“The just shall live by faith” (Rom. 1:17; Gal. 3:11; Heb. 10:38; cf. Hab. 2:4 LXX). In all these verses the Greek word translated as “faith” is pistis. Pistis is a noun. The literal translation of Habakkuk 2:4 is “the just shall live by My faith.” However, in modern translations and popular paraphrases of the Bible (NKJV, NIV, ASV, ESV, TLB, The Message, etc.), pistis is translated as “faithfulness,” an adjective, that carries with it all the synonyms the Quarterly gives us on Sabbath afternoon’s lesson. The lesson is correct, “‘faith’ and ‘faithfulness’ are not the same thing. Faith is that indefinable power, a gift from God, through which we can believe in a reality that yet remains unseen.” Faithfulness is a response or reaction to something, and thus can be understood as a “work,” something we generate from within ourselves.
Faith’s source is the unseen but knowable God who has revealed Himself through creation, His providential workings, the Bible’s true word, and the life of Jesus Christ as recorded in that true word. Though in His incarnation Jesus took upon His sinless nature the fallen nature of Adam, He remained the express image of God (Heb. 1:1-3). A fundamental Gospel truth is the faith of Jesus, perfected through His experience in fallen flesh (Heb. 2:14-18; 4:15, 16; 5:8, 9). It is this tested and proven faith that is given to “every man” as an endowment from our heavenly Father (Rom. 12:3). All persons born into this world receive this endowment and through this gift (that comes only from God; it cannot be manufactured by us) the Holy Spirit works to bring us to repentance.
What did the faith of Jesus test and prove?—the power of God to conquer sin where it had taken root in the flesh and mind of man. If Christ had come to this earth and assumed the nature of Adam before the fall, then nothing would have been proven regarding the effectiveness of the Gospel promise: “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed” (Gen. 3:15). The unfallen human nature does not war against its Creator; it has no enmity in it. But the fallen nature, from the moment Eve turned from that special tree in the Garden back toward her husband with a piece of fruit in her hand, had enmity, put there through self-indulgence, and distrust of and private interpretation of God’s explicit word. How important it is to be exceedingly careful how we handle the word of God.
Again, what did the faith of Jesus test and prove?—the faithfulness of God to His everlasting covenant promise to “save His people from their sin.” It was tested and proven in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. God’s faithfulness was effected through Jesus’ total commitment to His Father’s will. And “He imparts to us His own faithfulness. This he does by giving us Himself. So that we do not get righteousness which we ourselves manufacture; but to make the matter doubly sure, the Lord imparts to us in Himself the faith by which we appropriate His righteousness. Thus the faith of Christ must bring the righteousness of God, because the possession of that faith is the possession of the Lord Himself. This faith is dealt to every man, even as Christ gave Himself to every man” (E. J. Waggoner, Waggoner on Romans, p. 69).
As the “Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,” Christ was consecrated as the Ransom for the fallen race when the covenant was made between the