He is faithful, worthy to be trusted, as His deeds show.
Faith is our attitude corresponding to His faithfulness. Faith is the
germ of all that He requires from us. How much we need it! How firm it
might be! How blessed it would make us!
The thought of God as 'faithful' is, like a precious stone, turned in
many directions in Scripture, and wherever turned it flashes light.
Sometimes it is laid as the foundation for the confidence that even our
weakness will be upheld to the end, as when Paul tells the Corinthians
that they will be confirmed to the end, because 'God is faithful,
through whom ye were called into the fellowship of His Son' (1 Cor. i.
9). Sometimes there is built on it the assurance of complete
sanctification, as when he prays for the Thessalonians that their
'whole spirit and soul and body may be preserved blameless unto the
coming of our Lord' and finds it in his heart to pray thus because
'Faithful is He that calleth you, who will also do it' (1 Thess. v.
24). Sometimes it is presented as the steadfast stay grasping which
faith can expect apparent impossibilities, as when Sara 'judged Him
faithful who had promised' (Heb. xi. 11). Sometimes it is adduced as
bringing strong consolation to souls conscious of their own feeble and
fluctuating faith, as when Paul tells Timothy that 'If we are
faithless, He abideth faithful; for He cannot deny Himself' (2 Tim. ii.
13). Sometimes it is presented as an anodyne to souls disturbed by
experience of men's unreliableness, as when the apostle heartens the
Thessalonians and himself to bear human untrustworthiness by the
thought that though men are faithless, God 'is faithful, who shall
establish you and keep you from evil' (2 Thess. in. 2, 3). Sometimes it
is put forward to breathe patience into tempted spirits, as when the
Corinthians are comforted by the assurance that 'God is faithful, who
will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able' (1 Cor. x.
13). Sometimes it is laid as the firm foundation for our assurance of
pardon, as when John tells us that 'If we confess our sins, He is
faithful and just to forgive us our sins' (1 John i. 9). And sometimes
that great attribute of the divine nature is proposed as holding forth
a pattern for us to follow, and the faith in it as tending to make us
in a measure steadfast like Himself, as when Paul indignantly rebuts
his enemies' charge of levity of purpose and vacillation, and avers
that 'as God is faithful, our word toward you is not yea and nay' (2
Cor. L 18).