As a young man, Martin Luther recognized that he had a
serious problem. He took the Bible seriously, and knew that he did not live up
to the righteous standard of the holy God who was revealed in the Bible. He
knew that all the commands of Scripture stood written as an indictment of a
well-deserved condemnation over his life. Desperate to find some way to placate
God and rid himself of the burden of his sin-guilt, Luther decided to become a
monk. Surely renouncing all worldly pleasures and possessions and devoting
oneself fully to the service of the Lord would earn him God’s approval. Or so
he thought. In the monastery, he was shepherded by a faithful mentor to devote
himself to the study of Scripture. And that Luther did with all his heart and
with his mind. In his study, he came upon this verse of Scripture, Habakkuk
2:4, and it lit a fire within him. As Boice writes, “He recognized that
somewhere in these words was a revelation of a different way of pleasing God
than by fastings, self-immolations, prayers, charity, and good works.”[1]
Not yet sure of the answer to all of the longings and
questions of his soul, Luther set out on a pilgrimage to Rome . There at the church
of St. John’s Lateran, a staircase can
be found purporting to be from Pilate’s hall of judgment in Jerusalem . Plates of glass cover stains which
are said to be from the blood of Christ. And there pilgrims come from all over
the world, still to this day, to climb those steps on their knees, reciting
prayers at each step, pausing to kiss the glass-covered stains. This is done as
a means of receiving an indulgence – a minimizing of the penalty of sins. The
most recent pope to issue such a promise of indulgence at the Lateran Stairs
was Pius X in 1908. And it was for this reason that Luther went to visit the
Lateran Stairs. But something happened midway up those stairs.
A handwritten letter from Luther’s son Paul is displayed in
the Library of Rudolstadt today in which the following account is given: “my
late, dearest father, in … his journey to Rome … had come to the knowledge of
the truth of the everlasting gospel. It happened in this way. As he repeated
his prayers on the Lateran staircase, the words of Habakkuk the prophet came
suddenly to his mind: “The just shall live by faith.” Thereupon he ceased his
prayers, returned to Wittenburg, and took this as the chief foundation for all
his doctrine.” [2]
Later, as Luther meditated on Paul’s quotation of this verse in Romans 1:17, he
said, “although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner troubled in
conscience, and I had no confidence that my merit would assuage him. Therefore
I did not love a just and angry God, but rather hated and murmured against Him.
… Night and day I pondered … the statement that ‘the just shall live by his
faith.’ Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which
through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt
myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The
whole of Scripture took on a new meaning.”[3]
The words which are translated in the New American Standard
as “the righteous will live by his faith” are just three words in the Hebrew
Bible. In these three words, Walt Kaiser says, “one of the most triumphant
notes of biblical revelation is sounded.” The fact that this short portion of a
short verse in a short book of the Old Testament in quoted in three separate
books of the New Testament gives us a hint of the significance of these words.
Before we investigate the meaning of these words and their application to us,
let us set them in their original context in Habakkuk.
Again, I will remind you that Habakkuk was staring at an
unprecedented national crisis. Judah
was infested with immorality, injustice, and idolatry. Habakkuk had cried out
to God to do something about the problem, and God answered by saying that He
was sending the Chaldeans – better known as the Babylonians – to overtake the
nation as an expression of His judgment. To Habakkuk, this was hardly a
solution, for he could not fathom how God could endorse or employ a nation
which was (by human standards) more unrighteous than Judah to do His work. As if it were
not bad enough that the righteous in Judah
were being oppressed by the rampant wickedness within their own nation, now the
message is that all of Judah
– the righteous and unrighteous alike – are going to suffer an invasion, a
conquest, and a deportation from their homeland at the hand of the vicious
Babylonians. It was more than the prophet could bear. As Chapter 2 opens, the
prophet withdraws to a place of isolation to wait for the Lord to speak further
to him, and the Lord did just that. In verses 2 and 3, the Lord told Habakkuk
to record the vision he was about to receive and inscribe it on tablets. What
was Habakkuk to record and inscribe? At a minimum, it was the words of verse 4.
Perhaps the first part of the verse would be recorded on one tablet, and the
second part of the verse would be recorded on another. And these words would
serve as a warning to the unrighteous and an encouragement to the righteous.
The wicked would perish under God’s judgment, be they Jewish or Babylonian, or
of any other ethnicity. But the righteous would not perish with them. The
righteous would live by persevering in confident trust of God’s promises that
He had made to them.
But the message that God gave to Habakkuk was not for that
generation only. The Lord told Habakkuk to preserve these words because they
were for an appointed time. Habakkuk lived to see part of it fulfilled. Others
of his generation saw more of it fulfilled. But other portions of this message
awaited fulfillment at a later time. The Apostle Paul said, “Now these things
happened as examples for us” (1 Cor 10:6). And the three passages of the New
Testament which quote Habakkuk 2:4 each sheds unique light on the three Hebrew
words that formulate the primary thrust of this verse. So, as we seek
understanding and application of Habakkuk 2:4 to our lives, we are helped by
the New Testament and we should allow those verses to guide us in our study of
this one. If the righteous will live by his faith, then we will answer three
questions: (1) Who are the righteous? (2) How are they made righteous? (3) What
does it mean to really live?
I. Who are the righteous?
By what standard do we determine if a person is righteous?
Often we make comparisons of one person to another, and say (for example), “I
am not as bad as this person is,” or “this person is a better person than that
one.” We might say that Hitler would represent the worst of humanity, and say,
perhaps, that Billy Graham or Mother Teresa would represent the best of
humanity. And if that is the standard, then we might all say of ourselves that
we rank somewhere in between. But this is not how God views righteousness.
According to the Bible, God Himself is the standard of righteousness. He says
that we are to be holy, as He is holy.
How are we to understand what it means to be holy according
to God’s standards? God has given humanity a moral law which is a reflection of
His own righteousness. According to Hebrew tradition, there are 613 moral laws
or commandments in the Law. God seemed content to codify these commandments
into a more concise list of ten commandments, recorded for us in Exodus 20. All
613 commandments (if that is actually the number) are contained within the
framework of those ten. When Jesus was asked in Matthew 22:36 which was the
greatest commandment, He stated that the greatest and foremost commandment is
that “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your
soul, and with all your mind” (22:37-38). He was not quoting from the ten
commandments, but from Deuteronomy 6:5. Moreover, Jesus said that the second
greatest was to love your neighbor as yourself. This is also not from the ten
commandments, but from Leviticus 19:18. Jesus said, “On these two commandments
depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (22:39). In other words, if a person can
perfectly love God above all else with their entire being, and selflessly and
unconditionally love their fellow man perfectly, they will never run afoul of
any of the other commandments of God. One who loves the Lord in this way will
not worship or serve idols, will not violate the holiness of God’s name or nature,
and will always honor the Lord’s creative order of work and rest, caring for
creation and the human body which bears the image of God. If one loves his or
her neighbor as the Lord requires, then he or she will not dishonor parents,
will not murder, will not commit adultery, steal, bear false witness or covet
another’s belongings. In the keeping of these two commandments, all the rest
will be kept as well.
So, it is somewhat good news that we do not have to maintain
a list of hundreds of rules to keep. If we are to live up to God’s standard of
righteousness, there are only two commandments with which we need to concern
ourselves: loving God and loving our neighbor. I say that is somewhat good
news, but there is also bad news in this, because none of us have ever been
able to obey these two commandments perfectly. Stringing together an impressive
collection of Old Testament scriptures, Paul says of the entire human race in
Romans 3, “There is none righteous, not even one; there is none who
understands, there is none who seeks for God; all have turned aside, together
they have become useless; there is none who does good, there is not even one”
(3:10-12). In short, he says in Romans 3:23, “all have sinned and fall short of
the glory of God.”
The opposite of righteousness is set in contrast to it in
the first portion of Habakkuk 2:4 – “Behold, as for the proud one, his soul is
not right within him.” Pride is at the root of all unrighteousness, for pride
says, “I do not have to obey anyone else’s rules. I can do whatever I want to
do and I do not have to answer to anyone for it.” The Hebrew word for proud here is literally “puffed up,” or
“bloated.” We can see the proud person, sticking his chest out and boasting of
his or her own goodness and accomplishments. We can see that person so vividly
because that person stares at us in the mirror every day. He or she says to us,
“You’re pretty good. After all, look at all that you have done. And at least
you are not as bad as some other people you know.” Interestingly, this same
Hebrew word that means “puffed up, bloated, and proud,” can also mean
“tumorous.” Pride is like a cancer of the soul that is deadly. It results in a
serious condition that is simply described here as “his soul is not right
within him.” This proud person is not right with God, and not right within
himself. Their soul is, quite literally in the Hebrew, crooked, unable to reach God’s standard of righteousness.
So, if there is none righteous, then how is it helpful for
us to know that the righteous will live by faith? It seems to be a promise made
to no one who actually exists, does it not? It is like saying that Superman can
leap tall buildings in a single bound. That would be good news if there
actually was a person such as Superman, but there isn’t, so what’s the point?
Well, the point is that there is a righteousness which has been revealed. In
fact, Paul bases the entire book of Romans on this truth, and the place where
he gets this point is from Habakkuk 2:4. In Romans 1:16-17, he says that he is
“not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to
everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it (in
the gospel of Jesus Christ) the
righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, ‘But
the righteous man shall live by faith.’”
The word “Gospel” means “good news,” and Paul says he is not
ashamed of this good news because it makes known to us that there is a
righteousness that can be ours. Our righteousness, as the prophet Isaiah said,
is but “filthy rags” (Isa 64:6) before God, but God is making His own
righteousness known to us and available to us in the Gospel. So, the answer to
our question, “Who are the righteous?”, is this: The righteous are not those
who are better than others, not those who are good in their own proud
estimation, but those who are as righteous as God is. And though none of us are
able to attain that righteousness on our own efforts, God is making that
righteousness available to us through the gospel of Jesus Christ. And this
brings us to the second question.
II. How do sinful people become righteous?
The United States Constitution grants the President the
authority to pronounce a pardon on a person convicted of a crime. George
Washington issued 16 of them. Franklin Roosevelt issued over 3,500 of them.
Pardons are not a means of reversing a wrongful conviction in which an innocent
person has been declared guilty. There are other judicial avenues for that.
Pardons do the opposite. Pardons declare guilty people who have been rightfully
convicted to be innocent, and ensure that they must never be treated as though
they were guilty of the crimes for which they were convicted. The presidential
pardon is really the only way for a person who has been proven guilty before
the law of the land to be declared not guilty.
But what about those who are guilty before the law of the
Lord? How can one who is justly condemned as a sinner become righteous before a
holy God? Paul said in Romans 1 that the righteousness of God has been revealed
in the Gospel from faith to faith, in
accordance with what Habakkuk has said here: the righteous will live by his
faith. To understand this better, we turn to the second quotation of Habakkuk
2:4 in the New Testament, which is found in Galatians 3:11.
Paul’s point in this passage is that a sinner cannot be made
righteous by keeping the Law, for the Law has already been broken. The Law,
Paul will say, never existed to make a person righteous, but to show us that we
are unrighteous because we have fallen short of God’s standard. He says that
the Law has become our tutor, to lead us to Christ (Gal 3:24). Let me
illustrate. When we wake up in the morning, we look in the mirror to discover
that we have a condition known as “bed head.” Our hair is standing on end in
some places, pressed flat in others, and is all messed up. We know this because
we have looked into the mirror. The mirror shows us that our hair needs to be
fixed. But no one then proceeds to rub their head on the mirror in order to fix
their hair. The mirror cannot fix the hair, but shows us that the hair needs
fixing. So it is with the Law. The Law cannot make us righteous, but it shows
us that we are unrighteous, and in need of a remedy for our condition. And that
remedy is found in Jesus Christ.
The Law is a condemnation of us, for it says, “Cursed is
everyone who does not abide by all things written in the book of the Law, to
perform them.” In Galatians 3:10, Paul is quoting from Deuteronomy 27:26. That
condemnation stands written over all of us, because none of us have performed
or abided by everything in the Law. So the Law, Paul says in Galatians 3:22,
“has shut up everyone under sin.” That is, the Law silences our boasting of our
own righteousness, because it shows us that we have none. So what can be done
about this curse? Jesus Christ is the remedy for our condition because He bore
our curse for us as our substitute under the judgment of God in His death on
the cross. Paul says, “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having
become a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a
tree’” (3:13). So, righteousness cannot be earned by good works of keeping the
Law, but rather by faith alone in Christ alone. And it is to this point that
Paul quotes Habakkuk 2:4, saying, “Now, that no one is justified (or made righteous) by the Law before God is
evident; for “the righteous man shall live by faith.”
As an evidence of this, Paul points to Abraham. In Genesis
15:6, it is written of Abraham that he “believed God, and it was reckoned to
Him as righteousness.” In other words, on the basis of faith in the saving
promises God had made, God declared Abraham
to be not guilty of sin, to be righteous before Him, and actually imputed righteousness to him. Abraham received
this blessing and this promise before the coming of Christ by looking forward
to what God would do to fulfill His promises. We who live on this side of the
cross of Christ look back on how God
has fulfilled His saving purposes in Christ. Nonetheless, for us and for
Abraham and those of the Old Covenant, salvation from sin and righteousness
before God is granted as a gift of God’s grace and received by us by faith –
that is by believing God’s word and placing our faith in His promise, which is
fulfilled in Jesus Christ.
The same case is made in Romans, as Paul points repeatedly
to the gift of righteousness being received by faith. In Romans (as in
Galatians) Paul likewise points to Abraham as an example of this. Romans
3:24-26 makes the matter as plain as it can be: “All have sinned and fallen
short of the glory of God, being justified
as a gift by His grace through redemption which is in Christ Jesus; whom
God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood.” That word propitiation means that Jesus is the
satisfactory sacrifice which atones for our sin. God is pleased with the sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf – the righteous
taking the penalty of the unrighteous upon Himself. And this is received
“through faith.” So in the giving of Christ for our sins, God demonstrates
Himself to be “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” That
is, God shows Himself to be just in that He has rendered the full and final
penalty for sin. Sin has received what it deserved in His justice, but in His mercy
and grace, God allowed the substitute to take the penalty for us. Jesus did
this in His death on the cross, which prompted Him to say as He died, “My God,
My God, why have You forsaken Me?” He was undergoing the full outpouring of the
wrath that we deserve for our sins. And He did this so that God may not only be
just in punishing sin fully, but also the justifier
of the one who has faith in Jesus. That is, the one who has faith in Jesus is
declared not guilty before God, in fact is declared to be righteous, and
actually imputed with the righteousness of Christ. It is as though all of our
sin debts have been wiped clear from our account, and we have been credited
with the full righteousness of God Himself.
Elsewhere, Paul says that his desire is that he may be found
in Christ, “not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that
which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness of God which comes through
faith” (Php 3:9). This is what makes the Christian message so countercultural to
the thinking of this world. If you ask the average person what their problem is
and where their remedy can be found, they will likely say that they are victims
of what others have done to them, and the answer or solution to the problem is
to be found within themselves. The Christian gospel is the opposite of this,
for it says that our primary problem comes from within us – the inherent sinful
nature with which we are born; and the solution to the problem comes from the
outside – the righteousness of Jesus Christ which can be applied to us
judicially by God Himself on the basis of our faith in Christ. The theologians
call this an “alien righteousness,” meaning that it comes from outside of
ourselves. It comes only by Christ, and as Paul says in Galatians 2:21, if
righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died needlessly. In other
words, if there were another way for us to be made righteous besides through
faith in Christ, then the death of Christ was a great waste of time in the plan
and purpose of God, for it was not necessary for Him to die to save us.
So, who are the righteous? They are those whom God has
declared righteous and imputed with the sinless, perfect, righteousness of
Himself that is manifested in the life of Christ. And how is that righteousness
received or obtained? It is received by no other way than by faith in Him as
our substitute sin bearer. We trust His promise to take our sins to the full
measure of their just penalty in His death, and to give us His righteousness in
exchange. So this righteousness is received by faith. This is not a new way of
thinking, which would have been foreign to Habakkuk. Abraham himself, the
patriarch of the Jewish people, was made righteous before God on the basis of
faith alone, long before there was ever a law given by God through Moses. When
Habakkuk speaks of the righteous, he is speaking of those whom God declares and
makes righteous on the basis of faith in His saving promises which have been
now fulfilled in Jesus Christ.
This brings us to the third and final question:
III. What does it mean to really live?
In the movie Braveheart, we hear those unforgettable words
of William Wallace: “Every man dies, not every man really lives.” The Bible
says that it is appointed unto all men to die (Heb 9:27). Death is inescapable,
and it has come into the world and into human experience because it is the just
wages of human sin. Romans 6:23 says, “The wages of sin is death,” and we see
it happening from the fall of Adam in the Garden of Eden to the present day. In
fact, because of our sinful nature with which we are born, we are essentially
born dead. Spiritually, we are dead
before God in our sins. That is how Paul describes the natural human condition
in Ephesians 2. So, how then shall we live? The righteous will live by faith.
To understand this, we turn to Hebrews 10. There, the writer
of Hebrews takes up our verse, Habakkuk 2:4 and says, “you have need of
endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was
promised. For yet in a very little while, He who is coming will come and will
not delay. But My righteous one shall live by faith; and if he shrinks back, my
soul has no pleasure in him. But we are not of those who shrink back to
destruction, but of those who have faith to the preserving of the soul” (Heb
10:36-39).
You see, the writer of Hebrews is telling us that saving
faith is not something that is employed once and then discarded. It is not that
we are saved by faith and then go on living by our own effort and our own attempts
to be good. If we begin by faith, then we have to continue by faith. This was
the error of the Galatians. After hearing the preaching of the Gospel that
promised them that they could become righteous before God by faith, they fell
under false teaching that said that they had to keep themselves right before
God by law-keeping. Paul’s words to them were as strong as any words in the
Bible. He said, “Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now
being perfected by the flesh?” (Gal 3:3). No, as Romans 1:17 says, this
righteousness of God which is made known to us in the Gospel is revealed from faith to faith. That is, it is
received by faith initially, and then it continues in our lives by faith. We
are justified by faith as God declares us to be righteous positionally. We are sanctified as we continue in faith as God
shapes us into that righteousness practically.
Hebrews 10 is admonishing us that faith is not something
that we look to the past for in our lives. It is something that endures and
perseveres if it is genuine. As a pastor for almost twenty years, one of the
most heartbreaking things I observe on a regular basis is the efforts of
parents and grandparents to assuage the guilty consciences of their children
and grandchildren who are living in sin that they are right with God because of
a decision that they made when they were six years old in Vacation Bible
School. Don’t get me wrong, many souls are born into the kingdom at a young age
through things like VBS. But, when that saving faith is exercised genuinely, it
perseveres to the very end of life. It is not without its peaks and valleys,
but faith always triumphs in the life of the believer because it is God who is
upholding and preserving them to the end. So, it is a very dangerous thing to
offer empty promises of assurance to those who are not persevering in faith. If
someone does not live by faith presently, it is futile to assure them that
their past profession of faith was genuine and will save them eternally.
Rather, we must challenge that one to examine himself or herself to see whether
or not they are genuinely in the faith (2 Cor 13:5). If they have genuinely
trusted in Christ in the past, that faith will be evident in their lives in the
present.
After quoting Habakkuk 2:4, the writer of Hebrews goes on to
describe many of those in the Old Testament who lived by faith. They were not made righteous by what they did, but
they demonstrated the righteousness that they had been granted by faith through
the things that they did as they lived in
that same faith that brought them to God. Jesus said that He came into the
world that we might have life, and life abundant. We only really live when
we live by faith in Him. And it is only as we live by faith in Him that we can
have the confidence of dying by faith in Him. The promise of life that Jesus
offers us is not merely for the present time. It is everlasting life with Him
beyond this world. He said, “He who believes in me will live even if he dies”
(John 11:25). We have that life because of the righteousness that He gives to
us, which is received by faith.
Habakkuk’s words to his fellow countrymen were simple.
Things are bad. They are getting worse. But we will not die. We have been
promised life. And those who have received that promise by faith have been
declared righteous before God and can face life without guilt and death without
fear, and truly live abundantly and
eternally by faith. The same promise avails to all of us. Though we are all
sinners, God has made a way for us to be granted His own righteousness so that
we have assurance of life everlasting with Him when this fallen world has done
its dead level worst to us. That gift of righteousness is received by faith,
and that faith perseveres to the end as we live abundantly by faith in the Lord
Jesus. By His death, He takes away the guilt of our sins, bearing the full
penalty that our sins deserve in Himself as our substitute. In exchange He
gives us His own sinless righteousness as a covering before God. We receive it
by faith alone in Him alone. And having received Him by faith, we go on living
– through dark and difficult days full of sorrow and suffering – because we
live by that same faith day in and day out. It is life abundant. And it will be
life eternal. Because the righteous will live by his faith.
[1] James
Montgomery Boice, The Minor Prophets:
Volume 2, Micah-Malachi (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1986), 408.
[2] Robert
J. Morgan, From This Verse (Nashville:
Thomas Nelson, 1998). The book is a daily devotional, and rather than page
numbers, each page is marked with a date. This page is the entry for June 17.
[3] Roland
Bainton, Here I Stand (New York:
Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1950), 65.
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