What is God’s Righteousness?

What is The Righteousness of God? One might think the answer obvious: this is God’s gift of salvation whereby now we are in right standing with God. However, the verb (in Protestant theology translated “to declare righteous”) has been variously interpreted from being justified to being made righteous or sanctified. One thing is true: the word righteousness in our Bible has no meaning without God. “As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one.” [Romans 3:10]. “If you know that He is righteous, you know that everyone who practices righteousness is born of Him.” [1 John 2:29].

If you are like me, you are probably wanting to find a single word in the English language that answers to the Greek word, righteousness. But we are discovering that a study using this word is not that simple. Righteousness seems to refer to everything between God’s justice to our sanctification. Perhaps, we might have expected this to be the case since our word, righteousness, is not the only term in Scripture which embraces a number of English words. The Old Testament words, love and peace, for example, have a similar testimony.

We are for the best part dependent solely on Scripture to understand what a Biblical word means. Referencing other ages of the Greek language through its literature to understand the meaning of a word in our Bible should remain a humble and prayerful endeavor. This does not suggest we cannot know the meanings of words, but some terms have been elevated to a higher level of inspirational truth. The “Fruit of the Spirit” are definitely in the list. Paul made it clear that God’s truth is spiritually discerned [1 Corinthians 2:14]. Again, as Professor Trench alerted us, “There has often been occasion to observe the manner in which Greek words taken up into Christian use are glorified and transformed, seeming to have waited for this adoption of them, to come to their full rights, and to reveal all the depth and the riches of meaning which they contained, or might be made to contain.” [Richard C. Trench Synonyms of the New Testament (Wm. B Eerdmans Publishing Company,,Grand Rapids, MI: 1975) page 166.]

Granted, if we, as believers, could get in a time machine and return to the middle of the first century, and maybe, dialog with Brother Paul for a while, things would get much clearer, but we have a greater than Paul to teach us—The Holy Spirit [John 16:13]. This is why I would rather trust the Body of Christ— as a whole—to get it right, rather than the single input of the most renown scholar. And this is one more reason for our fellowship around God’s Word. If we keep our hearts humble and open and we listen with the heart to the testimonies of our fellow believers (the scriptures lived) we will find the meanings to the most cherished of Christian truths, including righteousness. We will, then, know, by living it, what righteousness means when Paul says that we have been created in true righteousness [Ephesians 4:24], not a counterfeit misrepresentation of it nor a dictionary definition that satisfies an academic interest in it, but what Habakkuk called “living by faith” [Habakkuk 2:4].

The Bible is not a mere theological treatise. It is from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22 all about God’s righteousness for us and in us. In many ways, God has already provided spiritual insight into Biblical truth by what He is perfecting in us [1 John 2:5]. Some believers, I surmise, have only begun to befriend the new person they are becoming under Christ’s Lordship in their lives and to discover what God’s righteousness is all about.