Righteousness and Creation
I feel led to write about righteousness. I already posted my first post about righteousness yesterday: Guidelines for Righteousness. To summarize, believe God, obey God, don’t claim credit what He does through you. But what does righteousness have to do with creation? Well, maybe nothing and maybe everything.Â
When God finished creating the world, He declared it very good. After that, He spends the rest of the Bible dealing with man’s unrighteousness, a corrupting influence on God’s very good creation. From this perspective, it’s almost like watching my son protecting his latest lego creation from the corrupting influence of his 3 year brother, Dr. Destructo. No matter what he does, no matter what measures my boy puts in place, little lego pieces keep falling off here and there. He loves his brother exceedingly, but it frustrates him, but what does he do? Send him out of the room… but then he comes back. Give him another toy… until he comes back. Teach him how to play without breaking things… until it breaks. Get him his own legos… which keeps the little guy happy until he realizes how much better his big brother’s creations are, and then he comes back. I suppose he could just superglue everything in place. Then, it can’t be broken. But then, it can’t be played with very well either, because the moving parts within the lego creation stop moving, too. It seems that creating a static toy is no good either. It’s ability to be broken is a necessary part of what made it useable, able to serve its purpose. Eventually my older boy gets so frustrated that he just breaks his toy into tiny pieces himself… after all, that’s all that’s going to happen anyway, right? Or at least, so goes 6 year old logic. But, what about us? What about God’s creation? What does He do what see His creation getting “broken”, corrupted, sinful, and rebellious? Well, here’s the thing… God’s creation was made for us, and we are part of God’s creation.
When God created man, He was declared to be very good, and he was. But then Adam sinned, and God remove him and Eve from the garden. Then mankind became exceedingly corrupt and God destroyed them in the flood. But noah was righteous and mankind was saved through him. God promised never to destroy the world in a flood again, but mankind became corrupt… again. So, God chose Abraham, and used his descendents to destroy corrupt nation after corrupt nation, until eventually, Abraham’s descendents became as corrupt as the nations around them, and could not longer be used for that purpose. So, God promised a messiah, a redeemer, to not only come for Abraham’s descendents and their remnant, but for the rest of the corruped world as well. But, knowing us to be corruptable, this messiah, Jesus, took on the penalty of our corruption, our sin, and made us white as snow in God’s eyes, so that when we die, when we go to live with the Lord in Heaven, our corruptible bodies can exchanged for an incorruptible body… a pointless gesture to an atheist, who would suggest that God create us incorruptible to begin with. But that would be like gluing our pieces in place, and that would be no good. No, our ability to be corrupted here on earth is part of God’s plan, a plan which most people can never understand, and so they reject it as absurd and nonsensical, because what one does not understand always seems absurd and nonsensical to them. But, here we are. Corruptible man, with a God-given path toward righteousness and incorruptibility, put down here in a corrupted world that must continually be cleaned up due to sin’s corrupting influence… a perfecting influence, which will make us precisely the worshippers that God is looking for when we die, as we are shaped and molded to be lovers of God who want to love Him despite our corruption, and must learn to accept His love despite how little we deserve it… and such people, if we can learn that, how to accept unconditional undeserved love, can learn to love each other, and learn to love God back.
And that my friend, brings true righteousness.