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Tess - I am still working on a response to our other conversation. I happen to be going through Romans now so a lot of the discussions you are raising are addressed at length in Romans.
Ok, what is righteousness? I’d like to say that righteousness is not the quality of being a good person as some people think it to mean. Biblically speaking, righteousness can be used in two different manners. It can be used to describe the nature of someone’s deeds (zedeq) in relationship to the Covenant of God or a person’s standing before God (how one is seen in the eyes of God).
First off, the term righteousness is derived from the Greek word dikaios, which means: just, right, or innocent. As it relates to the covenant, someone was dikaios (righteous) if they kept the commandments of God. What I mean is that under the Old Testament or Covenant, someone was in right standing with God by taking the covenant seriously and keeping it. A person was adikias (unrighteous) if they did not keep the commandments of God. Let me explain. Let me first say that this concept has been confused by the modern church culture and in my opinion, we have to reconsider what righteousness and unrighteousness is in the context of the Jewish culture.
If you were a Jew under the Old Testament, you were one of two people. You either loved God and obeyed his Covenant or you hated God and observed the Covenant outwardly only or openly disobeyed the Covenant. To say that someone was righteous under the Mosaic Covenant meant that he was someone who delighted inwardly in the law; someone who when it came time to offer a sacrifice to God, did so willingly and from a heart committed to live his life according to the moral vision of God embodied in the Covenant. Now, such a person was a sinner, of course. And built into the very fabric of the Covenant were provisions for sin: if you sinned, depending upon what the sin was, there was a prescribed sacrifice that you needed to offer to God in order to be dikaios (righteous) in God’s eyes. Dikaios in this sense means that when God “sees” you he looks upon you with mercy…even though you have sinned, he will not judge you; he will instead meet you with mercy. So such a person is in right standing within the community of the Covenant and in the eyes of God.
The interesting thing about keeping the Covenant (and this is what Paul means when he says that the Covenant was our tutor to bring us to God) was that in keeping it, you actually learned what sort of person you were. Let’s think about this for a second. Every time you became aware of a way in which you broke one of the Commandments, you were instructed by God to offer a sacrifice. You had to go and take an animal, kill it, and its blood was to be used as a means of atoning for your sin. You can imagine that after years of living under such a covenant and sacrificing all of the animals that you did, it would become increasingly clear that there was something fundamentally wrong with you…every time you had to go and offer the sacrifice it was as if you were saying “here I go again.” Some commentators say that the Covenant was a tutor in the sense that it taught us that we couldn’t keep it. Well, I don’t think that was the case. The Covenant could be kept it was just that in keeping it, it sent home the message quite powerfully that I was an evil person…all of the sacrifices that I offered left a trail of blood behind me that left no question as to the kind of person that I was.
When Isaiah said that “all of our righteousness is like filthy rags”, he was saying that as a nation, Israel was not following the Covenant. Isaiah himself was just lumping himself into the same category as the nation because he recognized that the Covenant was one that needed to be kept as a nation. Isaiah himself was in right standing with God (righteous) but Israel as a whole was not. They were going after other gods; when they would offer a sacrifice, they would offer it profanely, not with a contrite heart and not after the prescribed manner that God had told them to. Look at Isaiah 1:
11 “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?
says the Lord;
I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams
and the fat of well-fed beasts;
I do not delight in the blood of bulls,
or of lambs, or of goats.
12 “When you come to appear before me,
who has required of you
this trampling of my courts?
13 Bring no more vain offerings;
incense is an abomination to me.
New moon and Sabbath and the calling of convocations—
I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly.
14 Your new moons and your appointed feasts
my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me;
I am weary of bearing them.
15 When you spread out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,
I will not listen;
your hands are full of blood.
16 Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
17 learn to do good;
seek justice,
correct oppression;
bring justice to the fatherless,
plead the widow's cause.”
I haven’t quoted it but God goes on to say “come now and let us reason together. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be made white as snow.” How was this forgiveness going to come? By taking the Covenant that God made with them seriously and by committing themselves to the moral vision of God that the Covenant embodied.
The idea that when God sees me he sees Jesus is something that Augustine first introduced and Martin Luther probably expounded upon even more. I believe they were attempting to reconcile how it was that a righteous God can look upon evil creatures. If God cannot look upon evil and I am evil, then how can God really see me from the perspective of being rightly related to him? Ahhh, it must be that Jesus is who God sees when he looks at me since I am made righteous through Jesus (is the way the logic goes). Well, I think that this idea is kind of strange. God can look upon evil. Many times the bible says “he looked upon their evil” or he “visited their evil” or “I have seen your wicked deeds.” God cannot look past evil as if it didn’t exist…he doesn’t turn a blind eye to evil. So in that sense, he cannot look at evil…he cannot look at it with a neutral, ambiguous attitude.
But with respect to me, God looks squarely into my face when he decides to grant mercy to me. The part Jesus plays is that he reconciled me to God. He gave is life for me to satisfy God’s desire for justice and for his desire to grant mercy. But I don’t think that righteousness (Dikaiosune) can be transferred to me from Jesus. But as a gift of mercy, God does declare people righteous (dikaios) by believing in what Jesus did for them. Righteousness is a state of being declared “pardoned” in the eyes of God. When God comes to judge the world at the end of this age, he will either declare me guilty or innocent. To be righteous in this sense is the idea of God saying to me “even though you are evil and deserve to be condemned; nonetheless, because you have believed in my Son who gave his life for you, I will not punish you but I will overlook your sins.” That is far more dramatic for me to see that God is not seeing Jesus when he looks at me but that he really sees me and has had compassion and mercy upon me because of my faith in Christ Jesus.
I may have left some ends untied so pick up the discussion if you think I am overlooking something.
