Righteousness by Faith

Who is deserving of God’s favor? Which of us deserves to be in relationship with the LORD? Who has earned merit with God so that God would want to be close to us? Who is special enough that God would see them as good enough to seek them out?

What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, as it is written:
“None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”
For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus…” ¹

“But I’m not as bad as…” Have you considered how often we do the comparison thing with sin? Think back to when you displeased a teacher or parent and immediately turned to the ‘not-as-bad-as’ argument that someone else was more responsible, more at fault than you. Sin isn’t like that—sin is sin and separation is separation. There are not levels of failure for separated from God is separated, distanced, divided, dis-related. What then can we do to ‘fix’ the separation? How can we change the sin into something that doesn’t separate us from God, to make who has become worthless more worthy? The Bible says we do not have the ability to ‘work’ our way back into God relationship, we cannot earn removal of the guilt of our own sin. It is not a matter of sincerity or desire or ‘want-to’ or even regret for what has been done that violated the terms of relating to God. We have become worthless and without merit. All of us. None has standing of merit before God. We all are sinners. Paul is writing to the Romans about this dilemma and reminds that ‘no one’ includes the forefather of the Jewish peoples, Abraham. Certainly he must have deserved God’s favor and if him, why not us? Paul gives us the ‘if’ argument but follows immediately with the ‘not’ conclusion:

For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.” Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due. And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness, just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works:
“Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.”
Is this blessing then only for the circumcised, or also for the uncircumcised? For we say that faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness. How then was it counted to him? Was it before or after he had been circumcised? It was not after, but before he was circumcised.  ²

Abraham did not earn favor with God, he did not work his way into God’s good graces. Believing and committing to what God has done on your behalf without you meriting it is trusting God rather than your own efforts to resolve sin. Belief ‘counted as righteousness’ leaves all the merit in God’s work on our behalf and not that of ourselves. The emphasis of David’s later ‘look-back’ at God’s treatment of Abraham is that Abraham’s righteousness came before any act of Abraham in response to God. Righteousness came before the physical act that acknowledged what God had already accomplished. So it is with us so long after Abraham when we believe in and trust the sufficiency of what God has accomplished on our behalf ‘while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us’ ³ and then we believed.
Can you believe that God would do ALL that was necessary to make the Way for you to come back into relationship with Him after you have sinned against Him? Can you accept and live in the way of forgiveness?