Righteous God

Feb 21, 2023

“The Lord is righteous in all his ways and faithful in all he does.”

What does it mean that God is righteous?

According to Dictionary.com, the word righteous means: to be virtuous, honorable, or morally right. In the Old Testament Hebrew, there are a few different words for righteous or righteousness:

Sad-diq (sa-deek) – just, innocent, in the right, devout, upright
S-da-qa (sdaka) – honesty, justice, justness,
Se-deq (se-dek) – accuracy, what is correct, right thing, what is honest, equity, what is right

In the New Testament Greek there is one root word for righteous, dikaios, which means: observing divine laws, innocent, faultless, guiltless and just. What the Hebrew and Greek definitions tell me is that the attribute of God’s righteousness means:

God is just.
God is honest.
God is perfect, without fault.
God always does the right thing that is appropriate for the moment.

And finally, it means no matter how hard we work, you and I can never achieve righteousness on our own!

God’s standard is perfection and in our humanity, we will never be perfect!

As I’ve been meditating on that truth this week, I keep thinking back to when Ken and I were raising our children. We weren’t seeking perfection from them, even though they at times would tell me it felt like I was. (Ughh, parenting fail!) It was our responsibility, though, to raise them to be honest and do the right thing when faced with a challenge. There were lots of bumps raising our children along the way, but Ken and I always helped them learn and grow and always offered grace! That is what being a parent is all about.

God, as our Father, didn’t just offer grace and help us grow. According to 2 Corinthians 5:21:

“God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

- 2 Corinthians 5:21

The bad news is that we can’t become righteous no matter how hard we try, but God makes us righteous through Jesus’ death and resurrection. On the cross, Jesus exchanged our sin for His perfect righteousness so that we can one day stand before God and He will see not our sin, but the holy righteousness of the Lord Jesus.

I don’t know about you, but it is really hard to wrap my head around this! God sees you and approves of you! God’s attribute of righteousness is one that we can attain, but only through His adoption of us as sons and daughters! That is how deep the love of God is for us.