24/04/2026
A Common Understanding of Justification by Faith
First of all, righteousness by faith recognizes that God demands perfect obedience to His law and that breaking the law is sin. Since we have all broken the law, we have all sinned; and since the wages of sin is death, we all deserve to die. However, if we repent and confess our sins, then, unmerited and undeserved, by faith, God pardons our past sins fully and completely. There is nothing that we can do to deserve the forgiveness of God. Then God does more. He fills us with His Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit working through us enables us to obey God’s law. This too is unmerited and undeserved. Therefore, it is both the forgiveness for our past sins and our present obedience to God made possible by His Holy Spirit that makes us acceptable to God. We cannot earn His forgiveness for the past, nor can we deserve His enabling power for the present, but by His grace through faith He justifies us. This is a common understanding of righteousness by faith.
Read the above paragraph again, very carefully. I have discovered that most Christians today will readily agree that it accurately describes righteousness by faith. The problem is that it describes an experience that will never stand through the time of the shaking. Why not? What is wrong with what we have just read? Where does it go astray? Let’s look closely at each part and see if we can discover the error.
First of all, we said that God demands perfect obedience to His law. This is correct. He always has and He always will. Then, we said that we have not kept the law; and that too is correct. We have all sinned. Next, if we repent and confess our sins God will forgive our sins; and that is surely true. Then, He fills us with His Holy Spirit and by His power He enables us to obey His law; and this too is right. Finally we said that it is both the forgiveness for our past sins and the obedience which results from the Holy Spirit working through us that makes us righteous and acceptable to God; and that is wrong.
Jac Colón, Standing in the Shaking, Revised and Updated (College Place, WA: Jac Colón, 2013).
