DIVINE PATHS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

Part I

God’s freely bestowed righteousness in Christ cannot but bear fruit in the lives of His people. The first fruitful task of Jehovah when He begins to savingly lead elect sheep in His paths of Divine righteousness, is to uncover the barrenness of all their paths of self-righteousness. Like a good shepherd, however, the Lord does a thorough rather than a hurried work. As a good sheepman often suffers his flock to meander at some length in fruitless self-leadings prior to firmly shepherding along a fruitful though longer path towards a determined destination, so Jehovah frequently allows His spiritual Israel to undergo lengthy wilderness journeys in order to bring them into the land of Canaan as a flock desirous, prepared, and instructed to be Shepherd-led rather than self-led. How painstakingly this Great Shepherd handles His “we-areable” (Mt. 20:22) sheep, who incessantly ignore His righteous paths of revelation, justification, sanctification, and glorification, being prone to choose their own paths of law-righteousness, repentance-righteousness, and even unworthiness-righteousness!

The first path God makes barren for His people is that of law-righteousness. When the Holy Spirit begins to work in the heart of a sinner, sin is viewed in a new light. It begins to be seen as God sees it. Many actual transgressions crop up which cannot be justified in the sight of a now ever-present God. Desiring as never before, to become righteous in God’s sight, however, a convicted sinner begins to labor to perfectly obey Divine law and live a holy, reformed life. Desiring to do something like the Philippian jailor and the pricked hearts at Pentecost (Acts 16:30; 2:37), a concerned soul vows to patch up what it has done amiss. He prays to God for time, promising to make amends for all. Zacchaeus-like, he will restore all fourfold. Yes, he will live so perfectly that the Lord will be compelled to notice and forgive.

His sinless attempt seems to prosper for a while though never reaching its goal of perfection. Reforming himself in every respect, the sinner literally wages a relentless battle against sin — every sin and all sin. Sin becomes a greater enemy than death. Though this holy war is waged out of love for the Lord — hating what God hates (Ps. 139:21), it remains concealed from the soul’s eyes that he is trying to appease the Lord with a debt that cannot be paid.

The expectation sought in self-reforming lawrighteousness, however, is short-lived. Sin is never entirely dammed shut. Each night the confessional vows are renewed: “Lord, give me one more day, and I shall present myself sinless to Thee.” The goal more than eludes the grasp. With perfection seemingly close at hand, the soul begins to see sin in motives, thoughts, and actions never viewed as sin before. It begins to see the spirituality of the law, the demand of the law, the curse of the law, the punishment of the law, the inflexibility of the law. It begins to dismay of ever achieving law-righteousness, realizing that even perfection would fall far short for how could past transgressions be wiped away when dealing with such a hard taskmaster as the law? “Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them” (Gal. 3:10) begins to produce soul-fears and soul-tremblings.

Simultaneous with the sinfulness of sin and the curse of the law gaining reality, the attributes of God are seen, felt, and experienced. The blackness of sin becomes double black when placed before the back-drop of God’s white, pure, and spotless perfections. Holiness and justice are no longer only words, but daily and condemning realities. The soul meets the living God who can have no communion with sin, who cannot even tolerate looking upon iniquity, who is perfect and holy in all His Being and majesty.

Placed at a standstill before the virtures of God, conscience also adds condemning accusations when the Spirit places before the despairing soul all the sins of his past life (Ps. 50:21). In a word, sin and guilt is all that remains no matter which page of life’s history is turned open. With David he confesses: “Innumerable evils have compassed me about: mine iniquities have taken hold on me, so that I am not able to look up: they are more than the hairs of my head: therefore my heart faileth me” (Ps. 40:12).

The sinner becomes a mystery to himself. The more he fights for righteousness, the more unrighteous he becomes. He finds himself parting with beloved sins, yet finds sin in so doing for some reservation and some sinful motive stains all his effort. With his sins set in order before him on one side, and God’s impeachable attributes set in order before him on the other, he feels as though his soul is placed in an ever-tightening vice-grip with no way to escape. Divine holiness and heart sinfulness leave no room for merit in his desires to go up to God’s house of prayer, nor in his Bible meditations and religious book reading, nor in his prayerful prayers, nor in his burning love for God’s people, nor in his sleepless night hours seeking reconciliation with God, nor in his faint hopes and received texts, nor in his best legalism and his best works, for all his best self-reformations fall under Isaiah 8:20, “The bed is shorter than that a man can stretch himself on it: and the covering narrower than that he can wrap himself in it.”

The law becomes death. Law-righteousness becomes a barren path. And yet the sinner will not succumb to God’s righteousness through Christ. All self-paths will be pursued before the Christ-path.

He turns to a second path which God must make barren within him — the path of repentance-righteousness. He vows to repent with a repentance not to be repented of. He presents penitent prayers, penitent sighs, penitent tears, and penitent humility as a sacrifice on God’s altar. His human grounds of appeasement with God has changed his name from legalistic sinner to pious sinner.

Under the Spirit’s enlightening, however, hopeful penitent prayers become shameful, spoiled with pride, and riddled to the core with self-centeredness. Encouraging penitent sighs become too shallow to merit naught but Divine displeasure. Comforting penitent tears grievously disappoint, for relief is not deliverance. Satisfying penitent humility never can bow sufficiently deep to merit satisfaction at God’s holy justice-bar.

Meriting-repentance becomes barren ground. Prayers need to be prayed for; sighs need to be sighed deeper; tears need to be wept over; humility needs to be humbled.

Repentance paths of righteousness especially become poisonous rather than fruitful when the Holy Spirit brings a sinner back to paradise, painfully uncovering his very nature and whole way of life to be full of sin. He learns not only the impossibility of fencing sin out, but also the impossibility of a corrupt fountain-head ever spewing forth one drop of purity. Unbearable as the impossibility of stopping sin from without was, the impossibility of ever doing anything free of sin from within is ten times more grievous. The fall shows his heart to be nothing but a fountain of unrighteousness, making Jeremiah 13:23 actuality: “Can the Ethiopian change his sin, or the leopard his spots? Then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.”

The sinner becomes Adam before God. The fall is his fall; his fault; his guilt; his inheritance; his ruination; his condemnation. Unrighteousness, sin, and guilt is not only his portion, but is who and what he is. Self and sin become synonyms. “I am not only miserable,” Martin Luther once wrote, “but I am misery itself. I am not only sinful; I am sin itself. Truly to see and to feel indwelling sin is the torture of all tortures.” Yet the same great reformer, who knew this torture by lifelong experience, penned on another occasion that he would not exchange the experience of spiritually-minded torture resulting from indwelling sin for a bed of roses.

Martin Luther was not alone. The barren, sin-tortured soul searches for and discovers similar experiences recorded in sacred writ with which it can intimately identify. “I am dust and ashes,” said the father of believers (Gen. 18:27). “I am vile,” sobs Job, “wherefor I abher myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:6). Poor David often scarcely has a heart or pen for anything else. “There is no soundness in my flesh because of Thine anger: neither is there any rest in my bones because of my sin. My loins are filled with a loathsome disease” (Ps. 38:3, 7). And Daniel, a man greatly beloved in heaven and on earth, divulges: “I was left alone, and there remained no strength in me: for my comeliness was turned to corruption” (Dan. 10:8).

In experiential paradise, God, Adam, and all creatures are absolved of all guilt inwardly, and only “I did eat” remains (Gen. 3:12). “O Lord,” exclaims the soul convicted of original sin, “It is all sin, guilt, and unrighteousness. All my repenting righteousnesses are nothing but filthy rags and dung before Thee (Is. 64:6; Phil. 3:8). All my best is ragged. Ragged repentance, ragged obedience, ragged praying, ragged faith, ragged everything is mine. I cannot do anything without sinning. I cannot so much as confess my sins but my very confessions are only additional aggravations of my confessed sins. My very tears need washing, and the very washing of my tears needs still to be washed over again in redeeming blood. My hottest tears are but dirt, my deepest sighs are but pollution, my most heart-rendering petitions are but corruption, my humblest humility is but pride. O wretched man that I am! How deeply sinning self stains all! How terribly repentance but adds to condemnation! How fully David’s fifty-first psalm portrays my heart: ‘I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me. Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy sight: that Thou mightest be justified when Thou speakest and be clear when Thou judgest. Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me’” (Ps. 51:3-5).

“Sinner,” we think to respond, “will you not now turn back to your Father’s house where there is bread enough and to spare (Luke 15)? Finding legality and piety end in vanity and vexation of spirit, surely you will now surrender yourself and your paths unto God, declaring: ‘If I perish, I perish?’”

No, there is yet one human path left untrod — the path of unworthiness-righteousness. If legality and piety will not do, perhaps helplessness and poverty and unworthiness will touch Divine compassion. Perhaps his taking pleasure in the punishment of iniquity, and an ever increasing love for the very attributes of God which condemn him, combined with inability and forfeited rights will all serve to move God to pity and bless in condescending mercy. Continued.

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