PISTIS

Faith
(Pistis, fides). In the Old Testament, the Hebrew means essentially steadfastness, cf. Exod., xvii, 12, where it is used to describe the strengthening of Moses' hands; hence it comes to meanfaithfulness, whether of God towards man (Deuteronomy 32:4) or of man towards God (ps. cxviii, 30). As signifying man's attitude towards God it means trustfulness or fiducia. It would, however, be illogical to conclude that the word cannot, and does not, mean belief or faith in the Old Testament for it is clear that we cannot put trust in a person's promises without previously assenting to or believing in that person's claim to such confidence.
It seems a surprising way to begin talking about happiness by Saying, .. Blessed are the poor in spirit." there are two ways m Which we can come at the meaning of this word poor.
As we have them the beatitudes are in Greek, and the word
That is used for poor is the word ptochos. In Greek there are two Words for poor. There is the word penes. Penes describes a man Who has to work for his living; it is defined by the Greeks as Describing the man who is autodiakonos, that is, the man who Serves his own needs with his own hands. Penes describes the Working man, the man who has nothing superfluous, the man Who is not rich, but who is not destitute either. But, as we have Seen, it is not penes that is used in this beatitude, it is ptochos, Which describes absolute and abject poverty. It is connected With the root ptossein, which means to crouch or to cower; and It describes the poverty which is beaten to its knees. As it has Been said, penes describes the man who has nothing superfluous; Ptochos describes the man who has nothing. At all. So
This beatitude becomes even more surprising. Blessed is the man Who is abjectly and completely poverty-stricken. Blessed is the Man who is absolutely destitute.
As we have also seen the beatitudes were not originally
Spoken in Greek, but in Aramaic. Now the Jews had a special Way of using the word poor. In Hebrew the word is 'alii or Ebion. These words in Hebrew underwent a four-stage develop Ment of meaning. (l) they began by meaning simply poor. (2) They went on to mean, because poor, therefore having no Influence or power, or help, or prestige. (3) they went on to Mean, because having no influence, therefore down-trodden and
Oppressed by men. (4) finally, they came to describe the man Who, because he has no earthly resources whatever, puts his Whole trust in god.
So in Hebrew the word poor was used to describe the humble And the helpless man who put his whole trust in god. It is thus That the psalmist uses the word, when he writes, " this poor Man cried, and the lord heard him, and saved him out of all his Troubles" (psalm 34: 6). It is in fact true that in the psalms the' Poor man, in this sense of the term, is the good man who is dear To god. "the hope of the poor shall not perish for ever"
(psalm 9: 18). God delivers the poor (psalm 35: 10). "in thy Goodness, 0 god, thou didst provide for the needy" (psalm 68: 10). "he shall defend the cause of the poor of the people"
(psalm 72: 4). " he raises up the needy out of affliction, and Makes their families like flocks" (psalm 107: 41). " i will satisfy Her poor with bread"(psalm 132: 15). In all these cases the poor Man is the humble, helpless man who has put his trust in god,
Let us now take the two sides, the Greek and the Aramaic,
And put them together. Ptochos describes the man who is Absolutely destitute, the man who has nothing at all; 'ani and Ebion describe the poor, and humble, and helpless man who has Put his whole trust in god. Therefore, " blessed are the poor in Spirit" means
Blessed is the man who has realized his own utter helplessness. And who has put his whole trust in god.
If a man has realized his own utter helplessness, and has put His whole trust in god, there will enter into his life two things Which are opposite sides of the same thing. He will become Completely detached from things, for he will know that things Have not got it in them to bring happiness or security; and he Will become completely attached to god, for he will know that God alone can bring him help, and hope, and strength. The man Who is poor in spirit is the man who has realized that things Mean nothing, and that god means everything.
We must. be careful not to think that this beatitude calls Actual material poverty a good thing. Poverty is not a good Thing. Jesus would never have called blessed a state where People live in slums and have not enough to eat, and where Health rots. Because conditions are all against it. That kind of Poverty it is the aim of the Christian gospel to remove. The Poverty which is blessed is the poverty of spirit, when a man
Realizes his own utter lack of resources to meet life and finds His help and strength in god.
I
Jesus says that to such a poverty belongs the kingdom of Heaven: ,why should that be so? If we take the two petitions of The lord s prayer and set them together:
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven,
We get the definition: the kingdom of god is a society where God's will is as perfectly done in earth as it is in heaven. That Means that only he who does god's will is a citizen of the Kingdom; and we can only do god's will when we realize our
Own. Utter helplessness, our own utter ignorance, our own utter inability to cope With life, and when we put our whole trust in
God .. Obedience is always founded on trust. The kingdom of God is the possession of the poor in spirit, because the poor in Spirit have realized their own utter helplessness without god And have learned to trust and obey. '
o the bliss of the man who has realized his own utter Helplessness and who has put his whole trust in god For thus alone he can render to god that perfect
Obedience which will make him a citizen of the kingdom of Heaven!
Abraham had now become not merely the father of the Jewish people but the ancestor of all the faithful. His 'faith' (Greek: pistis, a word which, it is important to note, should be translated as 'trust' rather than 'belief) had made him a model Christian, centuries before the coming of the messiah. When scripture praised Abraham's faith it was referring 'to us as well': 'Scripture foresaw that God was going to use faith to justify the pagans, and proclaimed the Good News long ago, when Abraham was told: In you all the pagans will be blessed.' 41 When God commanded Abraham to abandon his concubine Hagar and their son Ishmael in the wilderness, this had been an allegory: Hagar represented the Sinai covenant, which had enslaved Jews to the Law, while Sarah, Abraham's free-born wife, corresponded to the new covenant, which had liberated gentiles from Torah obligations.
The author of the epistle to the Hebrews, who was probably writing at about the same time, was even more radical. He was trying to console a community of Jewish Christians
We should also recognize the changes in the meaning of our English verb, "to believe." Its use in mediaeval and Elizabethan times conveyed the sense of trust in a person, loyalty or commitment to a person. That is the sense in which Paul and all other biblical authors used its Greek equivalent, pisteuo when speaking of believing in God or in Jesus Christ. Since the time of Hobbes, Locke and Mills in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, it has gradually taken on the force of a proposition, "to believe that .... " In the 1959 edition of Chambers Encyclopedia, the article on "Belief" states, "what we actually believe, in the strictness of the language, is always a proposition or set of propositions. Of these, creeds are composed." (Quoted in Smith, Wilfrid Cantwell, History and Belief. Charlottesville, VA. Virginia University Press, 1977, p. 49; n. 30, p.109.)
Faith is the noun corresponding to the verb "believe," for which the Hebrew is heemin, the hiphil form of aman, and the Greek (LXX and NT) pisteuo. The latter is a key word in the NT, being the term regularly used to denote the many sided religious relationship into which the gospel calls men and women, that of trust in God through Christ. The complexity of this idea is reflected in the variety of constructions used with the verb (a hoti clause, or accusative and infinitive, expressing truth believed; en and epi with the dative, denoting restful reliance on that to which, or him to whom, credit is given; eis
and, occasionally, epi with the accusative, the most common, characteristic, and original NT usage, scarcely present in the LXX and not at all in classical Greek, conveying the thought of a move - ment of trust going out to, and laying hold of, the object of its confidence). The Hebrew noun corresponding to aman (emuna, rendered pistis in the LXX), regularly denotes faithfulness in the sense of trustworthiness, and pistis occasionally bears this sense in the NT (Rom. 3:3, of God; Matt. 23:23; Gal. 5:22; Titus 2: 1 0, of man).
A further argument for free will is that God's commandments carry a divine "ought" for man, implying that man can and should respond positively to his commands. The responsibility to obey God's commands entails the ability to respond to them, by God's enabling grace. Furthermore, if man is not free, but all his acts are determined by God, then God is directly responsible for evil, a conclusion that is clearly contradicted by Scripture (Hab. 1:13; James 1:13 - 17).
Therefore, it seems that some form of self determinism is the most compatible with the biblical view of God's sovereignty and man's responsibility.
who were beginning to lose heart by arguing forcefully that Christ had superseded the Torah, was more exalted than Moses I and that the sacrificial cult had simply foreshadowed Jesus' priestly act in giving his life for humanity. In an extraordinary passage, the author saw the entire history of Israel as exemplifying the virtue of pistis, trust in 'realities that at present remain unseen'." Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel and the prophets had all exhibited this 'faith': that had been their greatest, indeed their sole achievement." But, the author concluded, 'they did not receive what was promised, since God made provision for us to have something better, and they were not to reach perfection except with us.'
In this exegetical tour de force, the whole of Israelite history had been redefined, but in the process the old stories, which had been about far more than pistis, lost much of their rich complexity. Torah, temple and cult simply pointed to a future reality because God had always had something better in mind. Paul and the author of Hebrews showed future generations of Christians how to interpret the Hebrew Bible and make it their own. The other New Testament Writers would develop this pesher and make it very difficult for Christians to see Jewish scripture as anything more than a prelude to Christianity.
Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything, they say, and so everything can remain as it was before.