Romans 1:17
For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “The just shall live by faith.”
Truth to Learn
From salvation to service, we reveal God’s righteousness.
Behind the Words
The phrase “from faith to faith” has been hotly debated for centuries. The Greek is ek pisteos eis pistin. As I have said before, Greek is a very descriptive language. It is an inflected language, meaning that the “case” of nouns and adjectives tells us how the nouns or adjectives are used. The two nouns in this phrase, pisteos and pistin, are both inflected forms of the noun pistis which means “faith.” The first of these, pisteos is in the Genitive case, which means “of faith” or “from faith” and the second, pistin, is in the Accusative case, which means that it is the direct object of the verb.
Now, since the case of a noun does not always give a precise indication of its meaning, prepositions were added to the Greek language to make the meaning clearer. In this example, ek pisteos uses the proposition ek, which means “out of” or “from” implying “the result of” (that is, the outcome of faith), and eis pistin uses the preposition eis which means “into” or “unto,” implying that it leads, or continues, into faith (you could say it results in faith).
Meaning Explained
I give you my apology up front for the technicality of today’s discussion. I hope you didn’t get lost in the Greek grammar lesson here. Technical as it is, it is important for a complete understanding of this verse.
What Paul is saying in this verse is that the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel first of all as the result of faith. That is, we are declared righteous when we believe the gospel message, just as Abraham was declared righteous when he believed God regarding the promise of many descendants (see Genesis 15:6). We see from this that righteousness is revealed from (as the result of) faith. Paul is then saying that this righteousness, which God has now given us, is also revealed when we live by faith after we have been saved. That is, righteousness is revealed unto (resulting in) faith. One way of putting it is to say that the righteousness of God is revealed from saving faith which results in a daily living faith.
By way of firmly reinforcing what he means (that the righteousness that God gives us results in daily living faith), Paul then says, “as it is written, ‘The just shall live by faith.’” This is a quote taken from Habakkuk 2:4. Both the Septuagint translation of this passage in Habakkuk and the original Hebrew carry the meaning, “the righteous person shall live by his confidence in God.”
Application
This gospel message that we are to proclaim to the world contains the most powerful truth ever declared. Belief in this truth results in God’s righteousness being applied to us, and it results in us having the faith to serve with humility and to continue on with confidence. Through this confident faith in God, we can face anything that happens to us in this life knowing that God truly loves us and will care for us.
Does your life of faith reveal the righteousness of God?
In God’s service, for His glory,
Copyright © 2009 Will Krause. All rights reserved.
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