THOUGHTS ON RIGHTEOUSNESS.
By Eugene Leland
RIGHTEOUSNESS is doing, always and everywhere, and when righteousness is fulfilled, something is done. "The righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ, unto all and upon all them that believe," is the right doing, the DOING, mark you, of God, and that doing is expressed in the requirements of his word; but if those requirements are not met in us, can we truly be said to have the righteousness of God? The law cannot save the sinner, because it already condemns him; and so God sends his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin condemns sin in the flesh, "that the righteousness [the doing] of the law might be fulfilled in us." God did something for us that he may do something in us. It is doing that God wants to see in us, but it is his own doing that he wants to see; "for it is God that worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure." "This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom he hath sent." But this is not the work of God that we believe simply that Jesus did something for us some time ago; in addition to this it is that we believe that Christ will do in us what God wants done just now.