Faith in God means putting your trust in God. People who have faith in God believe everything God says. All the great men and women of Scripture had faith in God. What it means is that irrespective of your feelings you trust God. This is with the belief that God’s thoughts and ways are superior to ours, (Isaiah 55:8). Faith of God has the idea that God trusts in something, because faith has to do with trust.

Some believe that we can have the “faith of God”. This notion arises from wrong translation of Mark 11:22 and Romans 3:22 from the original Greek text. In Mark 11:22, Jesus answering Peter said, “Have faith in God” – this is the KJV translation, which in my opinion is right. However, in other translations such as Douay-Rheims Bible and Young’s Literal Translation (LITV), this verse is translated as, “Have faith of God”. Now, this is the choice of the translators, because in the Greek version, neither the preposition “in” or “of” is there. The Greek text translated in Mark 11:22 is echo pistis Theos, which can be literally translated as “have faith God”.

The reason why we have these two translations is because they’re grammatically possible. That is to say, from the original Greek, echo pistis Theos could be translated as “Have faith in God” or “Have faith of God”.  So the rendering is basically dependent upon the translators to either choose “in” or “of”

However, there is no such thing as “faith of God”. We cannot have the faith of God simply because it does not exist. In Hebrews 11, we find that faith must be expressed in something, in this case in God. To put it in simple terms, you express your faith in something or someone. To the Christian, this means that we must express our faith in God or put our faith in God. So we find that, there is no way God can have faith. The question is: Who is God going to have faith in? Unless you believe that there is something or someone greater than God. And if you believe something like this, let me plainly tell you that there is nothing or no one greater than God. God exists on His own – He is the Supreme Being.

We find out in the Bible that faith comes only by hearing the Word of God, (Romans 10:17). This is one thing we know. We also know that in order to be saved from eternal damnation, we must have faith, which is expressed through His Son Jesus Christ. The KJV also wrongly translated Romans 3:22, when it was translated as “Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ”.  The Greek text translated is: pistis Iesous, which can be literally translated as “Faith Jesus”. Like I did indicate earlier, it was the choice of the translators and in this case KJV was not consistent. But I believe, the reason they did not translate it like they did in Mark 11:222, is because they thought when Jesus was in the world, he became one of us and thus have faith in God, hence the translation.

So simply put, faith is expressed in something higher and in our case, it is expressed in God. God cannot have faith, because there is nothing or no one higher than Him. We are the ones that need faith and not God.

Taken from the book: “Faith: The Only Way to Please God” by Seth Gogo Egoeh