Nielsen’s Nook

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Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII

IV. Christ-the Essential Description of Righteousness

So we are faced with the fact that God has spoken definitively in His Law, in His word. We are ourselves subject to the same self-deception and self-righteousness of the Pharisees. And here is God’s Incarnate Son explaining to his hearers that they do not rightly understand the Law. If we care about discipleship, this should be alarming. If those most zealous for keeping the Law of God can not only go so far off course but also lead countless numbers of people with them, how do we reckon that we will not find the same in our own lives?

“Our Lord has not come to make it easier for us or to make it in any way less stringent in keeping [the Law’s] demands upon us. His purpose in coming was to enable us to keep the Law not to abrogate it.” ~ D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, Sermon on the Mount, p. 174-75.

To ask what the role of righteousness is in the believer should be to ask what the role of Christ is in the life of the believer.

If you are one who struggles with self-righteousness (and we all do), the answer is not for me to preach to you that you must stop being self-righteous. No, that is only preaching a different flavor of the same prescriptive parsimony – a variation on the same wretched theme. What Christ is offering is far more abundant! It is a liberal outpouring of nothing less than the totality of God Himself. What the self-righteous need is the gospel in which the impoverished are made rich in Christ. Our appetite for cheap imitation is then swallowed up by a hunger and thirst for the Righteous One. As we abide in Christ we bear the fruits of Christ, which is nothing short of an ongoing miraculous work of God in our lives. We are called to greater things than spiritual forms of Russian roulette.

One of the dangers in trying to blog about things like suffering or sanctification (i.e., the process of a Christian becoming more and more like Christ) is that given the very limited space there is a temptation either on my part to give a pithy post or for you, the reader, to think you will find a simple answer about things that do not by their nature lend themselves to simple or pithy approaches.

My pastor, Skip Ryan, used the following illustration last week in our order of worship, which I found very helpful in grasping some of the pathos and psychology involved in growing up in Christ.

As we grow in Christ, we become aware of two things with respect to our discussion here. First, we grow in our awareness of the holiness of our Triune God, it is a holiness that is full of awe for us. At the same time, we become increasingly aware that we are distinctly not like God in this respect. In fact, some of the most mature Christians are those who are painfully aware of the great incongruity that exists between God and us.

The thing that often happens is that as we grow in our awareness of God’s holiness and our sinfulness, our knowledge of Christ and the salvation that he brings us in Himself somehow stays stagnant, a stale proposition caught between the cogs of rationality and logic. While rationality and logic and propositions are absolutely essential to Christianity, they are easily exhausted and surpassed when the subject matter is the Triune God and His saving works on behalf of His people. To put it another way, our apprehension of Christ does not grow proportionately with the awareness of God’s holiness and our sinfulness.

So why does the Cross remain locked away, increasingly just a proposition of the mind? Part of the answer to this question would seem to lie in the fact that Christ beacons us to come and die with Him and we avoid suffering with all that we are. In other words, Christ will have himself found in suffering. When we avoid it, we should not be surprised that we do not find Christ, and that the Cross – the pinnacle of suffering and glory – is reduced and diminished into the void of propositions.

“Christ died for the sins of the world”. That is not only a proposition, but a redemptive historical matter of fact. He who bled the ground red at Gethsemane anticipating the blood he would finally shed upon the Cross outside Jerusalem is redeeming and has redeemed even suffering. That does not mean that you should just quote a Bible verse when all Hell breaks loose in your life. It does mean that the God who created and is recreating the world is in the midst of that chaos. The God whose Spirit hovered over this world when it lie formless and void in chaos, that One spoke and life and order emerged.

That God, our Lord Jesus, speaks now into the formlessness and voids of our own lives with the full undeniable purpose of transforming and renewing us into the unblemished likeness of our Maker. He is able, even to give us hope in hopelessness, light when our eyes would seem as though they were gouged from our heads. He loves this world that much. May we move towards Him as His people in the chaos to find that He wields not a battle-axe but a scalpel towards us.

All things are of God, through Him, and unto Him. Hence our soul can rest in it with unperturbed certainty. It is God’s will, his eternal, independent, and immutable will, that in the church [humanity] be restored and saved. We are convinced of this comfort of election even more when we remember that the counsel of God is a work of His mind not merely, but also of His will, is not a thought merely which belongs to the realm of eternity but also an almighty power which realizes itself in time. So it is with all God’s excellences and perfections: they are not passive, silent attributes, but are almighty powers, full of life and action.

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Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII

C. Christ Our Righteousness (Mt 5:17-19)

So far we have said that one must have righteousness that abundantly surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. We have also found that the nature of this righteousness is essential, relating to the core of our beings. Further, we considered that the Law of God has always been a description of righteousness to which humanity as God’s image is to emulate as salt is salty and light is lumi-nous. Finally, we have said that while the Law of God has always been concerned with the heart, it lacks the power (as the Apostle Paul teaches us) to circumcise our corrupted hearts.

Matthew 5:17-19 (ESV) 17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is ac-complished. 19 Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”

Jesus as the Fulfillment and Goal of God’s Law

Jesus begins this section following his description of Kingdom citizens with an imperative that his hearers not think that he had come to destroy the Law. This presents us with a distinct challenge. Apparently, Jesus anticipated that his teaching on His Father’s Law would sound to his hearers as if he was going against everything that they knew to be true about the Law. This is often the case when Jesus invades our lives is it not. We find that he challenges all that we know to be true about re-ligion and all of life.

A Misunderstanding the Purpose of the Law

By saying that he did not come to destroy the Law but to fulfill it, Jesus is cluing us in that perhaps his hearers did not understand the Law as they thought they did. Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law. Paul tells us that the Law was given as a tutor to point us to God. The Law reveals to us the righteousness of God that is alien to us. Jesus comes and ful-fills this Law from the heart perfectly.

The Law Exposes Us as Idolaters

Second-rate obedience will never save us. That is what the Ser-mon on the Mount is all about. Israel had settled for second-rate. They had redefined the Law so that it might be fulfilled in terms of outward appearance. God’s interest in their hearts, in the core and totality of who they were, had been swept away as prescriptive parsimony.

I thought I would let those of you who read and post on this blog or others in Google’s blogsphere that Google has a nice new toolbar for Microsoft Word for Windows (2000 or later). You can compose in Word and publish from Word without even opening your browser. Imagine all the publishing benefits you get that way (e.g., auto-spell-check, macros)! Anyway you can download it for yourself.

View Other Posts in this Series:
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII

B. Essential Righteousness (Mt 5:13-16)

The connecting thoughts between the Beatitudes and Jesus’ staggering statement about righteousness in Matt. 5:20 are the rest of the passage we are considering together. He begins by using two metaphors to explain the nature of true righteousness - righteousness that actually corresponds to the righteous standard of his Father - the righteousness that abundantly surpasses that of the Scribes and Pharisees.

1. Statements of Essence Mt. 5:13-16

Matt. 5:13-16 (ESV) 13 “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. 14 “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

Jesus is making a descriptive statement about citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven. Just as salt in and of itself is salty, so Kingdom citizens have certain innate properties as Kingdom citizens, matters of fact, for those who are His subjects.

In other words, if you saw a white grainy substance on a table and when you tasted it you found that it was sweet, you would not conclude that the substance on the table was salt - even if it was in a saltshaker! You would make these conclusions because there are certain properties that salt has simply because it is salt. The same is true for light. Jesus is making statements of essence, describing a Kingdom citizen at their most basic level.

2. Two Approaches to Righteousness

There is a continuum of responses we can give to Jesus’ teaching on righteousness at this point. On the one hand, we can either cry out to God because we see that we are immeasurably poor in spirit, unable to bring about the essential heart change that the Law required. Or on the other hand, we can work to redefine the Law of God, to say in effect, “Define Righteousness” as if it were somehow ambiguous or vague.

The former is a description of one who has been converted by the gracious and saving power of God’s transforming Spirit. The latter is a Pharisee, who would reduce righteousness to their own subjective rules of preference; thereby contorting God’s uncreated righteous standard to the perverted standards of their own created imaginations.