Unrighteousness

“All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away” (Isaiah 64:6).

George Sweeting said that there are some words which were coined just for usage in heaven, and that’s true–words which are meaningful to believers but honestly don’t make much sense to those living outside the kingdom of God.   But as you read the New Testament, you stumble across those words, asking yourself, “What does that mean?”  Such is the word righteous or righteousness.  Modern translations attempt to give us a modern equivalent, thereby often missing a great truth, something which blesses the hearts of believers.

At the same time, you have to remember that when Jesus sat with the large multitude on the shores of Galilee and said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness,” the people who heard Him had a far better understanding of some theological concepts that we do living in the twenty-first century.

Jesus talked about God’s kingdom being with you–an invisible kingdom where He reigns as Lord, something which can be fully understood only by experiencing this change of heart and mind through conversion.  Paul explained that “the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17), and again he used that word which doesn’t make much sense to us today.

Some things are better understood by focusing on their opposite.  An Eskimo living in the Arctic Circle may not understand the tropics because he’s never known warm breezes and eaten coconuts and pineapple, but if you tell him that in the tropics there is no ice, no freezing weather, no need for heavy coats and the protection of an igloo, he begins to understand.

Frankly, we know far more about unrighteousness than we do about righteousness.  We know about dishonesty, about immorality, about graft and corruption in society, about man’s brutal inhumanity to his fellow man.  We read the headlines of the newspaper and though we think we are beyond shock, we yet say, “How could that have happened?  How could a 14-year-old so ruthlessly have murdered his classmates?” or “How could a government stand by and do nothing as a neighboring country tries to wipe out a minority ethnic group?”

Having lived most of my life in the latter two-thirds of the past century, as a child I saw World War 2 unfold, though I didn’t understand what was really happening.  As a young man, with horror I visited some of the concentration camps of Europe, and as a mature adult, I still am entirely baffled by man’s inhumanity to his fellow man–something which graphically tells us that man’s nature is sinful and unrighteous.

Following the arrest of the key players in Hitler’s Third Reich, these men were brought to trial at Nuremberg.  A Jewish psychologist was also put with this group–a plant whose mission was to strive to find out how these men thought.  He ate with them, slept with them, talked with them, and, of course, was eventually found out.

At the Nuremberg war trials, he brought testimony against the men.  His conclusion:  Evil, he believed, was “a lack of empathy” which allowed them to view Jews as sub-humans and therefore avoided their personal responsibility in the horrible atrocities which were perpetrated on the Jews.

Theologians will tell you that intrinsically the same evil in the hearts of the worst is also incipient in the hearts of the best.  Paul put it, “As it is written ‘There is no one righteous, not even one,'” adding, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:10, 23).  Ah, if pagan Romans could understand, so can we.  Unfortunately, we understand unrighteousness better than it’s opposite, and from this we go one step deeper in our next commentary.

Resource reading: Romans 3.