That Faith is Not a Work
“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,”
Misunderstood grammar can be tricky, but if explained it can bring expanded comprehension. ‘It’ is the subject of our inquiry; in the above verse we have the phrase: it is the gift of God. The word that begins that phrase needs explaining. ‘It’ is a pronoun, which means it takes the place of a noun. What noun does ‘it’ refer to? Well grace and faith both occur in the verse and function as nouns; they are our most likely candidates. So we could replace those words to create the phrases: grace is the gift of God, or faith is the gift of God. I contend that the correct choice is faith. Using grace in the place of ‘it’ is awkward and unnecessary; it actually doesn’t make sense. Inherent in the connotation of grace is that it is a gift. So to say that grace is a gift is redundant; equivalent to saying, the gift is a gift. The only logical result then is that FAITH is God’s gift. That is, faith is not self produced. No human generates saving faith. No one believes correctly or hard enough. Everyone knows this fact: that a gift comes from elsewhere. Not all faith saves! Only that faith which is God’s gift saves. Grace is a necessary addition to salvation.
