Matthew 5:48 Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. Christ spoke this before many as He preached His sermon on the mount. It is the same call that God gave to Israel in Leviticus stating be Holy as I am Holy, again in Deuteronomy, and Peter states this call in His epistle. Within these scriptures it is clear that true righteousness is within God Himself, it is God, it is inherent in His nature and in order for any to be declared righteous on His terms demands that we be in Him. It is not within man to be righteous, or to do right, it is God alone that can be and do these things and God alone is the standard. When we talk about the righteousness of God it is so important to see that it is only in God, it cannot be replicated, manufactured or even tempered out of man. Understanding this definition of righteousness, we can quickly come to terms with our state of righteousness without God as being nothing short of just plain sin. Jeremiah states it is as filthy rags, which in the Hebrew is using much stronger language denoting just how filthy the rags are before God. We so often act as Israel when Moses went up to get the law, saying we will do it, we will perform all that God demands and we will satisfy God, but when we truly encounter the presence of God and who He is we instantly will stand afar off and want someone else to go in our stead. The same happened before the final conquest of the promise land as Joshua charges the people to keep what was given to them by God through Moses, we will do all that is required. This is the cry of man in sin, we will perform all that you ask, we will satisfy, redeem, and maintain “good works” for God’s sake. The reality is we stand afar off and are crying out for an intercessor as Job cried for one, as Israel watched Moses go up the mountain, and as Israel watched there many “righteous” judges lead them. We will speak as if we have it together but will always act according to what is actually in our hearts, and that is the knowledge of good and evil divorced from the divine understanding of righteousness. We are simply sinners apart from God, and sin is all we will be able to do without the Holy Spirit. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God…

Now understanding that the righteousness of God is within God alone wholly and complete, we now can look at that form of godliness, or the righteousness that is often exalted and glorified by man. In all biblical senses the righteousness of man is sin, no matter how good or how courageous it may appear before us, before God it is sin. Man’s righteousness so often will obtain a status as something gray in between the evil of Satan and the divine good of God, but it is just wretched and in all definitions within the Word it is evil. The result of evil so often can deceive us into thinking that it is of God, but God is a God that trieth the hearts of man, He tries the reigns of our hearts and sees the stain of Sin within man’s heart. God gave us the law to temper this nature and keep sin from utterly destroying the world, which if left without God’s intervention would do just that. Sin is serious, it is fatal as poison, and its work is complete within one act of it. Just as one drop deadly poison will kill, sin in any dosage completely and without exception kills us. The wages of sin is death…but the gift of God is eternal life. Our righteousness is just a fraction of God’s answer to sin, or in another way it is of God but not the complete revelation of what God desires us to have. Anything that is biblically good, really and truly is given by God, the sin in man’s righteousness so often is taking credit for something God originally gave. God gives grace to all men, the common grace; the law tempering our Old sin nature, the righteousness we perform is a result of God’s work. So when someone says the righteousness of man, they are in error in accrediting man of being able to do anything right without God. The moral are made moral by God’s law, the religious are made religious by God’s design Eccl 3:11, and nationality was given by God Gen 8:11. All things that could make a man righteous, even thru our carnal eyes is or was planted by God so the stark reality of “man’s “ righteousness is that it is just a small sapling from God’s common grace to man. Depravity of man is complete, no fraction of God’s provision to come to righteousness(law) can settle the whole account, it was only to draw us to the true and complete solution of the cross of Christ. In conclusion of this, the truth stands that there is none righteous no not one. Man even with the “borrowed righteousness” of God cannot stand completely righteous apart from Christ being formed within. Ecc 7:29 Lo, This only have I found, that God hath made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions…We were made with eternity within our hearts, we were made with a capacity to be righteous, but in the end man has sought out many inventions and our hearts are deceitfully wicked, corrupted completely by the evil taint of Sin. Grace is the solution, a finished work of righteousness is the solution, God Himself is the solution; stay in the loop next week as we unveil the efficacious grace of God, the true and pure righteousness that can be imputed to man and save all from their sin forever!