Getting the Most Out of the Bible 2

[HKHaugan]

Jesus gives us the key to seeing the OT as a treasure revealing Him not only as the Messiah but as the Son of Man who lives a perfect human life and the Son of God who lives God’s perfect spiritual life in the Holy Spirit. The clearest passage is Luke 24:13-35 and especially His summary in vs.27, “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning Himself.”

First, this makes His statement about why He wanted to be baptized understandable, Mt.3:15---to fulfill all righteousness, not only the righteousness that comes by obedience to the Law but the righteousness that is by faith (Gen.15:6), all righteousness. All righteousness is seen in Him. Paul builds his whole theology on faith righteousness, Rom.3:21-26 being his premiere statement. The questions we have to ask first are ‘What is righteousness?’ ‘What is its purpose?’ and ‘What do I have to do to be righteous?’

The deepest need in man is the need to be right. What Adam and Eve tried to do was to be right without God and then justify it. We may think it is love, or kindness, or worshipful or being good. But each one of those has to be prefaced with right. What all of us want is to be like God, be right like Him, think right like Him, love right like Him and act right like Him. We were designed to be like God (Gen.1:26); His image and His nature, to be right like He is right. That means we are persons, individually conscious, with a mind, a heart and a spirit designed for a right relationship with Him and with others.

So what is the purpose of righteousness? Again there are two kinds of righteousness, legal righteousness and faith righteousness.

First, legal righteousness. Why the Law? After the Fall in Genesis 3 mankind accelerated his descent into the ‘every-only-all’ of sin (Gen.6:5). God devised a plan of recovery, a structure, which would begin a spiritual sequence of first choosing and setting apart an individual, then a family, then a people and a means by which they could recover their lost humanity, the Law. The Law had three purposes: first, to expose and teach the spiritual reason for man’s separation from God, sin. Second, to build a community that would reveal God’s presence to the world. Third, prepare for the One who would come to fulfill the Law, expose sin, the devil, evil spirits and provide personal salvation and a lifestyle based on belief, trust and faith.

The Law demanded attention to detail and strict obedience. The Law established a threefold approach to accomplish its purpose. It gave a sacrificial system for One-God worship to renew the spirit. It introduced a dietary system to restore health. It provided an ethical system to shape relationships.

Further, the Law had five objectives to be a visible definition of witness to God: a healthy mind, a healthy heart, a healthy spirit, a healthy body and a healthy community. It would serve to mold a lifestyle to counter those in the fallen world. It would be seen in individuals, in relationships and in society. The key word for its goals was obedience, perfect obedience. Performance could be trained through the study of the Law for the mind, a relational attitude for the heart, a sacrificial system for worship, a dietary system for the body and a social system for the community. These five things are accomplished by obedience.

But the Law would only serve to open up the real problem, individual sin. As David said, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me (Ps.51:5).” As Jewish history developed there arose a problem, tradition. This is where the wheels of Jewish leadership went off the track. Tradition is the way man makes up a well-intended system of add-ons to accomplish three things. First, to impress God by personal ingenuity. Second, to impress others. Third, to impress self. All three have one purpose, to be in control by justifying one’s self to be right, to feel right and to act right. Jesus caught this full blown in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Mt.18:10). Every one of Jesus’ parables has something to say about self-justification, its attitudes and the sin that causes them. Romans 7 presents a perfect inner sense of what sin means when Paul tells us that the good we want to do we can’t and the evil that we would never do we find ourselves doing. Its infection causes us to be alone, fearful, prideful, defensive and manipulative.

Second, we are working at a new kind of righteousness, faith. “The work of God is this: to believe in the One He has sent (Jn.6:29).” Jesus is the ‘Right One’ who is right in every detail of His belief, His trust and His action. Faith in Jesus Christ is letting Him be right through us. We are not working at being legally righteous, which is earning our salvation. It is not working to get something but to give something, our sin, our repentance, our self-willed indifference and apathy, our exploitation of others, all of it to God our Father in Jesus’ name. This is the beginning of learning a ‘how to’, with the help of the Holy Spirit, how to disregard the old sinful inclination to be right without God and how to allow God the Son, Jesus, to be right through us. That is the work of the Holy Spirit. It is not our work but the work of the Cross that allows the Holy Spirit total access to work our belief, our trust and our behavior. This is why Jesus tells us He is the way, the truth and the life (Jn.14:6), the right way, the right truth, the right lifestyle. It’s not about trying to be good but letting Jesus be good through us.

So Old Testament rightness is a legal system designed to teach us the nature of our separation from God, sin. The Writings and the Prophets point out the specifics of that separation in our mind, our heart and our spirit. New Testament rightness is letting Jesus be the intelligent ruler of our mind, the attitude adjuster of the heart and the ever present guiding example for our action. It is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of right, who brings Jesus into our mind, stirs our heart and inspires us to action.