Christ as the Believer’s Righteousness Alone

The gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel, from faith to faith. And that's kind of an interesting turn of phrase, I'll leave it alone. Basically, it's revealed by faith. We believe the gospel, and then the righteousness of God is revealed. We'll see that in Romans 3. That's how God is manifesting His righteousness. In Romans 3, it says He manifests it apart, the law bore witness to it. But the righteousness of God is apart from the law, and it's manifested on those who believe in Jesus Christ. He is our righteousness. As it is written, the just, the righteous, the righteous one, shall live by faith. Faith in what? The gospel, and the righteousness that it reveals, which is Christ. When He died on the cross, and rose from the dead, He fulfilled all righteousness. Not just as a matter of law-keeping. It wasn't just that He fulfilled some law, that's not the point. He went to the uttermost in God's righteousness, doing what absolute righteousness would do, which is, He loved us so much that He wouldn't just leave us in our sin. He made the absolute saving gesture that cost Him everything, cost Him His own life, because He wouldn't just leave us in the ditch. He had to give us an option to come to Him and be reconciled to Him, even though we were enemies. That's so far above and beyond the righteousness that a law-keeping type of person can even conceive of, much less us, who are children of God. We're still trying to figure it out. Every day I'm learning a little more how much God loved me. And His righteousness and His love goes together. His love is expressed in righteousness, and God answered the big questions in the universe. How can a righteous God forgive sinners? And how can a loving God condemn sinners? At the cross of Christ. At the cross of Christ, God's righteousness is put on display. That righteousness is so much higher than anything you can touch that you should just drop all attempts and run to Jesus, like Paul did. He said, I had a righteousness of the law, I was blameless according to the law. But what things were dangerous to me, I counted as loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as dung that I may gain Christ, and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own, which is out of the law, but the righteousness which is out of God, and based on faith. That's in Philippians 3. The righteousness, so we want to find Christ as our righteousness, and lay hold of Him by faith, and let go and repudiate our own righteousness, and have Christ. That's the only way we can please God. Nothing can even come close to the way Jesus Christ pleases the Father. And that is righteousness.

Well, he manifested that he is just and the justifier of him who believes in Jesus, apart from any works, because Jesus paid the price. What was the price? It wasn't law-keeping. It was that he laid his life down for the sheep. He laid his righteous life down. Even if the law had never been given, he still would have had to do that. He still would have done it. We still needed a Savior apart from the law. The law is not what defines our need for a Savior. Our sin and our fallenness is what tells us we need a Savior. The law is there just to help the doctor give his diagnosis, so we'll accept it. But again, it wasn't given to all the nations. It was only given to Israel. Gentiles never had the law, so to say that Jesus fulfilled the law for you as a Gentile is totally erroneous. And the idea that he kept 613 ordinances is not the point at all. He is the fulfillment of the Levitical system, but he didn't serve in it as a priest. And not only that, but he worked on the Sabbath. He did healings and miracles on the Sabbath, thus, in the Pharisees' mind, kind of breaking the Sabbath. But he said, my Father works and so must I. And he said the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. And he said he's the Lord of the Sabbath, which means he has the right to dispense with it if he wants to and still be righteous. So again, that shows that the Sabbath, which is part of the Ten Commandments, is not the reality. Christ is the reality. He can dispense with it. He can work on it. And the law of Moses is said to be waxing old and passing away, okay, in Hebrews and in 2 Corinthians. It's a fading glory. It has a glory, but it's a fading glory. And it's a ministry of condemnation and death. Why? Because all it can do is reveal my sin. The sin is already there, though. It's not like the sin started once the law came. No, the sin was already there. And I needed a Savior before the law, okay? No one needed a Savior. Enoch needed a Savior. Adam needed a Savior before the law. There was still the need for blood to be shed. So they had the altar before the law. Is this just minutiae? You know, no. The obedience of Jesus does not consist of His law-keeping. The law is a shadow that points to His righteousness that is His by the virtue of His life. He is righteous. Not because He fulfills a requirement that's been written down, but because of what He is. Everything He does is righteous. And He laid His righteous life down.

God's righteousness is on display, not yours. Now in Romans 8, it also talks about the righteousness. Says that there's no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Where did the condemnation come from? The law, with its proper function. There's no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do, what? The law of God could not do this. God, sending his own Son in the likeness of the sinful flesh and for sin, he condemns sin in the flesh. What the law could not do, it couldn't produce the righteousness. Paul said in Galatians that if righteousness could have come by the law, then if there was a law that could have given life, righteousness would have come by the law. God's intention is to give life, not just to make you righteous, but to give Christ to you as your life. And the law couldn't do that. What did? God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh. He condemns sin in the flesh, and that's what we talked about last night. He terminated the last Adam. He terminated the Adamic race as the last Adam on the cross, and we were crucified with him. He did away with the vessel of sin, the vessel of sin's expression, the body of sin. He terminated its power and brought it into ultimate weakness on the cross. What the law could not do, in that it was weak through sinful flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of the flesh of sin and for sin, condemns sin in the flesh, that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. And they say, okay, see, it shows that we're law-righteous. That means I delight in the law of, no, the righteousness of the law is Christ. He is the righteousness that the law bore witness to, but it is the righteousness of God manifested apart from the law upon those who believe. Jesus Christ is God's righteousness. Much higher than the law, he's the reality. The law is just a shadow. The law can only condemn you. It can't bring you life. And until you have his life, you've got no righteousness. Even if you do.

The righteousness of the law is Christ. It he is the righteousness that the law bore witness to, but it is the righteousness of God manifested apart from the law upon those who believe. Jesus Christ is God's righteousness. Much higher than the law, he's the reality. The law was just a shadow. The law can only condemn you. It can't bring you life. And until you have his life, you've got no righteousness even if you do delight in the law. Delighting in the law does not make you righteous. Keeping the law could theoretically, but you can't keep it.

God did not have to do everything he did, except he's constrained by his own nature to do it, because he's absolutely righteous. There's no rule that anybody wrote down to obligate God to die for the sins of the world. There's nothing written in stone or anywhere else that says he has to do that. And yet when he did it, he fulfilled righteousness because he fulfilled his own nature. He is absolutely righteous. He is righteousness, and that he wants children. He wants to be the father of many children who have his life in nature and are righteous as he is righteous. And that can't be obtained incrementally by rule keeping. There's no way. You'll never go to the lengths that God went to. You can only hide yourself in Christ and say, thank you that you are my everything. That's it. That's where your responsibility ends. And after that point, you need to stop and then lean on him and rest in him and let him be him and say, I'm just a little child. I know very little. Like, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to react. I don't know anything. Every day, we have to repudiate anything we know and learn to realize that, look, I am not accumulating something here called spirituality. I'm every day dropping anything I had from yesterday and saying, Lord, you have to flow today. I don't know what to do. I don't know how to respond. You can't just read a manual and figure it out. That won't produce the righteousness of God. That'll produce a caricature that is full of hypocrisy because it's generated from human flesh and it's mixed with sin. When God manifests righteousness and does a righteous work, it's mixed with holiness, light, and love. When we try to manifest righteousness by ourselves, it's mixed with sin and self-love and darkness and hatred and unholiness and uncleanness. So that's why our best works are like filthy rags. And what we try to do is just do one thing at a time. I'm gonna work at righteousness right now and then we'll work at holiness at another time and then we'll work on love. And our problem is is if we're holy, we're not loving. We judge everybody. Or if we're righteous, we're super strict and unbearable. But if we're loving, then we're too loose and we give everybody a pass and tolerate everything that God hates. We don't know how to balance any of these things. We can't balance love, light, holiness, and righteousness. We try to work on them a little bit at a time here and there and end up putting this thing together that's just a gross mockery of Christ. And we try to call that our religious righteousness and it's not. It's an offense to him. So yes, the righteousness of God is higher than what we can attain to.