For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “The just shall live by faith.” (Romans 1:16-17)
What is righteousness?
When I’ve asked my friends and colleagues that question, I’ve gotten a variety of answers. One says it’s right doing, Another that it’s love. I’ve been told that righteousness is obeying the law, or that it’s personal holiness.
I tell them they have all missed the point of Scripture. Righteousness is nothing more and nothing less than Jesus.
Let’s think this through together.
If righteousness was right doing, then why would you need Jesus?
No, no need for a suffering Savior because you could earn your way to heaven. The Jains of India, who sweep the floor in front of them as they walk for fear of stepping on a bug, and who wear masks to avoid swallowing small life forms and killing something, would make it to heaven before most other people.
If righteousness is just love, then any happily married couple would be righteous.
Bonnie and Clyde, the infamous bank robbers, or Nero and Octavia, the Roman despots, would be easily eligible for paradise.
If righteousness could be had by merely obeying the law, most judges and lawyers should make it, because they really know the law, and they should be able to keep it to the letter.
If it were perfect holiness, we would all be lost.
I haven’t met any really holy people, have you? I’ve met good people. I’ve met kind people, but I haven’t met many people who, in themselves, were naturally holy.
But if righteousness is Jesus, then we can be righteous, through Him. As long as we have Jesus as Savior, we can be righteous.
The only way to find true righteousness is in Jesus. We know that, “all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags” (Is 64:6). We are incapable of righteousness in ourselves.
Morris Venden, one of my favorite writers, explains it this way. “Righteousness equals Jesus. Mankind plus Jesus equals righteousness. Mankind minus Jesus equals nothing.”
We are nothing without Him. We are everything with Him. When we accept Him, we become righteous. If we refuse Him, we are nothing.
Heaven is waiting for a people who have Christ’s righteousness within them. Does He live in your mind today?
Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that ‘the just shall live by his faith.’ Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. – Martin Luther