How do the words “The righteous shall live by his faith” go from a context of hope in hopelessness to the cornerstone declaration of the chief doctrine of the Christian faith?
In the middle of the apostle Paul’s diatribe concerning the doctrine of justification by faith, contra the Judaizers, he cites the prophet Habakkuk seemingly out of nowhere. Without any segue or build-up, he suddenly invokes the words of a prophet from the late seventh century B.C. to further his contention that a sinner’s right standing before a holy God is by faith alone. “Now it is evident,” Paul writes, “that no one is justified before God by the law, for ‘The righteous shall live by faith’” (Gal. 3:11). Perhaps we aren’t as shocked by this as we should be, but what Paul is doing here is nothing short of remarkable, especially since the context in Habakkuk’s prophecy has nothing to do with justification. No one was arguing the merits of “faith alone” as the only hope for sinners, nor was anyone banging on the prophet’s door insisting that good works are what get them into paradise. The historical setting in Habakkuk has little, if anything, to do with the particulars of the gospel, at least as we understand it.
1. Faith Amid Utter Chaos
Habakkuk was prophesying during a time of utter socio-political chaos. Judah was decaying at a rapid pace. Iniquity and violence were running wild in the streets, so much so that God, in all his wisdom, reckoned the time for judgment had come for Judah. As such, he was “raising up the Chaldeans” to be his instrument of justice (Hab. 1:6), which, as you might well imagine, wasn’t sitting well with Habakkuk. He just couldn’t wrap his mind around the blatant wickedness of Babylon being employed by the Holy One of Israel. Was the infinitely holy God really going to recruit the deplorable Chaldeans to do his bidding? Really, them? Meanwhile, oppression, injustice, and violence were steadily increasing. The situation in Judah was worse than words could convey, which is what prompted the prophet to cry out to the Lord in the first place (Hab. 1:2–3, 17). But all at once, Habakkuk receives a reply that is deep, profound, and affecting: “The righteous shall live by his faith” (Hab. 2:4).
The only lifeline for those who belong to the Lord is faith. When the world seems to shake, when society is collapsing as its values are crumbling, and all the vestiges of truth are severed, what do “the righteous” have to cling to? Nothing but faith alone. Right then, God was inviting Habakkuk and the rest of his people to put their trust in his words, despite what it looked like. Notably, God doesn’t reply with answers or robust solutions or even explanations. He merely tells his prophet to have faith in the fact that the wicked and the unjust won’t win in the end. Why? Because “the Lord is in his holy temple” (Hab. 2:20; cf. Ps. 11:4).
The only lifeline for those who belong to the Lord is faith.
2. Contextualizing a Long-Held Christian Maxim
Absent from God’s answer to Habakkuk’s cries, though, is any comment on “justification.” This begs the question: How do the words “The righteous shall live by his faith” go from a context of hope in hopelessness to the cornerstone declaration of the chief doctrine of the Christian faith? After all, Martin Luther famously said that if the doctrine of justification is lost, then all true Christian doctrine will be lost, and the kernel of that conviction emerges from this phrase in an obscure and often overlooked prophetic book. Habakkuk had received those words in one context, but Paul and Luther after him, seemed to deploy them in a completely different way. Did Paul take those words out of context? And does that mean that everyone after him has also misunderstood what Habakkuk was saying?
I raise these questions because how you interpret Habakkuk 2:4 and its subsequent uses in the rest of the Bible and in church history, is indicative of what you believe. What you do with this verse is a litmus test for how you understand the Christian message and how you make sense of the gospel. Indeed, the declaration that “the righteous shall live by faith” is the hinge upon which your faith hangs. I know it might sound like I’m overselling things a bit, but I don’t think I am. There’s no way to downplay the significance of this message.
According to both an Old Testament prophet and a New Testament apostle, those who belong to God do so by faith. “Both Paul’s and the prophet’s word,” R. C. H. Lenski comments, “climax in faith.” [1] It’s not faith plus something else. There is no addendum, appendix, or missing piece of the equation. Habakkuk didn’t leave something out of what God told him to write down, nor did Paul truncate what God called him to declare to the church. Faith alone has always been the prevailing word God has given to his people: from Abraham to David to Paul to right now. Salvation by faith alone in Christ alone isn’t a doctrine made up by medieval Christians going through an identity crisis. Luther didn’t imagine it.
3. Luther’s Rediscovery of Faith Alone
We can’t talk about Habakkuk without also talking about the watershed moment that sparked the Reformation. With the tremors of reform already felt in certain pockets of Europe, the Church of Rome still had a stranglehold on religious life throughout the continent. The Roman Catholic Church exerted comprehensive religious authority; everything fell under the tight control of the papacy, so much so that local parishes conducted their services almost entirely in Latin, which made it more than a little difficult for commoners to glean anything. The pope’s edicts would be passed down by local bishops without pause. There was no questioning their authority or what they were saying because, after all, God’s Word was in another language anyway. Most of Europe, in other words, was fenced in by the traditions of the church, as folks blindly followed their every word.
This was the world in which Luther was brought up. But as an Augustinian monk, he had privileged access. He was able to read the Bible in Latin and in the original languages. Soon, through the course of his studies, he noticed several discrepancies between what the Word said and what the church was propagating. The more he read, studied, and lectured, the more inconsistencies he discovered, prompting him to compose the Ninety-Five Theses, and the rest is history, as they say. But, interestingly enough, Luther never originally intended to be a “revolutionary.” He didn’t set out to be the leader of a reform movement that sought to protest against the highest religious authority in the world. “I got into these turmoils,” he went on to say later in life, “by accident and not by will or intention.” [2] The “accident” that led to the movement now known as the Protestant Reformation was his encounter with Scripture.
Luther gave all the credit to the Word: “I did nothing; the Word did everything . . . I did nothing; I let the Word do its work . . . when we spread the Word alone and let it alone do the work, that distresses him [Satan]. For it is almighty and takes captive the hearts, and when the hearts are captured the work will fall of itself.” [3]
It was the Word that had worked him over. He says as much in the preface to his then-newly published writings in 1545, in which he recalls meditating on Romans 1:16–17, where Paul writes, “For I am 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 the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’” Luther used to hate those verses, mainly because of how he was taught to read them. He interpreted the words “the righteousness of God” as nothing more than the divine standard he was hopelessly unable to meet. Any conception of a right standing with his Heavenly Father was only achievable by his ability to be faithful, or so he was told. Any peace for his conscience, any hope of eternal bliss, was realized by his fidelity to God’s words and ways, which meant that lasting peace was forever out of reach. Luther couldn’t live up to that standard, let alone anyone else, no matter what he tried, and he tried everything.
But that is when the Word of God captivated him like never before. As he was studying Romans 1:16–17, he began to understand that the righteousness of God is purely a gift. He wrote: “There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’ Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.” [4]
4. The Final Verdict in the Present
This watershed moment for Luther, and for the rest of church history, for that matter, is downstream of Paul’s inspired message that those who crave a right standing with God the Father can only be on the receiving end of it. Sinners can’t work their way into that status. There’s nothing to be done, earned, or achieved to bring that about or make it true. Righteousness is revealed in the gospel and given to us by faith alone, “as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith’” (Rom. 1:17). We are the recipients of righteousness, not the winners of it. This is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.” This is what opens the gates of paradise for sinners, notwithstanding how much sin they have.
We are the recipients of righteousness, not the winners of it.
The word of the gospel says that sinners have no hope other than to fling themselves on the mercy of God — mercy that is precisely revealed in the person of Jesus, who took every last sin on himself. He took the full load of our hatred, iniquity, and rebellion as his own. He “was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:25). Accordingly, because of what he did, your justification is certain.
Justification is nothing less than God’s final judgment of you breaking into the present. “Justification,” Jonathan A. Linebaugh incisively says, “is not a separate verdict from the one God will speak at final judgment, nor is it only ‘an anticipation of the future verdict.’ Justification is the final verdict — a forensic word from the future spoken in the enactment of God’s eschatological judgment that is the ‘now’ of Jesus’s death (and resurrection; cf. Rom. 4:25).” [5] We who trust in God’s Word, we who, by faith, believe what the gospel reveals, don’t have to wait in fear or trembling about what God will say in the Final Analysis. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, that final verdict is spoken over us and given to us right now. Because of him, by faith you are forgiven! You’ve been made right with God. Therefore, there is now no condemnation for you! The gospel is God’s word of promise that says whoever believes in what Jesus did on the cross for them will be saved, finally and forever. The Word reveals that our future hope has become a present gift that we receive by faith alone.
5. The Unchanging Promise of Faith Alone
Okay, but what does all of that have to do with Habakkuk? As God divulges to Habakkuk, it didn’t matter what your nationality, creed, or heritage was, every “puffed up” soul will be judged. “But the righteous shall live by his faith” (Hab. 2:4). The only way to endure or survive the judgment of God is to hold fast to the Word of God. Consequently, just as Habakkuk and the rest of the people of Judah, we are saved as we cling to God’s word of promise. No Judean citizen had the capacity to avert the looming judgment. The only means of escape was faith alone in the words of God alone. Accordingly, God’s promise to his troubled prophet is the same promise we cling to today.
Our only hope is faith alone. We don’t live by what we can achieve but by what we receive by faith. “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7). What is faith but the recognition that we are utterly powerless and hopeless apart from God’s promise in Christ. “Faith only leans on the promise,” writes Luther. “Faith says yes to the promise and grasps onto it.” [6] We have nothing — no hope, no confidence, and no future — without Christ. “Men cannot be justified by faith,” John Calvin comments, “until they cast away every confidence in their own works.” [7] At the end of all our reasons, abilities, and striving, that’s where faith is found. Faith is born when we come to the end of ourselves.
Even though Habakkuk, Paul, and Luther are separated by centuries, one thing ties them together: bare faith in God’s word of promise. Habakkuk’s world was unraveling at the seams, and all he had was the word God gave him, and that was enough. Paul, centuries later, hurls this same word in the middle of churches embroiled in confusion. And Luther, centuries after that, is utterly captured by this word, and proceeds to change the landscape of the church in the process. It is the same word that is being spoken to you and for you in the gospel. Those who belong to God do so by faith alone. Period. Full stop. This is no theory or mere possibility. This is the gospel. Amid all your doubts, frustrations, tireless striving, and desperation, here’s some relief: God isn’t holding out on you until you get your act together. The verdict’s already in. You are justified. You’ve been made right. You are forgiven and free by faith alone.
[1] R. C. H. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1961), 87.
[2] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works: American Edition, Vols. 1–55, edited by Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg/Fortress Press, 1959/1960), 34:328.
[3] Luther, Works, 51:77–78.
[4] Luther, Works, 34:337.
[5] Jonathan A. Linebaugh, The Word of the Cross: Reading Paul (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2022), 14.
[6] Martin Luther, Commentary on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (1535): Lecture Notes Transcribed by Students & Presented in Today’s English, translated by Haroldo Camacho (Irvine, CA: 1517 Publishing, 2018), 236–37.
[7] John Calvin, “Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai,” Commentaries on the Twelve Minor Prophets, translated by John Owen, Vols. 1–5 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1848), 4:82.
