Q86. What is faith in Jesus Christ?

A. Faith in Jesus Christ is a saving grace, whereby we receive and rest upon him alone for salvation, as he is offered to us in the gospel.

One of the most damaging things that modern American experiential religion has done is to reduce what it means to become a Christian to the decision of the seeker. And this is not just some nit-picky distinctive coming from Calvinists. 

I remember watching the movie Forrest Gump, and there is the scene in which Private Gump and Lieutenant Dan are back in the States after Vietnam at a New Year’s Eve party, and in the middle of Lieutenant Dan’s bitter, drunken stupor, he relays the message to Forrest: “Have you found Jesus?” to which Forrest replies, “I didn’t know he was lost.” It sounded absurd because it is absurd. If the skeptic has this sort of thing against us, it is a dagger that we have handed to him. 

In modern American religion, saying “Yes” to Jesus, or picking the “right Jesus” out of the crowd, descends to something like a religious game of Where’s Waldo. “We have the right Jesus” whereas the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses have the wrong one. And of course, that part is true; but it can come to conceal the trivial pursuit that we have made of coming to Christ. Jesus isn’t lost. The sinner is. And that being the case, we must always ask again: What does it really mean to believe in Jesus? What does it mean to have “saving faith”?

The Divine Gift of Faith

As we introduced last week, so this answer says that this is a SAVING GRACE. Faith is a grace. That means it is a gift: “And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8); and “it has been granted to you … [to] believe in him” (Phi. 1:29). In John’s Gospel prologue,

“But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (Jn. 1:12-13).

Or, in the book of Acts, “when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord, and as many as were appointed to eternal life believed” (Acts 13:48).

Why is it important to know that faith is a gift of God’s grace. Two main reasons the Scriptures give: to eliminate boasting and to solidify that faith. To put it another way: grace abases pride and exalts the humble. So Paul asks the prideful Corinthians,

“For who sees anything different in you? What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?” (1 Cor. 4:7)

And he had earlier said: “But it is due to Him that you are in Christ Jesus” (1 Cor. 1:30). And conversely, to the humble, or to those who are struggling to find assurance, we are to be “looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith” (Heb. 12:2); and “Do not be led away by diverse and strange teachings, for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace” (Heb. 13:9). 

The gracious nature of faith calls us to get out of ourselves, to look outside of ourselves. In this way, faith is not meant to be a mirror, but rather a window. And we will see that in both dimensions that we will look at today—the subjective acting of faith and also the objective focus of our faith. 

The Subjective Aspect of Faith

The words here are WHEREBY WE RECEIVE AND REST UPON. We will get to the words immediately following about the object of faith. But what about the believing subject? To RECEIVE Christ by faith refers to the sense in which one personally owns that which Christ does in our place. It is not a cold checking of the right box, but a seeing of the greatest need to escape the greatest danger; and in such fear and dread, to hear His voice that He will save, and so saying with the Psalmist, “I am yours; save me” (119:94). It is a simple trust—a taking of His word for it. 

You will recall that passage in the Gospel where Jesus says, 

“Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Mat. 18:3-4).

Many have tried to pit the objective faith against subjective faith at exactly this point. They will say, “You see—enough with ‘right belief’! What matters is becoming simple.” But Machen points out about this that, “it was not the ignorance of children to which our Lord appealed, but their conscious helplessness, their willingness to receive a gift.”1

So saving faith is “passive” in the sense that it looks outside of itself. It “views” the saving activity of the Savior. It does not fixate on itself. On the other hand, that is a manner of speaking, as even this looking out has an “active” sense. All of this is why the Reformed tradition has made the point to list the necessary and sufficient elements of faith. Turretin, for example, spoke of “knowledge, assent, trust (notitiam, assensum, fiduciam),”2 and Mastricht further emphasizes that belief which receives the person and work of Christ with desire.3 People can over-analyze this and get stuck in the WHETHER of their desire. Instead, one must simply take His word for it over the lack of desires.

Even before we get to the subject of the object of faith, other, more general objects already make no sense, given what faith is. Calvin puts it in this way,

“Great numbers, on hearing the term, think that nothing more is meant than a certain common assent to the Gospel History; no, when the subject of faith is discussed in the schools, by simply representing God as its object, they by empty speculation … hurry wretched souls away from the right mark instead of directing them to it.”4

Here Calvin pushes back also against the notion of “implicit faith” (of Rome), which is the opposite extreme to over-analyzing one’s performance in it. Here one is counted in the body of Christ on the ground of the church’s deposit of faith.

But, in other words, faith is not a dispassionate kind of objective belief, as if one set of facts were as good as another, or as if most rightly believing the most amount of truths were some kind of meritorious work. 

The second subjective word used by our answer here is REST. Not knowing true faith is a restless thing. The author of Hebrews speakings of striving to enter the rest of God. So in saying that faith is a restful thing, we don’t make faith entirely passive. It says, “But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls” (Heb. 10:39).

The Objective Aspect of Faith

So how do we rise above the level of the “demon’s faith” in James 2:19? Or better than the religious “Where’s Waldo?” of modern Evangelicalism, or the “Have you found Jesus?” question posed to Forrest Gump? If that’s not biblical saving faith, what is? In the first place, we have to resist the shallow nonsense that pits faith against reason—i.e., that makes faith void of all exact content. Machen wrote, 

“the Bible certainly tells us that faith involves a person as its object … [But] it is impossible to have faith in a person without having knowledge of the person; far from being contrasted with knowledge, faith is founded upon knowledge … religion is here made to depend absolutely upon doctrine; the one who comes to God must not only believe in a person, but he must also believe that something is true; faith is here declared to involve acceptance of a proposition.”5

But then secondly, it is not enough to rest faith upon some real knowledge; but upon the right knowledge. The object of this knowledge consists in two main things—the Person of Christ and the Work of Christ. And these are inseparable from each other. Christ’s atoning work, taking upon Himself the sins of His people (Mat. 1:21) makes no sense if He is not One sufficient to save, a perfect, spotless Lamb (cf. 2 Cor. 5:7; 1 Pet. 1:19). As we have labored to show earlier in this study, one cannot claim Jesus as a mere Teacher or moral Example, as we lack both the mind and the will to do as He says or as He does. The standard is perfection, and only Jesus ever achieved it.

Christ’s own righteousness is ours through this faith. So that righteousness is inseparable from this object of faith: “not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith” (Phil. 3:9).

“yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified” (Gal. 2:16).

Because of verses like this, Reformed theologians like Shedd will define faith in ways like this: “Faith is turning to Christ as the ground of justification and away from self as the ground.”6 Many will object that something so “technical” as the doctrine of justification cannot be made part of the gospel here. Some critics will even construct the straw man that the Reformed doctrine teaches that one is justified by believing in the doctrine of justification by faith alone. But no reputable Reformed theologian ever taught such a thing. Christ alone is the object of faith; the doctrine of justification describes what is happening, and serves to nurture that faith. Such critics have apparently never taken to heart the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector from Luke 18:9-14.

“He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: ‘Two men fwent up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

The first and the last words narrated by Luke are as important as the picture of the parable itself. This forever silences the nonsense that justification is a Pauline doctrine unknown to Jesus.  

Now here is where the objective and subjective dimensions come together. What good is it in saying that you have saving faith in a person if that person can not save you? Or on the other extreme, what good is it in saying that you have faith in a person who can save you if all you meant by it was something like belief that he lived at such a time and such a place? Arians and Mormons have meant something like the former (denying that Christ is the one and only Son of God and yet speaking of worshiping Him as Savior); while Liberals mean something like the latter (denying either Christ’s supernatural identity or activity, but speaking as if with admiration for His teaching or His virtues). 

So the application today is clear: Believe. Take His Word for it—and be saved! But also: Believe the Jesus that comes through the Bible—both His whole Person and His whole work.

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1. J. Gresham Machen, What is Faith? (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2012), 95.

2. Turretin, Institutes, II.15.8.3.

3. Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, II.4-6, 8-9.

4. Calvin, Institutes, III.2.1.

5. Machen, What is Faith? 46.

6. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 787.