I am yearning to sink our teeth into
the second of Paul's opening statement that deserves
such a probing that after saying that the
gospel is the power of God unto salvation
to the Jew first, those of the Greek,
for in it the righteousness of God is
revealed through faith, for faith, as it is
written, the one who is righteous will live
by faith.
That the issue of the gospel is the
issue of righteousness and that by it the
righteousness of God is revealed.
And which of us right now could so
much as compose a single statement on what
the righteousness of God is, that waits on
the gospel to reveal it.
The issue of how do we begin to
even move toward the appropriation of the word
holy or holiness, we have not first come
to some elementary consideration of the word righteousness.
Righteousness is almost the key to holiness, the
route to holiness.
If you read today's chapter in Proverbs, chapter
11, it celebrates the righteous man, how the
righteous man is prospered, how the righteous man
is honored.
The word righteous is central to God, the
scepter of righteousness is the scepter of his
kingdom, but what in heaven's name is it?
And Paul is saying the gospel is that
revelation.
So, that deserves another prayer.
Lord, if we stumble over this, if we
lightly dismiss this, we've lost the ball game
even before it's begun to be played.
It's imperative that we understand and cherish what
righteousness is and it may well be that
unless we apprehend it through the gospel, there's
no other way.
And that the gospel is the epitome, the
sum and the substance of righteousness.
So, Lord, we desire to know that word.
We desire to love that word.
We desire to live that word.
And we're asking your blessing afresh now as
we move to the second part of Paul's
remarkable opening statement.
Come Lord and help us with a little
help, we pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.
So I have before me one of the
great commentaries on Romans by John Murray, who
is greatly detailed in explicating every verse.
And you want to hear his statement of
why the Jew first?
So since Paul was the apostle to the
Gentiles and since the church at Rome was
preponderantly Gentile, it is the more significant that
he should have intimidated so expressly and priority
of the priority of the Jew.
So it does not appear sufficient to regard
the priority as merely a matter of time.
The implication appears to be rather that the
power of God into salvation through faith has
primary relevance to the Jew.
And the analogy of scripture would indicate that
this peculiar relevance to the Jew arrives from
the fact that the Jew had been chosen
by God to be the recipient of the
promise of the gospel and that to him
were committed the oracles of God.
Salvation was of the Jews and the lines
of preparation for the full revelation of the
gospel were laid in Israel.
And for that reason, the gospel is preeminently
the gospel for the Jew.
How totally contrary to the current attitude of
Jewry that Christianity is for the Gentiles but
not for Israel.
It is expressly and uniquely first and foremost
for the Jew.
The Gentile is the Johnny come lately.
The Gentile is not the first intended recipient.
But you who are far off without God
and hope in the world through God has
by the blood of the Messiah brought nigh
or near into the hopes and promises and
the covenant of Israel, even into the commonwealth
of Israel.
This is Paul's explanation of a secondary application
of the gospel.
But salvation is of the Jews.
That's why Peter required a trance in order
to be open to even the thought that
what they had received as Jews is now
also to come to Gentiles.
That's a revolutionary, totally unprecedented thought that required
a trance to be communicated by an Orthodox
Jew, Peter, who would not otherwise have ever
gone into Cornelius' house.
An observant Jew does not come into the
house of Gentiles.
It's defiled.
And when God gave me a relationship with
one of these Hasidic Jews years ago in
New Jersey, the whole story.
And when he came to visit me, he
came with a brown paper bag, styrofoam cup
and a plastic spoon.
All he would receive from me in my
house because it was mixed bag with a
Gentile wife was boiling water.
And there he would put his tea bag
and his styrofoam cup and swish it with
his plastic spoon.
But that was as close as he would
come to eating anything from off of my
mixed and defiled table.
You need to know.
So for Peter to come into the house
of Cornelius and speak the message and the
speaking of which the Holy Spirit falls on
Gentiles was an utter astonishment.
And remember the vision of the veil that
came down with unclean animals and God's command,
kill and eat or take and eat.
And Paul's cry even in his trance condition,
Lord, I've never touched anything unclean.
Call not unclean what I have made clean.
And when he wakes to that startling exclamation,
there's someone downstairs at the door, Gentiles from
Cornelius' house asking for Peter to come and
explain to them.
You guys need to know, the church needs
to know that you are secondary.
You're not the first intention, but it's a
grace of God through the blood of the
Messiah to bring you wild branches who are
far off without God and without hope in
the world into the commonwealth of Israel.
Salvation is of the Jews.
You've received a salvation intended for them by
the grace and the mercy of God for
which you need to have in your heart
a gratitude and that you have been grafted
in a tree that is not your own.
Left to your own tree, you'll be fruitless
still.
But the grace of mercy of God having
broken their branches off in unbelief is to
graft you in that you might be fruit
bearing and by your fruit move them to
envy.
Got the idea?
And that you, who should have a greater
faith for their return than you?
Because he was able to graft you in,
who have no natural right even to be
included, that you can sap and draw life
from that root?
How much more then shall they be returned
to their own root?
You ought to have the greatest faith to
believe for their return seeing that you yourself
having no qualification have been brought in.
Think of Paul's apostolic call in Acts 13.
Separate unto me, Paul and Bonibus was it,
for the work unto which I have called
them.
That work is never identified but the believers
hearing from the Holy Spirit that these are
men called forth, prayed and fasted laid hands
upon them so they being sent forth by
the Holy Ghost went.
But where did they go?
In the very first place in that Mediterranean
world they proclaimed the Gospel to the Jew.
So Paul by the natural process of the
Son of God in him was already demonstrating
in his own experience the principle of God
to the Jew first which he later now
expresses pointedly to the Gentile Church of Rome.
But he didn't do it as a principle.
He did it as the natural outworking of
the residency of the Son of God in
him as God's divine desire and love for
the chosen people to the Jew first.
Then seeing in his practice what God repeats
in every community, in every location, he then
formulates as a principle and sets it before
the Roman Church.
But though it's a principle, we don't do
it by principle.
We do it by the same life by
which Paul did it.
See what I mean?
It's wonderful to find in the natural outworking
of the life of God in us a
corroboration and confirmation of God's principles.
But to do it as principle is to
be religious or under obligation I guess I've
got to.
How much more glorious and true is the
thing just issuing from us as I said
about that group of Gentiles in Northern California
where I received the baptism of the Holy
Spirit?
Something issued from them, not as an issue
of obligation, but out of a love which
is the Lord's love for his own people
through them even as Gentiles that so affected
an environment and atmosphere for me that I
was able to receive the baptism of the
Spirit which for a year I had been
seeking with great difficulty and not finding because
I was not in the environment in which
the Spirit was free to so manifest himself.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
Paul is establishing a principle but it's not
a practice to be performed as a principle.
When you reduce the glory of the gospel
to a principle and you're doing it as
a principle you move from faith to religion,
to something that you're humanly performing with God's
intending is what Marlene is touching that as
for Paul so for us something ought to
issue that would express itself in an urgency
and a love for this people that makes
them a first priority and we find ourselves
acting in accordance with the principle but not
because of the principle.
Is that over your heads?
Can you follow that?
That this whole issue of the Jew, his
priority for the church is the righteousness of
God.
I can't even explain myself.
There's something in the heart of God to
the people chosen that are yet a first
priority despite their apostasy and rejection even be
the instruments of his own crucifixion that is
the very demonstration of righteousness.
That's what righteousness is.
Not to neglect or to refuse a consideration
to a people who are the very instruments
of your death but still to hold them
in esteem and as being a first consideration
because of their chosenness, because of their history,
because of their fathers.
That's righteousness.
At least an aspect of an understanding of
what righteousness is.
It's the righteousness of God and when it's
expressed through us it's all the more glorious.
So when it's expressed as the working out
of his life, that's righteous.
If it's expressed as a religious principle under
which we feel a kind of constraint and
obligation and never a joy in doing it,
it's no longer righteous.
It's unrighteous.
We're trying to find why Paul is saying
that the gospel itself is the revelation of
the righteousness of God and I'm thinking and
saying for the first time publicly, going on
record, that it's not the least of the
reasons why it's the righteousness of God is
because it's to the Jew first.
All the more because they are the ones
who stoned the prophets, rejected their own messiah,
were instrumental in his death and yet God
says to the Jew first.
That's righteousness.
Unrighteous would say, well let them suffer.
They had their chance, they blew it, they've
rejected and now it goes to the Gentile
and they're out of the picture.
That would be unrighteous.
That they're yet in the picture with a
foremost destiny that their Zion is to be
the capstone and the spiritual capital of the
world and out of Zion is to go
forth the law and Jerusalem, the word of
the Lord, is a testimony to the glory
and exaltation God yet reserved for that nation
though presently apostate.
If you have an attitude like that and
an interest like that and a jealousy like
that, that's righteousness.
I don't know how to explain it.
That's a righteous attitude because it is so
self-dismissing where a God would have every
right to be offended and snubbed and say
tough on them, they've had their chance and
we would all say yes, that's right because
we're men that are unrighteous.
We would agree quickly.
God is different.
He says though they have blown it and
blown it grievously, they are not dismissed from
my consideration because my love does not require
conditions to be fulfilled in order to be
obtained.
In fact, I'm showing myself as the righteous
God all the more by being to them
what I am despite their indifference and their
undeservedness.
My mercy is my righteousness and unless I
show it to the Jew, I'm not demonstrating
it to the world and if I could
demonstrate to the world through the Jew, who
in the world would be exempt from my
mercy?
Who will say that they're not deserving or
that God passed me by when we see
that he's bestowing to a people who have
been historically virtually his enemy and the instruments
of his crucifixion and yet this mercy is
a first priority.
How then shall we feel ourselves exempt?
That's why this is so critical at the
heart of the matter.
This is the heart of reality itself and
not to dismiss too quickly the issue of
acting out of principle or acting out of
the life of God.
Paul himself as I've already indicated is that
demonstration.
When he proclaimed the Gospel to the Jew
in every place, not because he was under
the obligation of a principle, that principle had
not yet been enunciated.
The principle came out from the experience of
a Paul who was moved by the life
of God to follow the divine logic of
God, yet to the Jew first.
And when you examine 9-11, how does
it begin?
The cry of Paul that he would wish
himself accursed for his brethren's sake.
It's the deepest identification and how does it
end?
The greatest exaltation or the depths of the
riches both of the wisdom of God.
We've seen the mystery of this room.
So when I preach this I say, don't
think that you're dismissed from Paul's cry in
chapter 9 because if you don't begin with
a comparable cry, you'll not end with a
comparable doxology or the depths of the riches.
But on what basis does Paul cry out
at the commencement of chapter 9?
Is it because he's ethnically a Jew himself
that he wishes himself accursed for his brethren's
sake?
Or is this the heart cry of very
God himself who became accursed for his brethren's
sake?
So that Paul's cry is not ethnic but
apostolic.
And if it's apostolic then we have every
right and in fact obligation to be able
to sound that cry ourselves to the degree
that we have that union with God's heart.
He's crying out of a union with God's
heart and it opens the way for the
revelation of the mystery that ends with the
great doxology or the depth of the riches
both of the wisdom and knowledge of God.
So the church is devoid of the mystery
to the same degree as it lacks the
ability to cry out with Paul over the
plight of Jews who are without Christ and
that we are willing for this sacrifice almost
even of our own salvation that they might
be saved.
The righteousness of God is revealed through faith
for faith as it is written the one
who is righteous will live by faith.
What's the conjunction between faith and righteousness expressed
in the initial statement of Paul that sounds
the great dun dun dun dun dun dun
dun dun.
These are the great opening themes of the
rhapsodic message of Romans and in it is
the word faith inserted in conjunction with the
word righteousness.
Any clue can righteousness be understood, revealed, received
or expressed independent of faith and if the
message itself is the power of God unto
salvation what does that power perform?
But what the power performs is to create
faith.
Faith comes by the word and the hearing
of the word.
The sent word, the apostolic word in Romans
10 how shall they call upon him of
whom they've not believed except one preach.
Let's look at that.
Somebody read that in Romans 10.
Paul says how shall they believe in them
of whom they've not heard and how shall
they hear except one preach and how shall
they preach except one be sent for faith
comes by hearing and hearing by the word
of God so that the issue of the
righteousness of God can only be apprehended by
faith and not by mental gymnastics or logic
or the exercise of intellect or cerebral ability
or that would dismiss the possibility for salvation
for the great multitude of mankind and make
it only the privileged experience of a select
few.
But the issue of salvation is without partiality
so then the apprehension of the message unto
salvation has got to be exclusively by faith
and that not of yourself it is a
gift lest any man boast.
See the whole remarkable thing is established in
terms that are righteous because if it was
partial and just an exclusive prerogative of those
who have the ability oh now I see
what God is saying I think I'll believe
that.
Then it would dismiss the great mankind but
if it's an issue of faith which is
given as a grace and order to receive
and that the word itself creates that faith
then God is altogether righteous in the way
in which he presents salvation to mankind.
Got the picture?
The gospel is the statement of God's righteousness
not only its content but its mode of
delivery and the means by which it is
received as salvation.
It's remarkable and without that revelation how can
anyone know in fact what righteousness is as
this is the most unique and monumental statement
not just as an elaboration of a word
but as a demonstration of a power unto
salvation to the utmost to everyone who believes
to the Jew first but also to the
Greek.
Not to the Jew first because of his
intellect but because of his believing but what's
the basis for his believing?
The word itself that was sent and is
apostolically proclaimed in power to create faith to
believe a message that is otherwise totally offensive
to human consideration and would be rejected if
it had to be considered on the basis
of our minds.
So the gospel is so to speak enacted
in the gospels but the exposition and the
articulation of the gospel and its implications comes
with the apostles and that God who suffered
the death and was raised by it entrusts
the exposition to those who follow him especially
Paul on what basis that the same life
of Christ now is functioning through a man
who says for me to live is Christ
and therefore it's the Lord continuing to explain
himself through the apostle in things that waited
for his resurrection and could not be taken
up before it.
Got the idea?
And in that act of generosity to the
Gentiles what is revealed?
The righteousness of God.
Where do you guys figure in?
By what right?
What was your qualification?
You were drinking beer out of skulls as
Simon has heard me say a thousand times
and fornicating like jack rabbits.
You had no distinction that deserved the consideration
of God but his righteousness extended his mercy
to those who were without God and without
hope in the world through the blood of
Israel's Messiah and grafting you into their tree.
That very act and that consideration is the
righteousness of God.
That's what righteousness is.
Righteousness is magnanimity and generosity and love and
extension of remarkable grace to the undeserving.
So then if that's what righteousness is of
what shall our righteousness consist?
You think God is giving us an exposition
of righteousness that we can be clever at
the next coffee table discussion or is he
giving us an exposition of righteousness that we
ourselves might be righteous and act in the
same way in the issues that are before
us that require our magnanimity, our generosity, our
grace, our forgiveness.
We've got to love righteousness and where do
we learn to love it?
When we see it as revealed in the
gospel from faith to faith.
Even that phrase from faith to faith maybe
even could be expressed to the degree of
faith.
To whatever measure of faith you have to
that degree you understand the righteousness of God.
As your faith increases your understanding will increase
but you'll never exhaust the genius of God
in righteousness and exploring the reality of the
gospel.
It's there, it's contained in the dynamic of
that historic episode of a son sent to
suffer and die and be raised again by
the power and the glory of God the
Father and establish forever the atonement of all
mankind.
We're facing the most formidable opponent because the
gospel, Paul even says in Romans, they are
the enemies of the gospel for your sake.
Why?
Because they're so formidable it compels you to
come to a place in God adequate to
meeting that formidable challenge and therefore the grace
of the Holy Spirit is probably the primary
provision of God in that encounter.
There is a real conjunction between the spirit
poured out from heaven and the commandment of
the Lord through his church.
All authority is given me in heaven and
earth.
Go ye therefore into all the world.
Preach this gospel of a creature beginning at
Jerusalem.
The place where I was crucified, the place
where the prophets were stoned, there you begin.
You don't first try it out and see
if it works in the boondocks.
Go to Bemidji first and then from there
you can go to New York.
No, you go to New York.
Begin where the opposition will be the severest
but I've given you every grace with the
fullness of my spirit that is not a
Pentecostal luxury.
It's an endowment for power and ability and
that mandate that I'm giving you that you
cannot fulfill on the basis of your own
religiosity and well meaning intention.
You can only fulfill it on the basis
of me.
Yeah, I did.
The night of my baptism, I'll always remember
driving back from Northern California to Oakland where
I was a teacher.
We came alongside another car for a few
moments and it was occupied by two black
men.
I'll always remember the image.
There was a pack of Marlboro cigarettes on
the dashboard and these two men were chatting
with me and I just looked like this
for a moment and a wave of compassion
came over me for these men.
What they represented, what the Marlboro cigarettes represented,
their lostness, their alienation from God, what it
means to be black in our world today.
Like a wave of something that came with
that baptism.
The second thing that I observed and is
factual to this day is the spirit of
revelation and the word.
That the word just opens.
Today's psalm, whatever it is, there's something operating
of a revelatory kind that came with that
baptism that was not operative before.
And who knows the other benefits?
I talked about speaking at universities.
It began at the University of Illinois at
Champaign where I was for seven days the
principal speaker and they put up these stickers
all over the campus, cats is coming, as
one word, no space in between.
And when I came and I arrived and
I saw that, I was terrified that I'm
the guy.
But what God did in those days was
awesome.
One meeting in particular, I was, the meeting,
four to six meetings a day.
I was spent, I was exhausted, my brain
was numb, I couldn't think of my own
name and I'm being taken by the hand
from the philosophy class to a Jewish fraternity
house or another classroom or wherever it is
that they have arranged the meeting.
And I'm praying in the spirit under my
breath.
In the few minutes I'm going from this
commitment to the next.
When I come to the next commitment, devoid
of any thought of what to speak, and
I open my mouth, there's a profusion of
spirit and activated words that engage, if not
antagonize my hearers.
And into that atmosphere comes this Vietnamese veteran
cracked out on drugs and falls to the
ground, to the floor, and listens as the
students then began to oppose me after I
finished my little message, questions and answers.
And he gets up and he says, what
are you guys doing?
He said, opposing this man.
Can't you see that he said that God
is here?
That man, Tom Bloomer, is today one of
the leaders of Youth with a Mission in
Lausanne, Switzerland, who arranged the program by which
for five days I spoke on the subject
of apostolic foundations.
The book that we have today, now in
German and Bulgarian and one day in other
languages, remarkable in its richness, had its first
expression from Tom Bloomer in Lausanne, who was
saved at that meeting and went on to
the remarkable position that he occupies today.
And I would say, if I had not
spoken in tongues under my breath, being taken
from the one meeting to that meeting, he
would have heard and received something less compelling
and it may have been the issue of
his salvation.
There's no way to exaggerate the importance of
the baptism of the Spirit and the remarkable
refillings and renewings in its power as often
as we will give God our voice and
faith in the language which he has given
by which the Spirit itself is carried and
renewed through our being.
And the issue of the Jew makes that
prominent.
It's interesting that I was called out of
the teaching profession to be taken into a
mission to the Jews that was Baptistic in
its origin and to this day.
And after four years I was forced out
of that organization by those members who resented
the fact that I was the only Pentecostal
missionary in that organization.
And the only reason I was was because
Moshe Rosen wanted to tap the resources of
the Pentecostal churches and knew that the mission
needed to have at least one man in
its midst who was a recognized Pentecostal.
And that mission today continues but with very
little fruit.
In fact, Jewish missions are one of the
patent failures of missionary endeavor in the world
and their fruit is always the peripheral Jew.
More Jews are saved independent of the church
let alone missions than by missions because they
still are at a distance from this reality
of the baptism of the Holy Spirit which
they have set aside as being the distinctive
only of Pentecostals or Charismatics and don't see
their own need.
In light of this revelation as a
barometer for what righteousness we're acting out of
because self-righteousness will love
them and will show them heart.
What a paradox to come to the Jews
on the same basis by which Jews themselves
subsist, namely their own self-righteousness.
Only we come out of the Christian form
of it.
Now we have got to come to them
from heaven.
We have got to represent the antithesis of
all to which they subscribe, which they dismiss
as patent foolishness and absurdity and weakness.
But in that weakness God's strength is revealed
from faith to faith.
I can't help but backing up into verse
16 again.
For I am not ashamed of the gospel
for it is the...
The gospel itself is the death blow to
the old man.
It should be the true gospel, but it
hasn't been in our experience.
But it should be the death blow to
the old man.
So the power of God is weakness and
foolishness.
And that is the thing that reveals righteousness
and that brings us from faith to faith,
leading on continually to faith.
That's the essence of our salvation.
It's the power and the weakness that comes
in Christ living in us.
Which is the death blow to the old
man.
We mustn't neglect the aspect of salvation that
was celebrated by a Swedish theologian in a
book called Christus Victus, Christ the victor.
That the principle heart of the gospel is
not only the salvation of men, but the
defeat of the powers of darkness.
Because at the cross Jesus made of them
an open, how does it go?
Spectacle, and disarmed them.
So that the defeat to the enemy, to
the devil, he says I've come to destroy
the works of the devil.
Now has the judgment come.
Now will the prince of this world be
confronted.
So there's a cosmic dimension to the gospel
that needs to be considered and not forgotten
that in it the powers of darkness are
dealt with and their wisdom is contradicted.
Which celebrates power, prestige, wealth and all these
things and it's met and defeated by the
foolishness of the weakness by which Jesus was
crucified.
He was crucified in weakness and yet in
that crucifixion the powers were defeated.
That's why Paul says in 1 Corinthians had
they known they would not have crucified the
lord of glory.
They would not have earned their own defeat
by what they thought they were eliminating.
Because in exercising their wisdom which is power
and force unto death, they brought a necessary
death that eventuated in a resurrection and the
atonement of all mankind and the final and
utter defeat to the church birthed through that
atonement.
So this, what's involved in that wisdom of
God is manifold.
That's why we're taking it apart, we're trying
to examine.
In it is the wisdom of God revealed
from faith to faith and we're even growing
in faith today by the word and the
exposition to show the ramifications of what is
in this single episode that is the only
great moment in the whole of world history,
the crucifixion of Jesus, the son of God
sent for that purpose.
Think of the whole basic thing.
God is visiting a ruined creation through the
fall.
A terrible tragedy has taken place with Adam's
fall.
The whole of creation has been submitted over
to the evil one and suffers now defilement
and corruption.
And God now is addressing that lost cosmos
by the sending of his son and effecting
a redemption through his blood.
How righteous of God even to give his
creation a second thought after it has blown
it and disfigured the glory of what he
had given at the first.
But instead of allowing them to wallow in
that corruption and defilement which is Adamic and
unavoidable, he sends a second Adam who is
his own son and very God himself to
bear the righteous requirement of its redemption through
a life given over unto death.
That willingness and that jealousy over his own
creation and the lengths to which he will
go to redeem it is a statement of
the righteousness of God.
What a righteous God we have who will
not abandon us to our own Adamic fall
to which we are all given and all
have subscribed and all are guilty.
So without qualification, why were we yet sinners?
God loved us.
He didn't wait for something from us.
He took the initiative.
Why were we yet sinners?
To set in motion our redemption at the
cost of himself.
And last night I was reading where the
writer says, what did it cost the father?
Jesus we know suffered, but did the father
suffer or was he looking down from a
kind of Olympian height and a kind of
neutrality and saying too bad, but my son
has got to go through this.
There's no shortcut.
Or was he suffering a grief?
And so the writer says he was suffering
divine grief that was accentuated at the point
where his son cried out, my God, my
God, why hast thou forsaken me?
And everything in his father's heart would have
yearned to be with his son and at
his side and save him from that abandonment,
but he could not.
It was necessary in the very process of
atonement that Jesus bears sin and know that
sin alienates from God and that the forsakenness
was part of that experience.
But the grief that a father bears, picture
your own kids crying out to you, dad,
I'm suffering from something from which you can
extricate me, help me now and you cannot.
And your heart is torn by every fatherly
impulse of love to extend that aid, but
to extend it is to defeat the greater
purpose for your son and the purpose through
your son.
So you bear the grief.
So the father is not exempt from the
suffering of the cross.
He so to speak is crucified with his
son.
That's righteousness you guys.
I like a God like that.
This is not a God who sent his
son to do the dirty work and he'll
wait for him to return.
This is a God who's with his son
in that sending.
What did it cost the father to send
his son?
He's not sending him off to college and
here's your allowance.
I'll see you in the spring break.
I'm sending you into this vile world that
hates me.
I'm sending you into a fallen world and
you're going to be its victim ultimately.
You're going to be rejected even by my
chosen.
You're going to suffer indignity and at the
hands of men, unbelievable travesty and violence.
I'm sending you.
You think that God could send his son
like that without a sense of grief, without
a sense of loss, without a sense of
the brokenness of a relationship that they've enjoyed
together since time immemorial that has now to
be ruptured because the son must be sent
into the world.
We have not calculated what it has cost
God to establish his so great redemption, but
every aspect of that cost and his willingness
to bear it is the statement of the
righteousness of God.
Our God is righteous.
This is what righteousness is and we would
not have seen it if he had not
performed it.
And we'll see it to the degree of
our faith, from faith to faith.
And even that is a grace that we
can see it.
So let me read the work of a
theologian who's pondering all this.
The reason that the gospel is revealed a
righteousness of God needs to be observed.
How the concepts originate even from the Old
Testament itself because there we find the conjunction
of salvation and righteousness again and again.
Oh, sing unto the Lord a song.
His right hand is holding on, hath brought
salvation for him.
The Lord has made known his salvation.
His righteousness hath he openly showed in the
sight of the nations.
Psalm 98.
Isaiah 46, I will bring near my righteousness,
you shall not be far off, and my
salvation shall not tarry.
I will place salvation in Zion for Israel
my glory.
Isaiah 51, my righteousness is near, my salvation
has gone forth.
My salvation shall be forever, my righteousness shall
not be abolished.
My righteousness shall be forever and my salvation
from generation to generation.
So again and again in the Old Testament
there's a remarkable conjunction between righteousness and salvation
to the point where you can almost say
righteousness is salvation and salvation is righteousness.
God rarely ever refers to salvation independent of
the word righteousness.
But because what is salvation in the last
analysis?
It brings to the unrighteous the righteousness of
God.
That we who knew no sin, that he
who knew no sin became sin, that we
who did not know the righteousness of God
could become the righteousness of God.
Salvation is becoming the righteousness of God and
what a righteousness that is.
Where else would Kit Kat's be today without
it?
I'd be dead long ago or I'd be
I don't know what.
I only want to consider the possibilities.
I'm saved by the righteousness of God for
righteousness.
It's a gift and there's a difference between
God's righteousness and human righteousness because the Jew
was unwilling to relinquish his human and religious
righteousness to receive the righteousness which is of
God.
It's not an issue of a degree, it's
an issue of a kind.
The righteousness of God is other than the
righteousness of man.
God's concern is not only against evil and
wickedness, it's against righteousness of man which in
the last analysis is wicked.
How do you know that Katz?
Because the righteousness of man crucified Christ.
Who are the instrumentalities?
Roman law, Lexus, what is it?
Romanus.
The law of Rome was the foundation of
order in the ancient world.
Roman law, the jurisdiction, the concepts even are
active today in our own legal practices.
In conjunction with whom?
The religion of Israel.
The highest form of monotheism.
It is most liturgical and sacramental beauty were
the joined forces that conspired together to execute
the Lord of Glory and to destroy the
righteousness of God and the keeping of their
own righteousness.
Men will kill to preserve their own righteousness.
Is that remarkable?
So do we esteem the righteousness of God
or are we more Jewish than we know?
Are we more Judaic than we know that
we've allowed the righteousness of God to lapse
in our consciousness and that we have more
and more moved in a religious way into
a righteousness of our own which is no
longer the righteousness of God but a religious
counterfeit very much like Judaism while we're yet
Christians.
Do you love the righteousness of God so
much as to dismiss your own?
Why is that an issue for you as
well as for the Jew?
Because self-righteousness is the foundation of self
-esteem.
We want to be recognized for our merit
and that which we perform and of what
we are capable but to be emptied of
those distinctions and all that we have as
barren nothings who are mere as dust is
what God imputes by faith.
Who's willing for that?
And what if he doesn't impute?
What if your face is sticking out at
a critical moment and you have nothing to
say and are able to do because you
have covenanted with God that you would not
again return to the pitiful rags of your
own self-life and he's taking you at
your word and here comes a crisis situation
where you're facing a rabbi or your own
Jewish kinsmen or black Africans and if God
be not God and there's no resurrection you
are most to be pitied.
To trust God for his resurrection power and
word is to trust God for his righteousness
and to be righteousness in your trust.
Got the idea?
This righteousness is not a little flaky issue.
It's a current moment by moment issue whether
we will abide in the righteousness of God
and be blameless before him which is why
he said to Abraham, Abram walk thou before
me and be thou blameless I'm God Almighty.
And I've said this before many times.
Why does the conjunction of the command to
walk and be blameless and be righteous and
I'm God Almighty?
Because the only basis upon which you can't
be blameless is upon me.
Not on your own Abrahamic life you dear
sap because on that basis you went down
to Egypt and offered your wife up as
a piece of entertainment for the court.
An object of their Egyptian lust.
You big shot.
You father of faith.
So I'm imputing righteousness to you because you
have none and you're the father of that
faith for many who will have it as
you have obtained it.
My faith as it is imputed by the
God who is alone righteous.
Have you guys come to this ground or
you're still fighting, kicking against the pricks wanting
to establish yourself on the basis of your
own righteousness, your own performance, your own ability.
So why did Jesus say to put to
John the Baptist who denied him and was
astonished that he should request baptism where he
needs, I need more to be baptized into
him because it fulfills all righteousness.
That word comes up again.
Why?
So that Jesus would go into the muck
of that river and be established in identification
himself as if he were himself a sinner
with his nation or he cannot be to
them a priest and a savior.
Righteousness required his immersion in their guilt and
sin.
That's righteousness.
And when the father saw that, he said,
Oh, this is my beloved son.
This is my boy.
He's really shown me forth.
This, this is what I am as God,
but I could never persuade men about it
until my son himself actually demonstrates it.
That's why what he does is righteousness.
That's why the gospel is righteousness.
What Jesus explicated and performed at the cross
is righteousness and that's the gospel.
And how shall we be in eternal fellowship
with him except that we share his nature
which is righteous.
So that's a salvation to the uttermost and
a preparation for an eternal fellowship with a
God who abides in that character because that's
what he is in himself.
The righteousness of God is not an affectation.
It's not a put on.
It's not a punctuation.
It's what he is in himself.
That's why I'm so grateful for this God.
We could have had any kind of tyrant
for God and we would have had no
choice in the matter.
But what we got miraculously is a God
who's righteous and has demonstrated that at great
cost to himself.
And his righteousness is his continuing patience with
us.
With sons who are sluggish, who are not
active, who will not thank him, who will
not praise him, who will drift and coast
and not come into the active appropriation of
their call.
A church that has not been obedient to
his mandate though he has said to the
Jew first and we have historically circumvented him
and turned away from that obligation.
And there's a God who's yet there, yet
patient, yet pressing, yet faithful, and will have
his church at the end.
He's righteous in everything.
He's remarkable.
How else should we have known it?
If we don't know the righteousness of God,
we'll only know the righteousness of the Pharisee,
which is self-righteousness, which is self-serving.
And when you get to the heart of
it, however altruistic it may seem at its
place and philanthropic, it's self-serving.
It's for man, his gratification.
Men would recognize him, compliment him, but the
righteousness of God is not in any way
clouded or contradicted or compromised by any such
consideration.
It is always totally for the consideration of
the other.
Nothing that redounds to God that he needs
to be exalted in his ego.
That's righteousness.
A righteousness that is pure from self-interest.
Otherwise, the other kind of righteousness, however zealous,
will bring you to the place of a
persecutor and a murderer, which was what Saul
himself became before he became Paul.
Saul is the epitome of religious self-righteousness
brought to its final point of expression, where
it finds itself opposing God and killing, in
God's name, God's own people, so that when
he's confronted by the risen Lord, the statement
is, Saul, Saul, why for persecutest thou me?
So that the man in one stunning, blinding
moment, that in fact leaves him blind and
as good as dead for three days before
a simple St. Lance lays hands upon him,
recognizes that his zeal, his righteous religious zeal,
the logic and the ultimate end of it,
was to be a murderer against God's own
people, which is to say against God himself.
That's the end of human right.
And Paul hath of eat it to the
end.
Have you known the joy of righteousness?
Have you ever experienced the exhilarating delight of
being righteous in God, of the righteousness of
God?
Have you ever been clean through the whole
cookie?
Have you ever had a conscience undefiled before
God and before man?
Have you ever been pure from taint and
from sin and the blood has abolished and
you're walking consistently in the life of God
and in his righteousness and tasted that as
joy?
I can't say that this is my every
moment, but I can say that in the
few moments that have come to me, it
has always been accompanied by a sense of
such joy, such inward exhilaration, such delight that
you would not exchange that for anything.
Let the most luscious babe cross your path
and offer herself at abandon.
You're completely indifferent.
Nothing, no temptation can begin to move you
once you have tasted the joy of the
righteousness of God.
That's an incentive to keep in that righteousness.
And I would suspect that the fallenness of
our ministers, which is of plague proportions, is
that they have not known it and have
not known the gospel and have only superficially
been inducted in the few catchwords pertaining to
it and therefore made themselves candidates for temptation
and falling from which alone the righteousness of
God and the joy of that righteousness would
have kept them.
To look at the righteousness of God, who
will not give us a blessing that is
just a superficial feeling and a motive kind
of thing, but roots his blessing in righteousness
for our sake.
That we would not be pacified by some
transient little catch thing, but that we would
be impelled to find our blessedness in his
righteousness.
And so this is the love of a
father who's not willing for a cheapy alternative,
but however long the process takes, he's insistent
on the real thing.
He's insistent on his righteousness and will give
us every encouragement to attain it, but will
not divert us by a cheapy substitute, which
he could give.
And the way we give as fathers, here's
an allowance, here's to your wife, go buy
a hat, go to the movies, but we
won't deal with the issue that really needs
to be faced that's painful and that will
really bring peace, righteousness and joy.
Because we have not the heart of a
father and we want an easy out that
relieves the momentary tension of the difficulty that
we can buy off with a few bucks
or a little gesture and an easy thing.
God is not that kind of God and
his truth and redemption is real and he
insists on it and we praise God for
that.
What is our worship if it is not
the thing that issues from us out of
the joy of the righteousness, which is the
gift of God by faith?
What is our worship that affects a joy
that does not have this as its nexus
and auspices, but a soulish counterfeit that we
can obtain through musicality and voices?
That's the kind of that's unrighteous, that's unrighteous
worship, which is more the affecting of an
atmosphere for our enjoyment than giving God his
due in our gratitude for the gift of
righteousness.
It would be unrighteous for us to pursue
that and to dispossess God from the thing,
the real thing out of which worship should
issue, which is the current practice of the
church today grievously and celebrated for that reason
that they have the better worship.
What they mean is the better music, but
worship that doesn't issue out from righteousness and
joy and the gratitude for its gift is
not a true acknowledgement to the Lord.
So you see the implications of righteousness in
the church's very practices that needs to be
corrected by someone coming in prophetic authority and
voice and blowing the whistle against a fraudulent
counterfeit and shutting it off and waiting for
the true thing that issues only out of
righteousness.
And that very prophetic interjection is itself righteous,
though it will not be misunderstood and will
be dismissed as being unrighteous, as disturbing the
program.
So the issue of righteousness is before us
because the joy of the Lord is our
strength, but it's not a fictitious joy.
It's a joy of a unique kind that
issues out of this kingdom reality.
So may we be jealous because of the
instruction of today for that righteousness and its
implications, which is also our strength and our
power.
For the joy of the Lord is our
strength, but it's the joy of the Lord
that comes from the righteousness of the Lord.
In fact, what does not come from the
Lord and any setting of the Lord aside
by any self-initiated thing of ourselves is
unrighteous in the face of a God who
is righteous in his giving.
He who gave us his son, will he
not give us all things through him?
What will he withhold from us who has
already given us his son in atonement?
He'll give us all things that pertain to
godliness of the life.
For us to void that and to initiate
something out of ourselves as substitute like worship
is unrighteous, robs us of joy, robs us
of strength, robs us of witness, and leaves
the Jews in their present condition totally unchallenged
for which God waits for they are at
the heart of the kingdom promised them.
God has set a standard.
He himself is that standard.
For us to elaborate a human standard based
on our ethical premises or subjective experience is
the height of unrighteousness and that's exactly what
Judaism is.
Contemptuous of the goyim, the gentiles who don't
have their practices and follow the fastidious requirements
of the law.
See what I mean?
And look down with contempt and disdain.
Why does it wait for us to be
prostitutes or drug dealers or tax collectors to
come to that acknowledgement?
Why aren't we all equally as grateful for
so great salvation that has brought us up
out of the mire as those whose sin
is so ostensible and conspicuous?
You know why?
Because we don't think we're that bad.
We don't really believe that our sin is
saved by grace and that our sin is
as grievous as a righteous man as the
prostitute or the gambler or the drunkard.
We have not the concept of sin which
will be our soon subject maybe even tomorrow
without which righteousness does not really obtain distinction.
So these are the foundations that need to
be restored or laid.
We have not the knowledge of sin apostolically
as being the exceeding sinfulness of sin that
we might with gratitude understand the exceeding righteousness
of God that has saved us out of
that condition and continues to save by being
our righteousness.
So let's thank the Lord.
We're on a remarkable symphonic thing here that
God is sounding and we need to pause
and give him praise for this much.
Amen.
So Lord thank you Lord.
As you go on my God we're getting
some sneaky suspicion about our unrighteousness even as
Christians.
So my God receive our gratitude Lord.
You're so good.
Thank you my God for your righteous answer
to a despairing servant of which we have
all been beneficiaries.
Thank you my God and may we all
be encouraged for we will have moments like
that in which there's a sense of abandonment
and despair and a sense of defeat and
the dampening of our hearts and the heaviness
my God that is unbearable which will allow
us to suffer because out of that suffering
issues of glory and we've seen the portion
of it today and we thank you and
give you the praise and glory in Jesus
name.