin because I don’t truly believe? And if I don’t have true faith, am I really saved?
And the mind previously elevated to the exuberant liberty of sonship sinks to the dark, shrivelled, grovellings of beggary. The True God, “abundant in mercy, goodness and truth”, Whose back-parts even, make the face to shine, fades into our confusion, and onto our mental stage slinks the dark, hunched form of the god, Tyranny, who inspires, not worship, but the obsessive need to appease. These are the effects of faith as a condition of salvation.
But does this lead us to conclude that faith is unimportant and redundant? Far from it. If that were so, words like, “Salvation by faith” and “Your faith has made you well” would be meaningless.
The point is that faith, far from being a condition of salvation, a response coming from man’s side, is part and parcel of the gift of salvation. It comes from God’s side. When God gives the gift of His Son He also gives the gift to believe Him. As the theologian, G.C. Berkouwer put it, “Faith is not the condition of salvation, it is the sine qua non of salvation.” Sine qua non means, “not without which.” Salvation is never present without faith, for with the Good News comes the Holy Spirit with the gift of faith to enable us to grasp it.
Let go, then, of that anxious enquiry, But is my faith strong enough (for this, for that, for what is to come, to get me through)? And ask, Is Christ strong enough, in whom I have faith? And the answer to that is always, Yes!
When God calls you to believe, His very call is also the gift of that faith. To hold out our hands and to receive it is to repent of unbelief, and in believing we recognize that the rescue is done and we are upon the shores of a New World.
But, enough of faith. To focus on faith too long, instead of the Object of faith, is to lose it.
So turn to the next page!