“Daughter, your faith has made you well… (Mk 5:34)
… that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me. (Acts 26:18)
… we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ … (Gal 2:16)
If I go to Walmart to buy a shirt and slap down a twenty-dollar bill, the cashier will make change, hand me a receipt, and I will walk out with a shirt. I will have just traded a piece of paper for a shirt. We are so used to the concept of money that the transaction doesn’t seem strange at all. In terms of real value, however, the actual paper and ink that make up the twenty are probably worth a few pennies at most, and yet I just traded them for a fifteen-dollar shirt. The reason I can do this is that the power of a twenty does not lie in the paper and ink. It lies instead in the government that backs it.
Faith is something like this. God says that we can, so to speak, trade faith for forgiveness, faith for righteousness, faith for joy and peace. He says that if we will believe, He will change us and make us more loving and humble. We can trade something that is meager and weak on our own and receive in exchange the riches of God. We can give something the size of a mustard seed and receive for it a full tree with fruit that produces many more trees. Faith is our piece of paper that God backs, and the power of faith does not lie in faith itself but in the God who backs it.
Faith is the currency of heaven, and God has made it so because He is merciful. This emphasis on faith makes Christianity unique. You see, the reality is that almost every religion on earth makes your deeds the currency of heaven. In most religions you earn your way to heaven by being “good enough.” You deny yourself, you fast, you treat people kindly, you pray your prayers, you give to the poor, you perform some rituals, whatever. In the end, your works buy you heaven or nirvana or righteousness. Everything depends on how good you are.
The faith of Jesus, however, says that you are not good enough for God and that you’d better stop pretending you are. The faith of Jesus says that God’s standard for righteousness is much higher than what you can do. If God, thus, is to grant us joy and peace on the basis of our deeds, then you and I are in big trouble because the best of us, on our own, fall horribly short of God’s demands. In this sense, the faith of Jesus has a much higher view of God than all other religions. You and I can’t be good enough for Him. He is holy.
When God, however, says that He will count your faith in Christ as righteousness, He is being realistic. He is like a dad whose three-year-old daughter just broke a ten-thousand-dollar vase sitting on the mantel. He knows she cannot repay the debt by working, so he pays it and asks of her something more reasonable — to trust him and repent. He does this because He loves her. Her relationship with him is, thus, based more on her trust than on her ability to work her way into his favor.
Now if faith is the currency of heaven, then the object of faith is important. That twenty-dollar bill can’t look any way you want. It must be a genuine twenty minted by the backing authority. This is why faith cannot be in anything you wish. Faith must stand upon truth or it loses its authority. Thus, while faith does entail a childlike trust from the heart, it may never be divorced from reality. Faith makes truth statements, and those truth statements must reflect reality or faith is counterfeit. This gets at what the New Testament calls belief, and we’ll talk more about that in the next blog.
