RIGHTEOUSNESS

Righteousness is the quality of being right or just (Vine), an attribute of God that is descriptive of His ability to confer His life upon man without compromising His nature. The righteousness of God is revealed to faith, not human reason. If God were to use human nature for His purpose, He would be using what is unrighteous and so compromising with evil. So righteousness is not human merit but God acting in character to realise His intentions. God’s righteousness acts in conferring upon man the new life and is the power that causes the new man to respond to Him spiritually, not in nature.

Righteousness is linked with the spiritual faculty of faith from its first mention in Scripture (Gen.7:1). Noah walked with God, did all that God commanded him “and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith” (Heb.11:7). However, he was not the first righteous man, that distinction belongs to Abel (Matt.23:35). As with Noah, Abel was counted righteous on account of his faith (Heb.11:4). Abraham’s righteousness was acquired by faith (Gen.15:6, Rom.4:3,13), as was David’s and a host of others (Heb.11:32,33). Likewise, through faith in Christ we have His own righteous nature begotten in us. “If you know that He is righteous you know that everyone who practices righteousness is born of Him”, 1 John 2:29.

We see then that righteousness is intrinsic to the man of faith solely because he is in a right or just relationship with God, a spiritual relationship, “not by works of righteousness which we have done” (Titus 3:5) but “even as David describes the blessedness of the man unto whom God imputes righteousness without works” (Rom.4:6). So, a man is not righteous on account of what he is in nature or anything he does in natural life. Righteousness has always been acquired by grace, through faith, apart from fleshly works, and is the work of God by which He perfects those who were by their own works spiritual failures.

By the same token, the unregenerate live in ungodliness and unrighteousness because in natural life “there is none righteous, no not one” (Rom.3:10). Ungodliness describes the character of human life in its relation to God in the realm of nature. Unrighteousness describes the nature of man’s activity towards God and his fellow man. In the gospel God is revealing the work He has completed in Christ by which man can be fitted spiritually to stand in His presence in righteousness. The gospel is not to make men morally upright but to make them spiritually righteous.

The Epistle to the Romans may be said to be the definitive New Testament treatise on the subject of righteousness and no-one familiar with it can be under the illusion that this spiritual quality may be attributed to natural goodness or moral rectitude. That is the doctrine of spiritually bankrupt Christendom, which does view righteousness in a naturalistic way. A ‘Christianity’ which is naturalistic, which values and develops natural rather than spiritual good in its adherents, is not of God.

So, living righteously is living for God, not in nature in everyday life, but in the new (spiritual) life He has given us. Those who are constituted righteous practice righteousness by the new nature acting in them. It is descriptive of that manner of life that is peculiar to a spiritual people, walking with God in the spiritual sense, keeping his precepts. They do so primarily in house of God exercise, in worship, prayer, ministry of the Word, gospel testimony, etc., alive to God in a new form of spiritual life called eternal life, life that is “created in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph.4:24). It is predominently a collective manner of life, in the local assembly, because that is where Christianity is primarily practised, in the God-given sphere of the righteous.