BLOG 2/7/17. RECLAIMING RIGHTEOUSNESS: GOD’S WAY OF DOING THINGS.
It’s high time we got serious, within the Christian community, about reclaiming our calling to be God’s agents of righteousness. I’m not talking about ‘self-righteousness’ by which people try to foist themselves off as better than others, … I’m talking about the character of God that is to be expressed in God’s sons and daughters—or as Eugene Peterson paraphrases righteousness: “God’s way of doing things.”
All too often, especially within our Protestant-Reformation tradition, we have put the focus on the blessing of our Christian faith, that our sinful persons are made ‘righteous by faith,’ i.e., that reality by which Jesus Christ bore our sins and carried our sorrows, and made us righteous before God by his own atoning death. Yes, amen. That is an inestimable blessing, … but it must not obscure the incarnational reality of that which teaches us that God’s calling of us, in Jesus Christ, is in order to “conform us to the image of his Son”—spelled out as our recreation in knowledge (to have the mind of God in us), in righteousness (to exhibit in our behavior the image of God), and in true holiness (to be embraced as intimate sons and daughters within the Trinitarian community) [Romans 8:29-39; Ephesians 4:24; Colossians 3:10].
It is this calling to be conformed to God’s Son in righteousness by which others can see our good works. It is this ‘Kingdom behavior’ that is visible to the watching world. It is in this that God demonstrates in flesh and blood his design for his New Creation people, … those who incarnate in their human lives, and daily live-out the Sermon on the Mount. Paul reminded the Romans that before they were baptized into Christ they were slaves of sin, but now in their new life as his resurrection people they are slaves to (guess what?) righteousness. This is critical for us to grasp. God’s people march to a different drummer. O, we may be Americans, or Democrats or Republican or whatever—but these are not our primary identity. We are God’s holy nation, and thereby transnational. God’s church knows no national or ethnic barriers. In whatever political, cultural, social, ethnic, or whatever context we find ourselves, we are to be those whose priorities and ethical behavior is motivated by our calling to be God’s righteous ones.
In Jewish culture those who consistently lived out the life designed by the Torah were designated as tzadik / righteous ones. It was high tribute. I have known such Jewish friends who were tzadik, and they were a breath of fresh air as they endured anti-Semitism and slights of all kinds with gentle consistency, and lives filled with good works. I regularly pray that I will be a Christian tzadik, and that those outside the community of faith will see my good works and glorify God—will see Christ’s genome incarnated in me. Or Latin American brother and sisters refer to this as ortho-praxis, i.e., the visible living out of the true nature of God. It was many of those Latin American brothers and sisters, also, who, when the church leadership became too captive to the wealth and power of the upper-classes, reminded the church of “God’s preferential option for the poor.” Yes, the helpless, the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the imprisoned, … they are God’s preferential option, and must also be ours. Righteousness.
In our present political climate of arrogant wealth and power seemingly in the ascendency, that we need to remind ourselves and all those who profess to be followers of Christ, that we are to be the radical practitioners of his righteousness with integrity and humility, no matter the cost. It is thus that we are salt and light, and true to his calling to be the radiant display of his divine nature—his peculiar people, his holy nation—even if it costs us our lives (cf. Revelation 12:11).
Yes. That men may see our good works, our New Creation behavior and thinking, … and glorify God, know that somehow God is the one who has brought this about in our lives. Righteousness. We are to wear it like a breastplate (Ephesian 6:14). That God’s design and it is our inescapable calling, especially in such tumultuous times as these are.
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