True Righteousness

Incredibly important issue in scripture, is this topic of righteousness. The question I will raise and try to answer today is... Is all right doing true righteousness? My belief according to scripture is that it is not. Another extremely important subject that is connected is... Does God view all righteousness the same way we do and does He reward us according to our own balances?

Righteousness is equity of character or act. Simply put, righteousness is our right doing or that which is the result of our right doing. If we were to talk of my righteousness, we would think of the righteous acts or deeds that I had done. There are two righteousnesses in the bible. All righteousness in the bible is separated into our righteousness (our right doing), and God's righteousness (or God's right doing).

Is our righteousness all counted as good by God? I understand that we humans esteem any act of righteousness as good. We assume that all good deeds hold value. The conclusion we will come to, is that God does not put the same value on all righteousness, as we do. In fact, God says in the scripture that He counts our righteousness as filthy rags.

Isa 64:6 ¶ But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags;

That makes no sense. How could God count our right doing as filth? I thought that good was good and bad was bad? How could good deeds be filth? What about the apostle Paul here in Philippians?

Php 3:8 Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ,
Php 3:9 ¶ And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith:

Paul called all His right doing dung. He heaped all his righteousness on a pile, stepped back and called the whole thing a pile of manure. Why? Because as it pertains to your legal standing with God, it is worse than useless. Why you ask? The only righteousness that God truly values, is His own. God's righteousness is the right doing that Jesus Christ did while He was here on earth. That is His righteousness (Jesus being God).

Let's regroup for a moment. God does not value any righteousness that we do in order to increase our standing before Him. We cannot increase our stature or position in His eyes by doing right. We cannot inherit eternal life by doing right. Being a "good person", will not get us into heaven. We are going to look at why that is.

Doing right for our own benefit, God counts as sin. Working for your salvation is sin. Anything not done in faith is sin. All right doing done by an unsaved person, is an affront to God because it is done for purely selfish reasons, and therefore holds no merit or worth to God. It not only is not righteousness, it is sin. This is where the world is fooled. This is where the religious people are fooled. Here a person is, really trying to be good and to do the right thing... But to God it is just filth because it was done selfishly and only for the benefit of the doer.

Here is where the beauty of the gospel and the wisdom of God come in. God gives an undeserving hell bound sinner the free gift of salvation. The sinner suddenly realizes that he deserves hell and eternal judgment but that Jesus died in his place. The sinner perceives the love of God and believes for the first time Jesus died and rose again for him, and suddenly knows that God has saved his soul for eternity! The new born Christian now is free from having to earn eternal life and right standing with God, and joyously lives in this new reality, by faith. Freed from his own righteousness, and freed from believing that he had to do righteousness to gain God's acceptance, he is now free to serve God completely and benevolently (not for his own gain)!

Oh what liberty! How freeing it is to know that eternal life is a sure thing, a bygone conclusion, and to be able to truly serve God with a righteousness that is free from selfishness and now truly honors Him! The grand genius of this salvation is, that God gets all the glory. We were the lost, hell bound sinners and God saved us freely by His grace using ONLY His righteousness! Oh the manifold wisdom of God!