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The Righteousness of God
By John Gavazzoni
(Suggestion: Either before or after reading this article, take time to thoroughly digest, giving your best grace-imparted attentiveness to the smallest details of chapters 3 and 4 of the Book of Romans as per Jonathan Mitchell's Translation of the New Testament. See link at the bottom for on-line version)
God is right, always right, consistently, unswervingly right. He is the Source of His own rightness. Righteousness as a thing derived is foreign to the Divine Nature. Though all righteousness proceeds from the inside out, righteousness of being that we all have within the Being of God, is derived from the Divine Nature by God giving birth to us. We derive righteousness by spiritual birth, and in our eonian existence, we are restored to that righteousness by being born from above, or born back up again.
Every human being has the Seed of that righteousness within, awaiting that moment, when in God's wisdom and determination, He calls forth from His Seed within us, the beginnings of our part in The One New Man. So let us be clear that with God, His/Her/Their righteousness begins as unbirthed and uncreated. Then, out from that Beginning, God eternally birthed His Son, within Whom all things have their beginning and end. The Son of God is the all-inclusive birthed Origin, Progression, and Destiny of creation.
There is no righteousness except God's righteousness; all else is "as filthy rags." Wherever righteousness is found among men, that righteousness is the righteousness of God at work within the one who by generation, and subsequent "regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit," has been reunited with the Nature of the Family of God, the Family which is God, and this by the shed blood of Jesus Christ, and by His resurrection from the dead.
So all righteousness is relational. There is no such thing as a rightness that stands all alone. Any expositor deserving of a hearing, will include the relational dimension of righteousness. If one is righteous, that means that he/she is rightly related, relationally right first, of course with God, and necessarily also with all of his fellow men.
Thus, a formulation of righteousness as being legally grounded, or even in the remotest sense having anything to do with legality, is a perverse imagination of man. True righteousness is ontological (according to Being), and it is only that righteousness which is afforded the reckoning of God.
Those who insist that an orthodox understanding of righteousness, must begin with men having legal standing before God based upon Him making Himself answerable to the law on our behalf, have a standing all right; it is a standing in opposition to one of the clearest threads of Pauline thought in the New Testament.
The great lie, to which mankind has been subjected, is the lie that God relates to man legally. It is the fallen perception of God as a legalist that is the curse from which Christ delivered us by becoming a curse for us. He descended into the deepest depths of the darkness of that Hades, to lead us who were captives to law, into the captivity of love and grace.
The righteousness of God begins with the rightness of the Son of God's faith in His Father. It is right that the Son should trust the faithfulness of His Father's love, and it is right that the Father's love is such that it evokes such faith from His Son, which faith is the manifestation/display (see Jonathan's translation of Rom. 3 and 4) of the right relationship within the nuclear Family of God. It was THAT righteousness-displaying faith that God reckoned, accounted, logically considered as righteousness to Abraham.
It is the faith which has its origin in Jesus Christ, shared with us in union with Him, that on our behalf, is reckoned for us INTO righteousness, for the path of righteousness, is that path which takes us further and further into His breadth, length, height and depth, and into His love. We are believING into Christ, according to the Greek, and with Him, into the fulness of the love of God.
Western orthodoxy presents God as staking out a position upon the very condition that brought unrighteousness into the world. God does honor the law as given by Moses, but He honors it, according to His purpose, that it should so exacerbate our futility until we are prepared by its instrumentality, to return to our ontological relationship with the Divine Nature.
God, as a demander of perfect behavior, who imposes upon man the necessity of making and carrying out moral and ethical decisions by means of an observance of a moral and ethical code, is a god who is internally related to a codification of righteousness, a cold, impersonal god, and that god, is the no-god, the god who Paul Tillich calls the god of non-being. He is not the One who Jesus called Father. Our God derived humanness, cannot tolerate such a god. To be related to him, is to become torn, fragmented, ripped and shredded souls.
On line version of Jonathan Mitchell's New Testament Translation
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