Righteousness - Our Response to God’s Commitments
When I was writing about the order of God’s promises and your acceptance of them yesterday, I wasn’t talking about salvation specifically, though I had it in mind. So, I need to clarify something… the fact that not everyone goes to Heaven. Now, in my examples above, take Saul for example, I implied that God made a promise to him… I was really talking about the commitments that God makes. A commitment is a promise, but not all promises all for salvation. But where the promise is salvation, the logic applies. So, when I was talking about “promises” made to people who don’t believe, how does that apply to those who won’t be saved?
Well once again, I am talking about commitments that God makes. God often makes commitments to people who don’t believe that he’s made one. So for those people who aren’t going to Heaven, God might make a commitment to them that they will “know” what they are required to in order for their choice to be on them. He might make the commitment to be ready with the payment of their sin-debt. But, by no means has He promised salvation itself to them, lest He be made a liar. What He promises is accessibility to salvation. In the meantime, for those He knows will actually take Him up on His offer of everlasting life, He gets them ready.Â
Now, lest you get caught up in the chicken-and-egg argument implied in my choice of words, understand that the reason such a stumbling block is there is because you see God’s choice to save you, your choice to be saved, scriptures exhortation to choose Him, and scriptures’ declaration that He chose you before you were born, and you want to put some structure to it all. But then, where do you put your faith? In God and His word, or in Human frailty, which comes with an inability to understand perfectly God’s framework? (I’m not saying there is no framework for all this, but given the wide range of disagreements on what it is, and how troubling that is for many Christians, I feel I must frame my challenge to you in this way.) Well, that brings us right back to our discussion of what righteousness is.Â
Righteousness is not an ability to come up with the perfect framework for God’s promises and how they relate to salvation. So, for all my effort on this blog to describe a complete framework of creation (whether it be successful is beside the point), that is not credited to me as righteousness. No, righteousness is credited to us when we believe God, despite our human frailties, and I would propose that it is the more difficult things to explain or accept that result in the larger credits to our “righteousness account”. So, my exhortation to you? Take these scriptures about righteousness and just go with them… and your belief will be credited to you as righteousness.
I would also like to point out that while I believe the earth is old, part of the young earth creationists’ perspective is to believe God… and while I think they’ve misunderstand what God did and had written about it, their heart is right with Him, generally speaking, because they believe the Gospel over all else. And that is credited to them as righteousness. Old earth creationists have a harder time with this, and have more trouble just believing God. That is unfortunate, and ironic, that they are understanding God and His handiwork more (in my opinion), yet the conflation of creation and salvation often makes them believe the Gospel less. That’s not right. Well, I don’t have time to explore this right now, but I did want to point it out, that we all have trouble putting perfect frameworks to what God says, and to what He commits to, when all we really have to do is believe Him, that somehow His Word is His truth, whether we understand it all or not, He created us, loves us, and sent His Son for us, that we could go to Heaven and live with Him. It’s the bottom line for us all. And if you believe that… they it will be credited to you as righteousness.