Two Kinds Of RighteousnessSample

Righteousness Restored

Man has ever sought to rid himself of his sense of guilt and sin. Sin consciousness was born at the fall. It was manifested in Adam’s fear of meeting God and in his desire to cover his nakedness.

The revelation of God, and the development of that revelation, has been to one end: to restore righteousness to man. Besides the ability to stand in the presence of God without a sense of sin, guilt, or inferiority, righteousness is also the process of being legally restored to the relation of a son or daughter and enjoying fellowship with the Father. Sin consciousness has robbed man of his faith and filled him with a sense of unworthiness that dominates human consciousness today.

Now the question is this: Has God provided a redemption that will take away this sin consciousness and permit man to reenter into His presence and remain there, as Jesus did? If God could do that, then faith is restored, for the great enemy of faith is the sense of unworthiness.

In the first three chapters of Romans, Paul is showing how both Jew and Gentile have utterly failed to attain a righteousness that would give them a standing with God. Paul concludes the argument in Romans 3:9–18 with fourteen charges in the grand indictment against man. In the first charge, he says, “There is none righteous, no, not one” (verse 10). In other words, no man has a standing with God outside of Christ. These fourteen charges, however, are laid against the unregenerate man, not the Christian.

Then, we get Paul’s statement of how righteousness has been restored to man on legal grounds: “But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets” (verse 21). Notice the expression “without the law.” Independent of the law, a righteousness of God has been manifested, and the law as well as the prophets witness to its validity.

God is not afraid to become the righteousness of the man who has faith in Jesus, because He planned that redemption. It is based on faith in His own Son and what that Son has wrought for man. God is not ashamed to become the righteousness of the new creation. If there is anything that ought to free us and lift us above the age-old master, sin consciousness, it is that fact.

No man who has received eternal life and has given his spirit an opportunity to develop by feeding on the Word can ever have his standing with the Father challenged. Never again must he shrink under that sin teaching of the modern pulpit and look upon himself as a failure, or as one ruled by sin. By his new birth, mankind has as much a right to stand before the throne of grace as Jesus has to sit on it. He has as much a right in the Father’s presence as the Father has a right to sit on His own throne.