Introduction

During a local retreat we were talking about “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col 1:27) when someone quoted from 2 Peter, “Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, 12 waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! 13 But according to his promise we are waiting for a new heaven and a new earth the home of righteousness.” (2 Pet 3:11- 13).

All of a sudden I could sense that everything in the new heaven and earth was filled with the righteousness of Jesus. I could see that “the river of the water of life” and “the tree of life” but were filled with his presence and that through the “face of the Lamb” all things in the cosmic order reflected Christ’s righteousness (Rev 22:1-5). Deeply affected by this insight I set out to pray for greater insight. Before expanding on this however the nature of “righteousness” needs to be defined.

A Note on “Righteousness”

It is most helpful to consider righteousness within context of the covenantal relationship God initiates with his people. To say “God is righteous” means he is always faithful to the covenant- he is reliable to his promises, vindicates his people when they are oppressed and saves them from evil (Ps 71:2; Isa 45:21; 63:1; Jer 23:6; 2 Pet 1:1 etc.). Humans are righteous when they are faithful and true covenant partners. This involves both faith and behaviour.

Original Righteousness and the Lost Pleasure of God

The expression “original righteousness” describes the sinless state of created humanity. Adam and Eve were conscious of being “very good’ (Gen 1:31) and “upright” (Eccl 7:29) before God. This was part of their experience of God’s delight in Paradise[1]. If Adam and Eve had obeyed God’s Word concerning the tree of knowledge (Gen 1:27) they would have been fully united to his glory forever. Their act of faith would have established them as righteous covenant partners of God. In all they did in taking dominion of the earth God’s pleasure would have been fully present. The sharing of divine and human life in “all things” would have been complete.

Generally people think of Paradise in terms of the maximisation of personal pleasure. Life is defined by personal pleasure, including the moral pleasure of being right in one’s own eyes (Prov 21:2). This helps us understand how the Fall occurred in Eden.

Satan said to Eve, ““You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit” (Gen 3:4-6). To want to know good and evil for oneself, rather than through the testimony of the Word of God (Gen 1:27), is self-righteousness. And to partake the culinary and aesthetic delights of the forbidden tree is to live for pleasure rather than for God (2 Tim 3:4).

Sin brings blindness to the rightness of God’s ways. The depraved human conscience judges all things, including God, from within its own self- centred framework. Our sense of what is good and evil for us is enthroned above the authority of God’s own Word. The sinful human condition is tragic, losing the glory of original righteousness fills people with shame (Gen 3:7-10) but the self-righteousness of the fallen conscience stops us from admitting our guilt before God. To save us, God himself must enter into our condition and turn our sense of rightness inside out; this is the meaning of the Incarnation.

Incarnational Righteousness

The Incarnation is the means by which God’s righteousness fills the humanity of Jesus and those who are united to him through faith. The righteousness revealed in Christ appears not to condemn the world (as humans expect) but to save it (John 3:17). God proves himself to be man’s faithful covenant partner by saving us from shame.

A profound text on true righteousness appears in Matthew, “Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to put her (the pregnant Mary) to public shame[2], resolved to divorce her quietly.” (Matt 1:19). Joseph is a prototype of Jesus because righteousness covers the shame of lost glory.

Whereas Adam refused to be deprived of the moral and sensory experience of the tree of knowledge, Jesus’ earthly journey was a voluntary setting aside of the infinite pleasure of knowing God in his fullness. Christ’s incarnate life was an emptying of the eternal glory he experienced with the Father for the purpose of raising us with him to heaven (Phil 2:5-11).

As a real human person, Jesus had to learn that God is righteous through personal experience. “tempted in every way, just as we are” (Heb 4:15), his faith that God is righteous was tested by hunger, thirst and aloneness (Matt 4:1-11), by the unbelief of neighbours, family and friends (John 12:37) and pre-eminently by the cross.

As he agonised in prayer in Gethsemane, Jesus words about “this cup” (Mark 14:36) reveal a he must soon be immersed in the wrath of God (Ps 75:8; Isa 51:17, 22; Jer 25:15- 26; Hab 2:16). Most terribly, Jesus knows the fitting punishing for self-righteousness (for those who believe they can see) is to be given up to an intractable blindness. “Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.”” (Isa 6:10). The anguished cry from the cross, ““My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”” (Mark 15:34), echoes this reality. Jesus has been removed from the immediate intimate pleasure of his Father and has been filled with the sin of the world (2 Cor 5:21). He is handed over to a state where so dark that evil seems all triumphant and good non-existent. For the pristine conscience of Christ the presence of this state of mind is utterly unbearable. Yet, unlike us, Jesus cry is a protest and not an acceptance. Totally without desire to be wise in his own eyes[3], even in this experience of hell Christ never judges God to be unrighteous. The fruit of Jesus struggle is not shame but life because to the end he lives by faith in God’s justice.

When he says by faith to the penitent thief, ““today you will be with me in Paradise”” (Luke 23:43), he proclaims that heaven is the presence of a person not a place. Paradise, God’s ordained destiny for humanity, has been fully realised in his own death and resurrection.

Resurrection Righteousness

The writer to Hebrews perfectly expresses the dynamic of the cross and resurrection, “looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” (Heb 12:1-2). The perfection of faith Adam failed to enter was achieved by the trusting obedience of Christ, and the fruit of faith is sharing the complete joy of God that comes after an experience of deprivation for the sake of the divine righteousness. It is through the joy of resurrection that Jesus has come to know absolutely that God is the fully faithful covenant partner of condemned sinners, that he is indeed “Righteous Father” (John 17:25).

God’s righteousness is fully vindicated by Jesus experience in resurrection. This is how the apostles describe it, “For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One see corruption. 28 You have made known to me the paths of life; you will make me full of gladness with your presence.’” (Acts 2:27), “You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.”” (Heb 1:9). Through supreme love for the righteousness of his Father Jesus has entered into the state of a full covenant partner with God. His pleasure is equal to God’s, for in the plan of salvation his humanity has been elevated to the dignity of deity- Jesus is Lord.

The righteousness of God has been so fully established in Christ that he has received the title, “king of righteousness” (Heb 7:2). With sin and mortality completely removed from his humanity, Jesus, is so intensely united with the life of God that “he always lives….by the power of an indestructible life.” (Heb 7:8, 25, 15-16). It is now impossible that any element of evil, temptation and death could touch the person of Christ. By his own confession he bears the attributes of deity, “17 I am the first and the last, 18 and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore” (Rev 1:17-18).

Fully immersed in the realm of God, Jesus is beyond “the knowledge of good and evil” as experienced by fallen humanity. The terror of the state of guilt, shame and fear has forever been annihilated in the realm of his personal presence. Heaven is not some state or place; it is the home God has established by his righteousness fully indwelling Christ. Heaven is the union Jesus enjoys with his Father.

Resurrection in Us

The apostolic preaching of the gospel focuses on the resurrection (Acts 2:24, 32; 3:15, 26; 4:10; 5:30, 32; 10:40, 41; 13:30-33; 17:31). Paul describes the gospel of God as “concerning his Son… declared to be the Son of God in power …by his resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:3-4). The resurrection establishes Jesus as a covenant partner so faithful that he can only be called “Son of God”. It was God’s own declaration that Jesus is the “Righteous One” (Acts 3:14, 7:52, 22:14). To put it another way, the resurrection of Jesus is his justification by God[4].

Paul expounds this clearly as the fruit of his conversion experience. From the time God “was pleased to reveal his Son in me” (Gal 1:16), the apostle “proclaimed Jesus … saying, “He is the Son of God.”’ (Acts 9:20). His message was “Jesus our Lord, 25 who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.” (Rom 4:25). In Paul’s understand to preach the resurrection of Christ was to proclaim the availability of union with God’s own righteousness in him. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” (2 Cor 5:21). This is the message that “turned the world upside down” (Acts 17:6), for to be as upright as the one true God is either the height of self-righteousness and pure blasphemy or entry into heaven itself!

Paul answers these objections in terms of the role of faith in salvation. “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”” (Rom 1:16-17). The final revelation of God, manifested in Jesus and made known in the gospel, is that the eternal plan of God was that his true covenant partners should live by faith alone. As Jesus was united through his righteousness with the “living Father” (John 6:57) and is “alive forevermore” (Rev 1:17-18), so we are united by grace through faith to the righteousness of Christ and inherit the gift of eternal life (Tit 3:7).

The Last Judgement holds no terrors for the believer, “we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he (Jesus) is so also are we in this world” (1 John 4:17). It has been fully and finally revealed in the gospel that God’s standard of judgement is our beloved Jesus, “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 31 because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”” (Acts 17:30- 31). “In righteousness” Jesus will return “to judge and make war” (Rev 19:11). This is a source not of shame but of hope for the believer. When Paul says, “you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us…righteousness” (1 Cor 1:30), he reminds us that the standard of judgment is Christ who has redeemed us and indwells us. Grasped by this, ,we are free from being controlled by the fears that paralyse human obedience to God.

Knowing “when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” we are deeply motivated to Christ-likeness, “everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.” (1 John 3:2-3). Because we have “the hope of glory” in us (Col 1:27), we cry in union with the martyrs in heaven, ““O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?”” (Rev 6:9). We begin to understand that as righteous in Christ we are “hastening the coming of the day of God” (2 Pet 3:11) through all our sufferings for his kingdom and its righteousness. This means nothing less than that by grace we are treated by God as true covenant partners in everything.

A Vision Lost a Vision Regained

This vision of partnering with God in all the spheres of life has been drastically lost by the Western church. We have filled ourselves with self-righteousness through our numerous programmes, seminars, books, CD’S, DVD’s, songs, church growth teachings. We have lost a vision of the End, the final revelation of the fullness of the righteousness of God in Christ no longer grips us.

Instead of a “hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matt 5:6) we are addicted to materialism and hedonism. Our lack of abiding in the righteousness of God in Christ keeps us in shame[5].

Every lasting revival comes through a rediscovery of the gospel of grace. It is grace that humbles us and causes us to repent from believing that God’s work depends on our righteousness, i.e. our intense prayers, our desperation, our evangelism etc. The vision of the sole righteousness of God in the gospel of Christ is the one thing for which we must pray, and it is a vision that in the End will fill all things[6].

Conclusion

If Christ is in us we are the home of God’s righteousness on earth and in a very real sense that “heaven is in my heart”. As “little heavens”[7] we are called “the salt of the earth”, “the light of the world”, “the aroma of Christ” (Matt 5:13-14; 2 Cor 2:15). These metaphors illuminate for us that the very sensory and tangible dimensions irradiating the righteousness of Christ in the heavenly river and water of life are to find their expression on earth through the church today. The high calling placed upon us by God is to appropriate by faith that through the witness of Christ in all of life, whether at work, home or recreation, disgraced and guilty souls can find the reality of a covenant of eternal grace (Heb 13:20). This is what God started to show me on retreat and it is a message for us all.