A Righteousness not Based on Works
Introduction
Born again Christians have for so long differed on the issue of righteousness. There are those who believe that one has to portray a perfect picture for them to be considered righteous, while another group believes that righteousness has nothing to do with what a person does or does not. This is one of the key issues that has brought division in the modern church. To enable us delve into this issue of righteousness we have to bring ourselves to the existence of two types of righteousness:
Human righteousness.
Divine righteousness.
Human righteousness
Human righteousness comes from doing good and not doing what is evil. It relies on classification of human acts into two broad categories; good and evil. If you can manage to evade the category of bad things as spelled out in the minds of people or in any written law (including the law of Moses, then you qualify for human righteousness.
Divine righteousness
Divine righteousness, on the other hand, comes by believing in Jesus (cf. Romans 10:9-10). It does not rely on human acts or omissions. It is not dependent on some laid down laws that have to be met strictly so that the designation “righteous” could be affixed. This is therefore a permanent thing that cannot be revoked since it is based on what someone else did in His earthly life, and then He went to a place where there is no sin to corrupt His righteousness (heaven).
What should we do to do the works of God?
The problem with us as Christians is that we like to work so much. The world around us has taught us that you need to work for something. Nothing is for free in this world, but that’s not the case with God. He gives his righteousness freely to those who believe. We have an example of very zealous people who were trying to establish a righteousness of themselves and in the process neglected what God was offering them freely in Romans 10:1-3.
This is what happens when you are busy trying to please God by what you do or what you try very hard not to do. You are in effect trying to re-invent the wheel while a whole functional thing is there waiting for you to take it. You try so hard to fulfil the whole requirement of the law, which was not even given to you in the first place, in the end becoming a curse and being alienated from God. God’s chosen nation, Israel, tried and failed to fulfil what the law required of them. Instead of becoming a chosen people as God had promised, they became a curse as it is written, “cursed is anyone who does not fulfil these things.”
The law of Moses could not make perfect. It could not justify man in the eyes of a righteous God, but Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness to whoever believes in him. (cf Romans 10:4). So long as you believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, there is righteousness for you. True righteousness starts with believing in Christ Jesus as your saviour. It doesn’t start when you quit some behaviour or the other. It doesn’t start when you start going to church. It’s a free gift that God gives you when you believe.
Filthy rags
In Philippians 3:9, Paul is eager to attain a righteousness that comes not from the law but one that comes through faith in Christ Jesus. He knows that human righteousness is temporal and inconsequential in the eyes of God. In fact, God sees human righteousness as filthy rags (cf. Isaiah 64:6). Imagine that! Living a constrained life so that you may shine in righteousness before God but He sees you as a lunatic in filthy rags.
Isaiah 64:6 was written many years before Christ. There was no one to attain the full requirement of the law. It is my belief that the law was not even given to be fulfilled, that’s why they were given a robust sacrificial system so they could cover their sins. All were cursed and all were sinners regardless of how they followed the law. You just needed to break one law, say look at a woman and think how beautiful she is, and you’d be a sinner.
The righteous acts done under the law which was in operation then were filthy rags; they couldn’t cover the nakedness though they gave the wearer a sense of security and comfort. You think and feel like you are wearing clothes but when you look at yourself you see your nakedness. A man who adheres to the law “in its entirety” may feel like they are closer to God since they have done a great percentage of His demands, but it can’t be further from the truth. Those good acts can not make you righteous and if they can, it’s not a righteousness that comes from God but a human thing that comes and goes. You have to do the same good things tomorrow and the next day and avoid the same things over and over, but it will never be credited to you as righteousness.
We need a saviour
If those good acts can’t make a man righteous then we need a saviour who can make us righteous. We take the example of Cornelius in Acts 10. He’s what most of us would like to emulate. He had all the qualifications of a humanly righteous man, but his righteousness before God lacked. Though he was a devout church goer, gave to the poor and had good deeds, he still had to receive the righteousness of God.
No amount of doing good or resisting the bad can take one closer to God. The knowledge of good and evil is the one that made man flee from God, how can the same knowledge make man come nearer to God? In Genesis 3:8 we see Adam and his Wife hiding from God when He’d come to visit them, as usual. It is my assumption that this was the norm around this place, God visiting the family in the cool of the day and fellowshipping with them.
God, in His infinite knowledge, knew even before they told Him they were naked, that they were, but He didn’t mind. He knows the deepest secrets of our hearts, so he knew they had already eaten the fruit, yet He didn’t care. He just wanted fellowship with them. But man’s fallen nature could not let him face a righteous God. So, he ran away. God’s decision to chase man out of the garden of Eden was the equivalent of helping him do what he was already doing; putting a gap between himself and God, because of his guilt.
God still wanted to bring man back to himself. Man wanted to have a fellowship with God, but every time he looked at himself, he could only see his imperfections and run away from God. In this way man could never have been reunited with God. God must do something to bridge the gap. First, He gives the law through Moses, to show us how useless it is to try to reach him by our own means. The more we tried to follow the law, the more we found ourselves doing wrong (cf: Romans 7:9-11).
The gift of Righteousness
For man to relate to God and not be held back by his own guilt, he has to rely on a righteousness that doesn’t come from himself. God himself gives this righteousness as a free gift to all those who believe (cf: Romans 3: 24-26) You do nothing to qualify for the gift, else it would not be a gift after all. Titus 3: 4-7 tells us that He saved us not because of the good things we’d done, but because of His own mercy.
Had it been based on the good things, we'd need to continually do those good deeds all the time for the rest of our lives. Then salvation and righteousness would not be a gift but a wage. But just a minute; who would qualify for the wage? Only one: Christ Jesus qualified for the prize, having attained the righteousness of the law. Instead of stashing the righteousness for himself, He took our place on the cross and gave us His rightful righteousness. All that is required of us is to believe that He actually did that. He die for our sins and rose for our justification.
Now, you may wonder, “can I do nothing at all and still be righteous?” romans 10: 9-10 sets out a simple mechanism for receiving the free gift of salvation and righteousness. If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is lord!’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 for it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. The righteousness of God comes by believing in the resurrection of our lord Jesus and declaring His Lordship.
Today, if you completely believe in your heart that someone else was punished for your sins, you will not come into judgement. You will have the right to be called a son of God, just as Jesus was called the son of man. You will have a right standing with God, because God Himself satiated His own anger on Jesus Christ on the cross. If you believe that Christ Jesus took your sinful nature and nailed it to the cross, you will receive His righteous nature and become like Him. If you believe that Christ Jesus died for your sins and was raised from the dead for your justification, you will be saved from the curse of the law, which is death, and be imputed with the life of God.
Read more on this topic:
What does it mean to be save by grace
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