What Is Faith?

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.

We are in the middle of an interlude between seasons of this podcast, so we are taking some listener questions today. Actually, this is one listener question. We looked at this question and said, “We could definitely use a whole episode on this,” so here is the question from our dear listener.

“In the episode titled ‘A Bond in Blood,’ you talk about how some people boil down faith to an act or a work, the only ‘work’ you need to do to be saved. As we know, and as you point out, faith is not a work, but is faith ever an action? Is it an active thing? Can we say that we actively have faith, or is it a passive thing that is existent whether or not we feel it or think about it one day and don’t the next? Are there things that we can choose by the Holy Spirit’s work within us to do to strengthen that faith, or is that something that only the Holy Spirit can do, regardless of how we live our lives?” So that is the question for today.

That is the multiple questions, all of them good and all of them extremely relevant in this day.

Every day, really.

Every day, but this is a particular place where the gospel has been under attack a lot in the last decade or two, so we want to look carefully.

But you’re right, of course, Bryan. We could go back to the Reformation and this was the issue. You could go back to the Synod of Dort and in many ways this was the issue. It keeps coming back in different dress, and even though we’re convinced we have the answers, we ourselves are going to have to be really careful how we phrase things, because it’s easy to say it not quite right through carelessness or because you’re trying to emphasize one side or the other, and open loopholes that trucks or 747s could go through.

It’s a good time to listen to Jordan Peterson’s advice – “Be precise with your speech. Tell the truth, or at least don’t lie.”

That’s a start. We listened to the same album.

“Akira the Don – He’s got clout.”

That’s my preemptive reco.

We will link that album in the show notes.

I literally was listening to that today while I worked.

It’s so good. That’s my ‘cleaning my house’ music.

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

You know Jordan Peterson has got all this audio available to listen to, and this electronic musician put a bunch of songs together encapsulating these ideas, and it’s just a really groovy beat, with Jordan Peterson talking over the top of it, and it’s great.

I still love the way he talks about what it means to lie. It’s like lying is being inconsistent with the very nature of being itself. You’re going against reality. You’re warping the nature of being. It’s like, “You shouldn’t do that.”

So we’re going to try not to do that today. We are going to be as precise as we know how to be, because this is a very important topic.

To start, the trinity is like an egg. [laughing]

[laughing] Which brings us exactly where I was going to go, the necessity of creeds and confessions with their very precise language, and also very public language. If we say Westminster Shorter Catechism or Heidelberg Catechism, anyone within the Reformed community should know what we’re talking about. A lot of people will have particular questions and answers memorized, and we are used to particular expressions that, within the document, are fleshed out. So although you can pervert them, it takes some energy and some creativity after all these years.

Yeah, and if you don’t know these things, we’ll link them in the show notes so you can read them.

Yes, we will. But when you adopt a philosophy of “All I need is the Bible,” yes but no. Is the Bible sufficient? It’s sufficient for what God intended it to be sufficient for, but God also created the church as a community that works together, worships together, and grows together.

God appointed within the church apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. He also appointed that having received the Word from such gifted people, often in the context of public worship but in other contexts as well, we are then like the parts of a body to pass it around and build up the body, so that not all of us need to, say, learn Hebrew or Greek or be experts on Mideastern archeology or all the other things that will come into play at some point in understanding scripture clearly.

Scripture is clear enough to show us our sin and clear enough to point us to Christ and how we lay hold on him, but the devil is very clever and so are his followers, and they like to confuse things because sometimes they know the Bible pretty well, too. They conveniently drop out things, pervert things, or make things sound very plausible, and unless we have an anchor outside of ourselves that can also look at the Bible and say, “Yes, you’re reading the Bible correctly. That is what it says to everybody else, and it’s what it’s been saying to everyone else for 2,000 years,” there’s a chance that we fall into that, “Yes, I am just doing what the Bible says. Jesus is not Jehovah.”

There are two things I always point to. One is this kind of “solo scriptura” idea where it’s me and my Bible because I have the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is going to let me be the one to interpret it properly, and completely gloss over the fact that the past 2,000 years of faithful preachers and teachers have also had the Holy Spirit helping them do that.

Secondly, it’s just very arrogant to presume that you, in a completely different cultural context, more than 2,000 years separated from when these things were written, would somehow know it better than the people who studied it 500 years closer to it than you are, or 1,000 years or 1,500 years closer to it than you are.

And oftentimes are writing it in their maturity. I, as a 27-year-old, simply do not have the same wisdom to interpret the Bible as someone who is older, just by virtue of not having lived as long. Getting a head start helps a lot.

And that’s a good deal of it, getting a head start helps a lot. No one comes to calculus or physics or the medical sciences and says, “I will start from scratch and I will play catch-up real fast because I’m so smart, so that by the time all of you are getting out of medical school I’ll be ready to open my own practice.” I say nobody says that. Nobody intelligent says that. Nobody who isn’t a quack says that, because we rely on what’s been done before.

This is how God ordained that human society and human community should work, and to turn that aside and ignore it is to slap God in the face. “I don’t need your help, God. I don’t need the helps you gave me. I can figure this out. After all, your Word is clear and infallible.” It is clear and infallible, as I said earlier, for the things that God intends it to be clear about for the people he intends it to be clear to.

First of all, it’s not clear to unbelievers, and that’s not the Bible’s fault. God didn’t stutter, but unbelief will twist it at every point. And there are things in scripture, as the confessions say, that are not all that clear themselves, and the Bible says this.

“Those things that Paul says, they’re hard to understand.”

And that’s an inspired apostle saying that about Paul. The Bible is there and we’re to read it and we’re to wrestle with it and we’re to try to understand it, but nowhere does God ever suggest that we’re all on our own. If we have to be, if we’re on a desert island and all we’ve got is the Bible, then we do what we can. And if we’re on a Caribbean island and the only people around are Roman Catholics, then maybe we still do the best we can but look for a shortwave radio.

We should still talk to the Roman Catholics.

We should still talk to Roman Catholics carefully, checking everything they have against what the Bible says, because there are some things they’re right about and there’s a whole lot of things they’re wrong about, which kind of brings us by roundabout ways to this.

There are people, at least within the last generation or so, many people who I read at one time with profit, who spend a lot of time reading Roman Catholics, or people from earlier generations who had interacted with Rome a good deal, and they have come away saying, “You know, the evangelical church and the Reformed church, they’ve gotten this justification by faith thing right, but they’ve misunderstood what this faith thing is, and it’s opened the door for all kinds of antinomianism in the Church. The idea of rejecting the lordship of Jesus, that you can be saved without embracing Jesus as Lord – we want to get away from that. We want people to understand that faith is a commitment. It is faithfulness to the covenant. It is obedience.” <beep beep beep>

Lots of red lights going on right now.

Red lights should be coming on if we’re familiar with the confessions and creeds. We should say, “Wait, we’ve heard this before.” It is very much what Rome taught in the days of the Reformation.

We’ve sometimes done the Protestant church a disservice by saying, “Rome teaches justification by works.” There is some truth in that, but that’s not how they would say it. In fact, they would deny that, and we need to be polite and, again, not lie and not bear false witness even against people we don’t agree with and don’t trust.

What they say is that the grace of God in Christ is wrapped up in the Church and its sacraments, and as we by our free will come to the sacraments, the Holy Spirit works grace in us, transforms us, puts charity in our heart, so that we learn to love God, love our neighbor, and thus begin to obey that basic principle of love and respond to it, so that God at some point will see what we’ve done, recognize his own grace in us, and pronounce us his friends – justify us.

If you say, “Are you saved by works?”

“Oh, absolutely not. We’re saved by Christ, by his shed blood. We’re saved by the grace of God, by the work of the Holy Spirit,” and they mean it. They’re not lying, from their perspective. But they’re not using those words the way we mean them, and we have to flesh them out and understand what they’re saying. They are saying that justification comes after a certain undefined amount of obedience, something that only God knows and recognizes and can judge, even though the Holy Spirit is already at work in us.

Although we are church members, we cannot be sure of God’s friendship, the final justification, until – well, that’s the point, we can’t until we see purgatory or the face of God, because at any last minute you could commit a mortal sin and throw it all away. You have to continue in the faith, and to the Protestant ear that sounds an awful lot like justification by works.

The line in the Westminster Larger Catechism – I don’t have the whole answer memorized, but in the answer to the question “What is justification?” it talks about how justification is not for the sake of good works, even the ones wrought in us. It’s the ones that Christ did on our behalf.

This just comes back to once again properly distinguishing law and gospel, which is something Luther just hammers home. That’s his thing. That’s the thing he gets and will not let you forget. You have to understand that there’s the principle of law and the principle of faith, which is what the gospel is centered on.

I’m reminded as well of Christianity and Liberalism by J. Gresham Machen, where he says the gospel is at base a story about something done for you. It does not involve you doing anything.

Right, it’s not our story except insofar as we benefit from the results of it. It’s good news, not a cooking recipe or a prescription for service or a plan of attack.

Exactly. Someone on Twitter, or maybe it was a Facebook thread somewhere, but a friend of mine who’s very solid theologically was saying the difference between law and gospel is the difference between saying “I watched the news today, and then as a result I did something else,” and that’s what sanctification is – it’s the difference between that and “I watched the news today, so I was on the news.”

That’s very apt. So I’ll ask at this point, “Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he had offered Isaac his son on the altar?”

Are we going to go there already?

Do you want to save that for later? We can come back to it.

You brought it up so we might as well begin to deal with it, because again we’re defining terms. Within this last generation there have been a group of people that have had various names placed upon them, and the names are not nearly as important as their shenanigans, but they’ve come to the Bible and they’ve recognized something that is somewhat true, that the Bible does not always use what we think of as theological terms in exactly the same way. Sometimes it doesn’t use them the same way that theologians have settled on.

For instance, during the Reformation the word ‘regeneration’ did not mean exactly how we construe it today. We know that. It’s a matter of historical change and clarification and we catch that, but if you don’t know that, in reading Calvin you might say, “Wait, what’s he saying?”

Or even in Paul when he talks about sanctification, not in the sense of becoming more like Jesus through your life, but in the sense of being made holy once and for all.

Right, what some call positional sanctification or definitive sanctification. That’s true, and any good student of scripture knows that. Something as simple as the word ‘God’ means all kinds of things in scripture because the Bible, aside from being divinely inspired, was also written by real human beings who God uses, and people use words in different contexts and that’s the way humanity works. So we do have to read in context and figure out what’s going on here.

The word ‘love’ for instance – there’s a passage in Hosea about “Go love a woman beloved of her friend, according to the love that God has for Israel” and you just look at all these words – love, love, love – and almost every time it means something else. In one case it means adulterous lust, and another is God’s divine, saving love, and another it’s the prophet’s imperfect love for the woman who’s cheated on him.

In Kings, where our teachers are teaching right now, there’s another passage where the inspired writer speaks of the Samaritans. “So they feared the Lord and they served other gods. They feared the Lord and they walked after their idols. To this day they do that, the same thing.” They don’t fear the Lord!

“Wait, you just said they did, twice.”

He’s using the language a little bit differently in context. In that case it’s bitter irony, but it is also true that if you ask these people, “Do you fear God?” they’ll say, “Oh yeah, we fear God,” but that’s not the way the Bible normally uses that.

The word ‘justification’ in context is what’s being talked about. It’s not a theological term that always means the same thing. It’s a human word that has a range of meanings, and context will help us understand what’s going on.

First of all, we believe that scripture is inspired by God, and God is smart enough not to contradict himself. Bryan, what was Jordan Peterson’s definition of lying?

You’re warping the structure of being.

You’re standing in defiance of reality.

As far as scripture is concerned, God himself is reality. God is truth. If you look through the Westminster Confession--I found this out back in college, when I was doing a Bible study and I wanted to find, “What does the Bible say is truth?”--and I looked all over the place and got every reference I could, because I was amazed at how little any of the standard works said. Then finally at some point and someplace I stumbled across the reference in the Westminster Standards where it references truth, and parenthetically it says, “God, who is truth himself.”

As a parenthesis!

Yeah, a parenthesis, but they so assumed it. It was so basic to their thinking that they couldn’t pass without mentioning it, but they almost didn’t think you had to because we’re talking about Christianity. How could it be anything else?

God always speaks truth, and his truth is coherent and there are no contradictions, and the whole Bible is the Word of God. Although Luther may wonder about what in the world James was doing in the New Testament, it is there, so we come and say, “All right, whatever is going on here, there’s no contradiction.”

James is a shorter book talking about a particular topic that we can catch as we jump into the flow of the passage, and we can see that he’s talking about how faith evidences itself. Then we can go back to Paul and track his argument through numerous epistles, where he keeps on coming back to this.

Some person, whose name I think I remember so I will not call him an idiot, said something along the lines of, “Well, if you pull Romans out of the canon, where would you actually find justification by faith?” Where would you not?

Hebrews 11.

[laughing] The amount of quoting of other places that exists in Romans…

Yeah. Romans in many ways is a commentary on Genesis. Just follow the marginal notes and see how many times Paul is appealing back to Genesis, first of all. And you mentioned Hebrews 11. The whole thing here is talking about the righteousness which is by faith. We want to look at Hebrews 11 before we’re done.

Clearly that just means that’s how you get started.

[laughing] Yeah, right.

I’m near unto James, since my Bible is open to Hebrews, so I’ll turn over a couple pages. In case anyone does not know what in the world we’re talking about, it goes like this –

What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him? If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit? Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.

Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works. Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?

At this point the argument seems pretty clear. It’s that there is something that people call faith that sits and does nothing, and it’s the kind of faith that the demons have. They believe, intellectually give assent to the fact that God is, and there are many people who will say, “Yes, Jesus is God. Jesus died for my sins. Jesus saves sinners,” but that’s where it ends.

I remember having to ask this of a young man once who was really failing in what seemed to be a long-held faith, but he was throwing it all away. I asked him, “Do you believe that Jesus died for your sins?” and his response, very careful and very deliberate, was “I believe that Jesus died for sinners.”

I said, “That’s not what I asked.” He said, “I know.”

That was the point. He was struggling with that. Was he willing to embrace Christ as his Savior, or was he simply acknowledging that the theology of our church happened to be accurate? The demons know who Jesus is. They testified to Jesus over and over again, with fear, even screaming sometimes.

Paul Washer says, “The demons believe and they’re more pious than you because they’re trembling.”

Yes, that. James goes on to show that that kind of bare intellectual assent is not true faith and it doesn’t issue in any kind of works, because true faith does exactly that. It leads us to do things like kindness and love, practical love, to our neighbor.

There’s a Peanuts cartoon where Snoopy is out in the cold shivering in the rain, and Linus and Charlie Brown, who are all nicely wrapped up with hats and scarves and such say, “Oh, there’s Snoopy. We must go comfort him. Yes, let us go comfort him,” so they walk over to him and say to him – I don’t remember if they may be pat him on the head, but they say, “Snoopy, be of good cheer.” “Yes, Snoopy, be of good cheer,” and they walk off. And the last panel is Snoopy sitting there shivering.

Feeling like Job.

Yeah, “Go away. That was annoying.”

That’s almost exactly it here. If your brother or sister lacks clothing or things necessary for the body and you don’t give it to them, if you just say the right things, “Depart in peace. Be warm and filled,” what good does it do? What good does it do them, but also what good does such a faith do for you? That’s not being like your Heavenly Father. That’s not trusting God for salvation. That’s empty meaningless talk.

So James comes down to, “Look, you want to show your faith off? Show me how you can do that without works and I will show you my faith by what I do.” We’re talking about faith as it appears in the public sphere or the human sphere, revealing itself for what it is, to actually be faith at all. It’s in that context that finally he says what you were quoting.

Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he had offered Isaac his son upon the altar?

By the way, notice that faith and works here are distinct, not the same thing.

Seest thou how faith wrought with his works, and by works was faith made perfect? And the scripture was fulfilled which saith, Abraham believed God, and it was imputed unto him for righteousness: and he was called the Friend of God.

But wait, that was something that had already happened. That was back in Chapter 15 before Abraham looked up at the stars and God said, “That’s how numerous your seed will be,” and Abraham believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness, even before the covenant-cutting ceremony, so that was already said and pronounced.

The word here ‘fulfill,’ this wasn’t a prophecy to fulfill as we normally think of this. This was a statement, a verdict God had already passed that now is being proved, shown, worked out in history by what Abraham does. The faith was already there. The justification was already there, but now it’s coming out in public view so everyone can say, “Wow, this guy is weird. He was going to sacrifice his son because he trusted his God so much, he trusted the promise so much.”

So before the eyes of men, Abraham is justified. His works demonstrate the reality of his faith. This is the traditional interpretation the Church has placed upon this, at least the Protestant church. Then he goes on –

Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.

That is, not by faith alone. The kind of faith that is alone that does not produce works doesn’t justify anybody, because again even the demons have that kind of faith.

The Reformers would say that faith that justifies is never alone, but it is faith alone that justifies. Did I say that right?

We are justified by faith alone, but faith is never alone.

Likewise also was not Rahab the harlot justified by works, when she had received the messengers, and had sent them out another way? For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.

So we’re answering already one of the questions that our listener asked. “Is there a connection here? Does faith do stuff?” Yes, necessarily it does stuff because faith is a heart matter. The heart means not the superficial emotion that people of the 21st century tend to come back with. “I love you in my heart.” The heart is far deeper than that.

The heart is the religious focus of our being. It’s the ego, the I, at the root of thinking and feeling and choosing. It’s where our values, our priorities, our most basic commitments reside, and that’s where God places faith.

It’s the self out of which all of our actions flow.

And that being there, it cannot but produce works, thoughts, emotions, choices, feelings. That’s what it means for us to believe in Jesus with all our heart – that is with every dimension of our heart. These things are going to come. You can’t just sit there and hide in a corner.

The listener’s other question, “Can you go through days without thinking about it?” – if you mean thinking about it in a self-conscious way of “How is my faith doing today? I have to look and assign myself to try to figure it out,” or even “What does scripture say about my faith? I should read something about that today” – you can go through a lot of days without doing that kind of stuff. But if your faith is real, it is always working and active because it’s always shaping your reaction to everything – first of all to God and then to yourself.

Because it’s relational. It’s not that faith is this thing that you possess. It’s faith in Jesus, faith in the God of scripture.

The faith is trust centered on a person.

Yes, and that person is not us.

It’s not us. And that person we can describe with words – words that God himself has given us. We can talk about Jesus being truly God and truly man. We can talk about the virgin birth and his sinless life and his vicarious atonement and his literal resurrection.

But again, it’s not the facts abstracted somehow, it’s the person of whom these facts are actually true. He is this person. He is this kind of person. He is the only person who is like this, and that’s the person we trust, the person who we can describe with words, because God has described him with words.

So is trust trusting a person? Or is it trusting the words? Yes. It’s trusting the person who revealed the words, and the words that reveal the person who revealed them. There’s no conflict here. You have to misunderstand the nature of faith to let that in any way be confusing. We know what it means to trust a person. It means we know who the person is. They’ve got a name. We have a track record with them. They’ve done things that have proved themselves to be trustworthy. There’s a relationship that exists.

In my generation when you saw a cop you trusted him, because even if you didn’t know him, the badge, the uniform, and police car meant that with very, very, very few exceptions this was going to be a guy who, if I’m in trouble, is going to help. We’ve blurred that a lot, and sometimes it’s been the fault of the police, and often it’s not been the fault of the police.

And then our parents. We grow up learning to trust our parents. It would be hard to sit back and say, “Here are all of the individual acts my parents ever did that have earned my trust.” They’re my parents. That sums up a lot.

Even “I know them” says so much.

Yeah, and we know God. We know Jesus. We know him from what he has said, and we know that what he has said has played out accurately in our lives, that the Bible does indeed conform to reality. We don’t just say that blindly because our presuppositions demand it of us, but it’s really the case. His grace has been sufficient. All the things he says about who we are and what he will do for us have proved true over and over and over again. And the more we understand what he has said, the more we get that and the more we trust him.

So we talk about faith being a heart matter, and the next question has got to be where does faith come from? Because if I generate it out of my own thoughts, feelings, ideas, rationality, and choices, then that sounds an awful lot like a work.

I tried earlier with Rome and their perspective on justification. I think for a moment we need to look at classic Arminianism of the Remonstrance that was answered by the Synod of Dort. For them, faith became most literally a work. It was a work that God took in place of all the other works.

God does not require the whole law of us, but he does require this one thing, trust in Christ, because it’s the one thing we can do. And although we have the Holy Spirit’s help in doing it, it is still essentially us doing it, or the offer of the gospel to everybody would not be real. It has to be something that everyone is capable of, and the Holy Spirit will help everybody, but some will embrace that help and some will reject it, so grace is something that can be resisted, can be rejected, or that can be received. And in receiving that grace and receiving the promise we receive Christ.

So this one thing, this self-generated (by the help of the Spirit) thing does indeed become a good work, because if it’s not a sovereign gift of God based upon the eternal plan that has nothing to do with us or our good works done or foreseen or potential, but merely God’s good choice and good will, then we have something to bring to God.

But if it is God’s grace, God’s good will, God’s eternal predestination, God’s plan in Christ, then we’ve got nothing. We don’t have to have anything, and for those who are saying that’s the wonderful news, we sometimes look and say, “But that’s not wonderful news for those who aren’t saved.”

Well, you know what? They don’t want to be. Their wonderful news is God is going to leave you alone. God is going to abandon you to your sins. “Oh goody!” That’s not the right response, but it is exactly the response of every unbeliever.

They’re glad they don’t have to know God, face God, trust Jesus, serve Jesus, or go to heaven, because heaven is where God is. Now, if they could kick God out of heaven and take his place, that would be great. Of course, it wouldn’t be heaven anymore, it would be something very terrible.

And they are determined to be happy with not knowing God, even though it makes them miserable.

Yeah, and we can and should be sad about that, but as someone has said, the incredible thing is not that God hated Esau but that God loved Jacob. God’s hatred toward Esau was the proper response of a holy God toward a wicked man, who was wicked from conception, being conceived and born in sin. The incredible thing and incredible good news is that God was gracious to his brother, who had nothing else going beyond what Esau had. God simply chose to save him.

For many that’s a very hard thing, and if we’re not careful we can turn that into a matter of pride, without any logical basis. “Well, I’m saved. I’m one of the elect. How about you?” You understand that that means you did nothing?

The meme that Emily posted on our Facebook page I love so much. “So let me get this right. In this plan I do nothing?”

“That’s right.”

“Let’s do this thing!”

We have to get to that point where we understand that faith is a gift of God, a sovereign gift that we receive, in the same way that a teacup receives the tea that’s poured into it. It’s not an action whereby God says, “Here’s this faith. Do you want it?” and we reach out on our own initiative and either take it or slap it out of his hand.

We’re not Chip and Mrs. Potts. We can’t decide to be filled with tea.

Yeah, that would still put us back in the driver’s seat where we get to control salvation, we get to control grace, we get to control the planet, we get to control our eternal destiny. That’s not the message of the gospel. The message of the gospel is we’re dead, and corpses don’t get up and start affecting their resurrection. That’s called zombies and that’s scary. We tell nightmare stories about zombie apocalypses because it’s scary. We don’t want dead people walking around doing stuff. The Bible does not allow for it, either. Life is in God, and God as life comes to us and breathes life into us in his Spirit so as to quicken us to a living faith.

Now, having said that, the listener’s other question is, “Is it something we do?” Yeah, it’s something we do. We believe. God doesn’t believe for us. But it’s the function of someone who is spiritually alive, and the life comes from God, not from us. God, in quickening us by the gospel and tying us to Christ, regenerates us, gives us a new heart that loves God, trusts God, lays hold on Jesus, and will be content with nothing but Jesus. That’s the nature of the thing.

Is it an action? Well, in the sense that it’s an activity of our psyche, of our mind, will, and emotions, yes. But is it in any sense meritorious? Does it accomplish something? And above all at this point, is it self-generated? No, it’s not self-generated.

If faith is not a work and it’s not meritorious, then how in the world does it save us? Well, in a sense, it doesn’t. Faith is not our Savior. God is our Savior. He saves us by grace through faith. Faith is instrumental. Our Savior is Jesus. Faith is the means by which God quickens us to lay hold on Christ, and he does it for Jesus’ sake. He does it because Jesus bought, on the cross, the gift of faith for us, and on the basis of what Jesus did, of what he purchased, that whole total salvation which includes our regeneration, the gospel brings this faith to us.

God brings it to us through the gospel, through faith, through the work of the Spirit, so we lay hold on Christ as he lays hold on us. And by being legally and spiritually united with Christ, covenantally in a word, we find ourselves in Christ and therefore justified – his righteousness becomes ours – and tied to Christ existentially in that now he lives in us and works in us by his Spirit, so that we are justified – his righteousness being ours, our sins being punished in him – and moreover he is now the source of our life and the source of our actions, of who we are and what we do.

Then that brings us to the doctrine of sanctification, which is where we need to go eventually, because that’s another dimension to all of this. But I think we’ve addressed most of the high points concerning faith.

Maybe we should actually give a definition of faith at this point. The Heidelberg Catechism’s definition of faith is real simple –

True faith is not only a certain knowledge whereby I hold for truth all that God has revealed to us in His Word; but also a hearty trust, which the Holy Spirit works in me by the Gospel, that not only to others, but to me also, forgiveness of sins, everlasting righteousness and salvation are freely given by God, merely of grace, only for the sake of Christ’s merits.

Up front are two things, and Bryan addressed one of them. We’ve been hinting all around the other, that it involves an absolutely certain knowledge. We know these things to be true. We trust Jesus. We know who he is. We know real and true things about Jesus, so there’s a knowledge there. It’s not just a feeling along or a vague sensibility that there’s someone out there. This Jesus we can talk about. But having this knowledge, we then trust him for our salvation. It has nothing to do with our works or with our faith.

I’m just going to add a little bit of flavor text to that, I guess. I don’t know if that’s what you’d really call this, but the knowledge that accompanies faith, that informs us of the subject of our faith, is also something that is correspondent to your level of understanding in general.

I remember at one point having a discussion about saving faith and whether or not the mentally infirm could have faith, and the fact is that yes, they can. It may not express itself in a knowledge like ours because of that mental infirmity, but it’s still there. They still trust in Jesus. They know that Jesus cares for them and he’s died for them and he loves them. They may not know the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, but they know that Christ loves them.

And it’s not as though any of us has a perfect mind. We have not been glorified yet. This is all degrees and types of knowledge.

Yeah, we’re not saved by the quality of our knowledge. I really appreciate that point, Bryan. I don’t think I would have made it if you hadn’t brought it up, so thank you very much, because in that way we can make our theological knowledge a work.

“You don’t know this doctrine yet, so your faith can’t be real. When you know as much stuff as I do…” and again it becomes a matter of intellectual and spiritual pride.

Knowing stuff rather than knowing Jesus.

Right. I think it’s a real temptation in Reformed circles. I’ve seen it at least within those I travel in, especially among young teenage guys who love winning theological battles, or thinking they’ve won theological battles to put a little notch in their belt.

You know that if you shout “By what standard?” enough times and they give up, that you won.

Yes, an automatic win.

I’ve been blessed to know a lot of godly Christians who are not members of Reformed churches, and their theology in many cases at some points has come out as being, “Yeah, that’s not right.” But you know what? They know Jesus. They know him to the level of how they’ve been instructed, of how much they’ve been taught, of what they’ve read, of whom they’ve trusted to learn things from. And according to the light they’ve been given, the information they’ve been given, they’re trusting Jesus. And if they knew that they had anything wrong, they would change.

They may not be in a position to understand that, because we’re all sinners and sin gets in the way and ignorance gets in the way – which are not the same things in and of themselves – but they are indeed people who love Jesus, and often what they do with that faith that is not as well-informed as mine puts me to shame. They pray more. They witness more. They’re willing to take persecution more directly for Jesus. They step up to the plate and stand for Jesus, even though their faith may not be as informed as we would like it to be.

And Reformed churches are not exempt from this. Some of the errors that we’ve been talking about today are very prominent in particular Reformed circles.

And even there we do need a certain amount of graciousness because there are people who are not really good theologians, and their pastors and teachers come along and tell them these things that are contrary to the gospel, but couch it in beautiful words, words that seem backed up with scripture, and what they hear is “gospel, gospel, gospel,” and they don’t realize they’re being lied to. They don’t realize that reality is twisting and distorting. Their thinking is simple or they haven’t given it the diligence they ought to.

Or haven’t had time. They might be young or young in the faith.

Yeah, so we shouldn’t simply stand back and say, “Well, you belong to a group of people who have rejected the gospel. Obviously, you’re all going to hell.” We don’t know that, and it’s probably not true, so we need to be very careful about those things, and yet we can say, “Look, here’s the gospel. Here are things that are contrary to the gospel. For your own sake you should move away from those things that are contrary and you should embrace the gospel as scripture reveals it. And if you seem someplace in a wasteland between the two, I’m letting God judge you, because I’ve walked through wastelands, too.”

There have been times when my life has not been right with God. If you’re searching after God and you’re trying to submit to the Bible and you think what you believe is in the Bible, okay. But then there are those teachers who have every reason to know better. They know what they’re rebelling against. They know when they’re being sneaky and deceptive. God holds them to a tighter standard, and we must also for the sake of the flock, for the sake of God’s people.

Teachers don’t get to say, “I’m the one in authority, so you don’t get to criticize me when I’m wrong.” It is, in fact, more the opposite.

Yeah. We need to hold our teachers accountable. As teachers we need to be held accountable. When someone comes to us and says, “There was something you said that I don’t think was right,” we ought to say, “Oh, okay. Start at the beginning and tell me what it was. I want to know what you’re saying here,” not “How dare you, you Cretan.”

Yeah, put down the defenses.

Just listen, because they might just be right.

That’s the reason why one of the qualifications for elder is “not quarrelsome.”

Yes, the servant of God must be gentle, must not strive. This is basic. Someone who comes across constantly with an arrogant attitude of “I’m right and you can’t criticize me, or you can try but I’ll shoot you down and make mincemeat out of you,” that’s not what God would have of his teachers, of his pastors, his servants.

But certainly, Bryan, to the point that you specifically made about what we used to call the mentally infirm, I don’t know what the politically correct words are anymore. In my generation we would often speak of those who were mentally retarded. I know that’s not the word we use anymore. Today we might say “somewhere on the spectrum.”

That’s going to be politically incorrect within a few years, I’m pretty sure. But their minds don’t work quite the way most people’s do, and this provides some degree of not being able to understand things very well, at least not being able to communicate. There are people who are afraid that, “If faith requires some kind of knowledge, then these people are lost forever and there’s nothing we can do.” No. God can save children in the womb.

The Holy Spirit normally works through the external means of the preaching of the Word and the understanding of specific content, but he’s sovereign and that’s just a means that God has picked, and God could pick other means and sometimes does. He can reach a child in the womb. He can reach somebody who to us, at our current level of knowledge, seems nearly brain-dead or at least comatose or out of it. How many stories have we heard of people who we thought were lost, and one day they open their eyes and the machines are taken off and they actually remember hearing things, or they remember songs or voices.

We don’t know how God works, so we can trust a sovereign God to break through all of our limitations, even ones that medical science thinks are impenetrable, and reach the lost, reach his covenant people, reach the elect. That’s a good thing to remember. It keeps balancing us out so we don’t get all full of ourselves.

I even remember having a discussion on the hypothetical question of whether or not somebody in a hidden tribe in South America could still be saved by God. The gospel has never come there. It’s never been missioned – if that’s the verb form.

Evangelized.

Yes. So yes, the normative means, the way that we’ve been commanded to go out is to bring the gospel to people who have not heard it, but at the same time if God wants someone saved, there’s not necessarily anything that tells us, “Nope, sorry. You didn’t get there in time. God is powerless to do anything.” That’s never an excuse to be like, “Well, let’s not go out anywhere, because God can do it anyway.”

The grounds you’re treading on – and lest anyone misunderstand, we’re not following the C.S. Lewis idea, “Well, you believe in God the best you can, and God’s going to count that,” that kind of natural theology…

As seen in The Last Battle.

And also Till We Have Faces. No, salvation is in Christ. Having said that, that does open up the question about, “How about all the children in the world who die in infancy and literally have had no opportunity to hear the gospel?”

My answer to that is I don’t know. My second answer is, “But God knows, and God is incredibly gracious,” and I’m going to leave it at that. There’s enough in scripture. What was the number of people at Nineveh that God quoted? So many thousand who don’t know their right hand from their left?

A lot, and also much cattle.

Also much cattle. God is good toward his creation. He delights in salvation. Can God save the children – say all the children that have been aborted in this world? Could he save them? He can. He could. Some Christians are convinced he does, and I’m not convinced he doesn’t. But if they are saved – and there’s your thing, if they are saved – they’re saved. That is, they’re saved from sin. They’re not innocents who would go to heaven because they’ve never sinned. They are souls that Jesus would have saved because his salvation is that powerful. They would be saved in and through Christ. Even the Westminster Confession kind of skirts the issue by saying, “Elect children die in infancy.”

Some people have read that and “Oh, we know what that means.” No, you don’t. It just means that there may be elect children who die in infancy. It doesn’t say which ones, and where, and are they only the children of covenant families? Does it go beyond that? The Confession marvelously simply leaves God to be God, and says that the salvation that is in Christ can reach through means that we don’t know.

On the other hand, that does not mean we should go around aborting children or slaughtering infants because that will send them directly to heaven, because God’s got that covered somehow. Nor does it mean, as you say, that we should leave tribes unevangelized, or New York or Berkeley unevangelized, because somehow if they never hear, well, God will save them.

No, we’re told how God normally works and it’s most of the time. But the thing we will continue to insist on is that it is through Jesus – not through natural revelation, not through human goodness, not through anything we have done or can do, but it is through Jesus.

So that’s the gospel we preach, a gospel that points to Jesus and that God is pleased to use overwhelmingly most of the time to call his elect to himself. It’s our job to be as clear as we can, given our own limitations.

I think I’ve mentioned before about one older couple at our church that I talked to, and they confessed honestly and humbly, “We’re kind of afraid to do evangelism because we’re afraid we’re going to sound like Arminians.”

“Um, go ahead and sound like Arminians then. You’ve been Christians how long?”

Where have we failed that something like this comes up? The apostle Philip says to Nathaniel, “We’ve found him of whom Moses and the law and the prophets did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” He got it all wrong. And yet when Nathaniel says, “Can anything good thing come out of Nazareth?” he picks up on that, and Philip finally says, “Come and see.” We can all at least do that. “Come and see. Come and hear.” We can share Jesus.

We can all invite someone.

The gospel is freely offered to all.

Yeah, and we absolutely insist on that.

And it’s also important to understand what the gospel is when you’re actually telling it to them, because the gospel is not, “Believe.” That should be the response to the gospel. That’s the response that only the Spirit can give to you, but the gospel itself is Jesus Christ came to die for sinners.

That’s what you believe.

And if you believe in him, the consequence is you will be saved.

Christ died for sin according to the scriptures. He was buried. He rose again the third day, according to scripture. That’s it. You can say that. Presumably they’ll have questions.

“What must I do to be saved?”

“Men and brethren, what shall we do?”

Since you’re the ones that got him crucified…whether it was literally you crucifying him or your own sin.

Or your covenant leaders, as the case may be.

Shall we come back and focus a little bit more on this last question? We’ve kind of touched on it, but I think it needs some more direct response.

Can you read it again?

“Are there things that we can choose by the Holy Spirit’s work within us to do to strengthen our faith? Or is that something that the Holy Spirit does, regardless of our choices and how we choose to live?”

Yes.

I believe that’s what I was going to say.

Sanctification is monergistic, but it’s the Holy Spirit leading us into things that are going to grow us.

Things that he has promised to use. Again Bryan, I really appreciate the word ‘monergistic’ there. For those of you who may not know it, it’s from two Greek works. Mono is only or alone, plus the word for one work. It comes from God. It’s God’s sovereign work in us.

It’s not synergistic. It’s not working together. It’s God’s work.

And unfortunately there are points where really good, honorable, well-meaning Reformed theologians haven’t been clear about that. You ask them, “Is sanctification God’s work or ours?” and you get what is essentially a synergistic answer, because they’re confusing what the Holy Spirit does with what the Holy Spirit moves and leads us to do to promote the process. We don’t make ourselves holy. That’s the work of the Spirit of God – through sanctification of the Spirit unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus.

It feels in the moment, though, like we’re deciding to do things because we make real choices. We do decide, “I’m going to open my Bible and read it instead of scrolling through Facebook.” That’s a choice that we make in our real lives.

One of my favorite chapters to reference out of the Westminster is Chapter 9, Of Free Will, where it talks about how mankind does have a will that is free to make choices, but it is free to make choices that are consistent with its nature.

So in the case of a Christian, the will is set free by the Holy Spirit to choose these things.

In other words, the heart has been transformed so that the will springs from a good heart and will now choose the right things, and the Holy Spirit is at work in the heart, continuing to cleanse and to grow and to strengthen and to impart life. The result of that is that we make better choices than we were making. “It is God who is at work within you, both to will and to do of his good pleasure.”

Yes, we are willing and we are doing, but it’s God who’s working at the bottom of all this in our hearts so that we are now the kind of people who make those choices. And yes, there are certain things that God has promised to bless, most obviously the preaching of the Word. “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” You want to strengthen your faith? Go hear the gospel some more.

We can talk about prayer. Jesus said that God will most certainly give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him. We could talk about the sacraments. We could talk about Christian fellowship and other things that spin around hearing God’s promises, understanding them, and laying hold on them in Christ.

These are real things that we can do, should do, will do, but the other side of Bryan’s answer – “And if we don’t, God has ways.”

Yanking you back to where you need to be.

The Lord who loves his son, will he not chasten him?

Even the Father the son in whom he delighteth. It’s not God’s wrath against us. That’s satisfied in Christ. But it’s his fatherly displeasure, the displeasure of a father who loves us and wants what’s best for us and will bring the rod to bear on our behinds when the normal processes get interrupted, as sometimes they do. We get stubborn and we refuse to relinquish an idol. God will do other things. He will use external means that will resound in our hearts, as well as the internal promptings of his Word by his Spirit.

Post-conversion we preach contra Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. God does not look upon us loathingly, as a spider held over the flames.

No, he looks at us and he sees Jesus and he wants us to be conformed to that more and more, and he uses everything in our lives.

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

So predestination and this whole golden chain of salvation is not just so that we can escape hell or go to heaven when we die. It’s so that we can be like Jesus. That’s God’s agenda. That’s where this is going, and he’s not going to let it falter. He’s going to keep pushing within and without, using everything in our lives to get us there. It’s a long road in most cases.

Sometimes God speeds up the plan and calls someone home early, and death provides the final nudge into entire sanctification, but with most of us God takes his time. It’s his artwork and it’s a process. We are his poem, his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. God has decreed the works. Now we have to find them and walk in them, and we do that by faith. That’s where that faith comes from, that same context.

There is something else I would like to talk about, but I’m looking at the clock and thinking that maybe we need one more episode, because whereas we can think of Federal Vision and the perspective on Paul and things like Roman Catholicism and Arminianism, who try to make faith work, I’m seeing another movement within the Church that says basically, “You believe in Jesus? You have done well. That’s all there is. Don’t even talk about works. If you even bring up works you’re probably diluting the gospel.”

There’s one writer, who in many respects I do respect because he’s addressed Federal Vision and some of these other things very tellingly, but when he turns around and starts writing about faith, he starts saying things like, “Well, don’t attempt great things for God. You have nothing to attempt for God. Don’t go out and try to be a hero for God. You can’t do that. There’s nothing. You can simply trust Jesus and that’s it. Yeah, God may do something here or there, but don’t try to do anything around the gospel.”

So if you don’t mind, I would like at some point to come back and look, as we originally planned, at Hebrews 11.

That was the first point on our outline for tonight.

Even that guy you’re talking about – I don’t know who it is, but the thing you’re describing is correct if you limit it. It’s not the call of every Christian, in order to be justified or found worthy of heaven, to go out and sell everything they own to go to Uzbekistan, to go to deepest darkest Sahara…

Darkest Peru.

Yes. There is faithfulness in your own area.

Yes. We need to be clear about that. But at the same time, we need not discourage people from trusting God for something that is not required but that might be really cool. In the Old Testament we have so many evidences of God actually coming and saying, “Go do this. It’s weird, it’s strange, and no one will understand you, but do it,” and people responded.

But today, when God does not generally give us that kind of verbal invitation – “Emily, I want you to start a podcast…”

Yeah, that’s not what happened. I did get my husband saying to me, “I think we should start a podcast.”

I remember one of my favorite memes this year has been, “Just a reminder: The CDC is reminding you that even after you’re vaccinated you should not start a podcast.” [laughing]

Good thing we started this before COVID.

So there is still more to say for faith, and since the writer of Hebrews takes an entire chapter, I think it would be worthwhile. And also in reference to, “Where does justification by faith appear in the Bible except in Romans?” – people would say Hebrews 11, because the writer makes it very clear that although he’s talking about things that people did at every point, he’s assuming justification by faith. “The righteousness which is by faith…” – that’s the common thread. So I think if we could go back and do that at some point, that would be great.

All right, we’ll do that. Shall we wrap up with some recommendations?

I can go first. I actually have three things to recommend. One of them I alluded to earlier, so it’s kind of half of a recommendation, and that is Acura the Don and his really excellent – I guess you’d call them remixes of Jordan Peterson speeches, talks, audio clips and stuff into electronic music, specifically his album “12 Rules for Life,” which is about the speech that Jordan Peterson gave talking about his book 12 Rules for Life, and it’s very good and relevant a bit to what we were talking about, especially not lying, because lying warps the structure of being.

The second thing to recommend is a book I just finished this week for the first time. Somehow I’d taken forever to even get started on it, and that is The Gospel Comes with a House Key, by Rosaria Butterfield, which is phenomenal.

Speaking of the gospel and gospel faith being lived out in actions.

Exactly. It’s very good. She’s an RPCNA minister’s wife. I love the stories in it, too. I cried at a couple different points because it was very touching, like the story about her and her mom when her mom was dying. That got the tears going a little bit.

Then the third thing, which is very relevant to what we’re talking about tonight, and I believe I’ve recommended before, but it’s such an evergreen recommendation that I’m going to do it again. That is Sinclair Ferguson’s The Whole Christ, where he talks about the Marrow controversy in the Church of Scotland in the 18th or 19th century, I forget which, and the differences and similarities between legalism and antinomianism, how they sort of horseshoe back around to very similar outworkings, and then the solution to that, which is the proper distinction between law and gospel, which is everything we were talking about tonight pretty much. So those are my three.

Excellent. Emily?

My recommendation is not really super relevant to this conversation, but it was really great. Last week, Greg and David and David and David had this lovely conversation about science and wonder and the gospel in that arena of life. Meanwhile, I was listening to the entire run of the new podcast of Hank the Cowdog, which stars Matthew McConaughey as Hank the Cowdog, and oh boy, it’s incredible!

“All right, all right, all right.”

That’s the guy. Hank the Cowdog is a series of children’s books that entertained my family for hours and hours and hours on road trips. The original audiobooks are read by the author and he does all the different voices and the original songs and instrumentation and all that, so I was really skeptical when my dad was like, “Hey, you know there’s a new Hank the Cowdog podcast?”

I was like, “I’m not so sure about this business,” and he said, “It’s Matthew McConaughey,” and I was like, “I’m still not sure about this business, but I’m slightly less unsure.”

I listened to the entire thing last week in the course of a couple of hours, because it was phenomenal. It did not disappoint. There’s only like five episodes right now. I hope there will be more soon, but I highly recommend that. It’s very entertaining, even as an adult.

Well, I’m going to wax all theological and recommend two things – the Christian Reformed Bible curriculum called Promise and Deliverance. You’ll find it online and it’s probably going to be expensive, especially in hardback, although I think they’re reprinting it in paperback.

The thing that is so wonderful about it is it takes the biblical theological approach to the Old and New Testament, which is to say it does not come to the Bible stories and look for, “Here’s the lesson, children.” Rather, it shows the wise teacher how to see Christ in each of the stories, so that teaching Sunday School stops being legalistic – “Here’s the moral of the story” – to “Here’s how we should see Jesus here.” That’s Promise and Deliverance.

I won’t stand for this attack on Veggie Tales. [laughing]

Yeah, there is that. The other is an old Puritan work by Thomas Boston called Human Nature in its Fourfold State. It’s Puritan so it comes with all of that.

Paragraph-length chapter headings?

Yeah, and subheadings and sub-subheadings and all of that, and lots of references to scripture – point firstly and point secondly and all that. However, having said that, if you want a solid introduction to what the Bible says about man as the image of God as he was created, to man fallen and in rebellion against God, and to the regenerate man in Christ, you’re not going to do much better than this. Reading it may not be the literary experience of your life, but in terms of just finding good theological content and verses you can look up, it’s wonderful. The fourth estate is man in glory, when the regenerate man is finally free from sin.

I’m reasonably certain the set of terms are older than Boston, but is that where he draws out the four Latin phrases like posse non peccare, non posse non peccare?

It’s been so long since I’ve read it that I cannot swear to it, but that sounds awfully familiar.

Yeah, it does. It’s my favorite set of Latin phrases, I think, besides the solae.

Not wingardium leviosa?

No.

I didn’t take Latin.

Actually, my favorite Latin phrase is, of course, Carthago delenda est.

Obviously, because it’s everybody’s.

Naturally. Cave canem. [laughing]

Thank you, guys, so much. This has been fun. We have run long, but it’s been a good time.

Thank you, so much, listeners for listening. We appreciate you tuning in. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. I hope you enjoyed his “not quite cameo” appearance last week – his significantly more significant than cameo appearance. Go back and listen to that if you haven’t yet.

And we’re going to do it again.

Yes! Much like this episode, we need to make another one of these things happen, so look forward to that.

Again, we are on break, releasing biweekly until July. We’ll be back in July with weekly episodes, so this is a great time to send us emails, rate us on our Facebook page, leave a review on whatever podcast catcher you’re listening on, and tell a friend about us. See you next week.