Posted on Sep 19, 2026 by Mike LeDuke
The Faith of Jesus
Have you ever wanted to have faith like Jesus?
For many of those who believe in penal substitutionary atonement––or Jesus dying in our place––Jesus’s faith doesn’t factor much into what happened on the cross. Since Jesus is understood to be God Himself, what would it even mean for him to have faith? How could God believe in Himself? Why would God need to believe? Certainly, as God, He can make anything happen that He wants to have happen.
Nevertheless, the biblical text is clear: Jesus had faith. The problem is that this faith is often lost in translation. Consider the following passage:
Yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified. (Galatians 2:16 ESV).
Without looking at the Greek, one would be hard pressed to know that anything isn’t quite right about this verse’s translation. It says that we’re justified by faith in Christ; certainly that sounds like how God saves us. However, that’s actually not what the verse says. Both times that the translation references “faith in Jesus” or “faith in Christ,” the Greek has “Jesus” and “Christ” as the genitive form––a form that is typically possessive. In other words, the verse isn’t saying that we have faith in Christ. It’s saying that we need to have the faith of Christ.
How did Christ save us? It wasn’t because he died in our place. Instead, it was because he showed us what faith really looks like. How else are we to know what it looks like to perfectly believe in God? No one else had ever done it perfectly! Thus, returning to Isaiah 53 from our last post, this is the exact interpretation that Peter gives to that passage. Quoting Isaiah 53, Peter says:
For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.” (1 Peter 2:21-24 ESV).
Do you see what it meant for him to bear our sins in his body on the tree? It meant that he left us “an example, so that [we] might follow in his steps.” That’s what this is all about. God didn’t need some kind of sacrifice to pacify His wrath. Instead, he needed someone to show humanity what it meant to be faithful!
And yet, we can’t follow Christ perfectly anyway. So why do we need that example? That’s what we’ll consider next.
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Jason Hensley, PhD.
