Sola Fide for the Walking Dead

I am not very nice company for that beloved pastime, Family Movie Night. Whenever I am in the position of having to watch a movie (every Monday evening), I am the irritating person who whispers my displeasure at critical moments, like just when everything is heating up, or when the music turns sappy. Leave it to me to ruin everything by pointing out that the sweeping grandiosity of the soundtrack is lugging along the extremely poor acting. In this way I have managed to undo the charm of so many Disney-esque saccharine coming of age flicks for my children. If there is ever a whiff of a young, strong, female lead about discover her true self, many of them will shout, with a full measure of sarcasm poured out, shaken together, “believe in yourself!”

Belief in the self is the bewitching lying spell of this age. Just believe hard enough in who you are, and all your dreams will come true. My local elementary school has a big banner hanging on it right now that says, “Believe It! Achieve It!” Every little child shuffling up the mountainous steps in the darkness of early morning, shouldering books and appropriately monitored snack food, also bears the weight of his own perfect destiny. If you try hard and believe, you can touch the sky.

Of course the modern American whose instinct is to turn Grace into a commodity, will twist and subvert the gift of a justifying faith in God so that it lands back on the self. It’s what we do, it’s who we are.

Faith, like all the others, is a ruinous stumbling stone because, once more, it’s not about us, it’s about God. When God, so many millennia ago, speaking audibly and clearly to Abraham (not in impressions and intuition, not Abraham coming so close to God and God coming so close to Abraham that they just understood each other, like a manipulative and insane girlfriend who won’t speak but will only text and cry) set his rescuing plan of salvation into motion, he was not hoping that Abraham would make a good choice and help him out, that the two of them together would save the world. Quite the opposite. He picked Abraham out of the vast colorful sea of all idolaters and gave him faith as a gift, gave him saving, justifying belief in the promise to come, for his own, not Abraham’s, glory.

Faith is the vehicle, the means by which God conveys the merits and benefits of Christ’s perfection and sacrifice to spiritually dead people. He makes them alive, he regenerates them, he gives them alive hearts rather than dead ones, and he gives them faith so that they might believe and trust in him. Just like grace, faith is a gift, given by God, to sinners who need saving. “For you,” writes Paul in Ephesians 2, “were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of the world,” believing, I always want to say, in yourself. The dead, walking around, believing, having every kind of faith that they aren’t really dead.

Faith Alone, like Grace Alone and Scripture Alone, rests the ground of the work in God and not in the person. It’s not faith plus a little bit of something else–a lot of God, and a little bit of me, jumbled together for the saving of my soul. It is the gift of God producing faith, not by baptism, not by working really hard to believe, not by trying really hard to be good, not by systematically forgiving everyone in the hopes that God will notice and forgive me.

And it is so because of the great sin that I believe so much in myself. I have a hefty belief that I’m not as bad as I really am. I believe, with my whole being, that I should be good enough for all the work in front of me, that I should be able to be loved by God and other people, that if I try hard enough, I will succeed at something. This belief, this faith in myself, being constantly affirmed by the world, is always and everywhere my undoing. Because it turns out, it doesn’t produce anything, it is effectively dead. This belief leads me, when I am struggling to do very simple activities–like being a reasonable amount of kind to another person, or chopping an onion without cutting myself, or administering a spelling test without yelling, or not being covered with envy for another person’s life and situation–to despair. And not the despair that leads me to more fully lean on Jesus, the despair that makes me angry and depressed.

It is only by God’s work, arresting the death and darkness, giving the alien gift of faith that I do not naturally possess, grafting me in to the body of his Son, that I am alive at all. I am the least of these, the most helpless, the most troubled, the most undone. I have nothing that I can produce myself. I am never able to be grateful, until God gives me gratitude. I am never able to love, until God loves me himself. I am never able to be kind, except for the kindness he himself has produced through the riches of his grace. Paul says it more perfectly, “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.” And then, a few verses down again, he says, “by grace, you have been saved, through faith.”

The gift of faith, of being able to lean in and hang on to Jesus, like a squirmy half hearted child, of being held onto firmly by the immeasurable love of God who has determined that you shall not perish, that you shall live, is the ground of the Christian’s continued existence. It’s not believing and hoping really hard and then pretending not to be disappointed. It is being held in place by God for eternal life, of being given the knowledge of his Son, the intimate, catastrophically vulnerable knowledge of the love of God.

Why would he do this? Why would God give faith to people who didn’t know him and didn’t want to? Why would he want to be known by a desperately deluded, idolatrous humanity, perfectly content in their own decaying, death dealing way of “life”? The answer to that is in the last two Solas–in Christ Alone for the Glory of God Alone and I will pick it up there tomorrow.