Do Something Beautiful - A 5 Day DevotionalSample

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND THE STORY OF GOD

The theological word in the Bible for righteousness, however, means simply to be morally acceptable to God, to be right.

The great news is that the reality of a person who is right with God (we’ll talk shortly about how that can happen) is bounty. We see this in Ephesians 1:3–14, where the bounty of the righteous is described. In this passage we see how God gives freely and in large amount the wide variety of good things to those who have been made “rightwise” with Him. Notice that, as we’ve seen before, the bounty of God includes things like belonging, blamelessness, joy, forgiveness, unrecompensed eternal riches, knowledge, wisdom, hope, inheritance, life, and connection to God and to God’s children through the Holy Spirit. But notice, too, how all this Bounty is tied to being “rightwise.” These gifts are jam-packed here at God’s dinner table in just fourteen verses. This is just one of many passages in the Bible that tell us what the experienced reality is like for those made “rightwise.”

Righteousness requires that a person or world be just, but it is much more than mere justice. You see, justice focuses on rights, on equity, on restitution; but righteousness is fundamentally about bounty. Justice makes someone pay what is owed; righteousness comes to us without “recompense” or required payment. God gives righteousness freely, liberally, to all who come and get it while it’s hot! Justice is important, but it only balances the scales to equality, to what is due. Beyond justice, as a totally free and unearned gift, we see righteousness. Righteousness isn’t about earning a cosmic merit badge or feeling like a better person than someone else; righteousness is about experiencing abundance, bounty, eternal life, which includes things like joy, belonging, hope, togetherness, and so much more.

God wants to give us many things, but He wants to start with righteousness. Righteousness is not merely the absence of wrong, but the presence of what is right, beautiful, and true—the experienced reality of bounty. For many people, our longing for a world made right—a world with God’s true Bounty—begins with the desire for justice. But mere justice by itself is always dissatisfying, isn’t it?

We can never experience a world “made right” simply by establishing justice. Justice is merely the doorway through which we must walk to get to righteousness. Even when justice wins the day, so much more is needed to have an experience of bounty. Imagine someone who is falsely incarcerated but set free after years of suffering. He may have finally gotten justice, but he is not living into the blessing of bounty. A community that suffers under the tyranny of a despot may be freed through winning a war or fleeing their land, but the ravages of death, displacement, disease, and despair along the way fall far short of bounty. The story of God does, in fact, include the establishment of justice, but the great news is that it goes much, much further.