Jeremiah 33:15-16

This is the name wherewith she shall be called, The Lord our Righteousness.

The justified Church

It is no slip of the pen--“She shall be called”: it is no mistranslation, or unguarded statement, as might be imagined. It is a deliberate name, based on a great and an everlasting principle; and it is just as true, “she shall be called the Lord our Righteousness,” as it is true that “He,” that is, Christ, “shall be called the Lord our Righteousness.” Why? Because there is a spiritual and yet real identity between Christ and this redeemed and believing throng. He and they are one in time, and will continue one in eternity. Nay, so completely is the Church knit to its Head, that it is said she is “the fulness of Christ”; as if Christ were not complete in heaven, complete in His mediatorial glory, complete in His happiness, until there be added to Him those He has ransomed by His blood, prepared by His Spirit, and at last brought, as the fruits of His grace, to the triumphs of His throne. You will also recollect, that in Scripture, the relationship that subsists between Christ and His Church, is represented as being the relationship which subsists between the husband and the wife. Her responsibilities He has assumed Himself, that they may be absorbed, and disappear before His Cross. It is thus, that a transfer, an exchange, takes place between Christ and His Church--by concentrating all her responsibility on Him; He being answerable for her sins, answerable for her defects, answerable to a perfect law and to a holy God; and she receiving from Him that glorious and everlasting name, which is the Open Sesame at the gates of heaven, and which shall he heard loudest in the songs and hallelujahs of the ransomed around the throne. Whatever name, I would observe next, is given in Scripture to anything, is a reality. Therefore, when it is said, “This is the name by which she,” the Church, “shall be called,” it does not imply that it is the investiture of that Church with a mere empty and evanescent honour, but the stamp, the imprimatur of an everlasting and indelible reality; so that the Church, in herself all rags, is made in Christ “the Righteousness of God.” In discussing the subject matter of this name, I would lay before you the following facts, in order to show you the absolute necessity of our being “called,” or being made, “the Lord our Righteousness,” before we can ever expect to see God in happiness. Let me observe, then, there has been, is now, and ever will be, what is called a law. The law of God is just to God Himself what the sunbeam is to the sun--what the rivulet is to the fountain--what the effect is to the cause--what the blossom or the leaf is to the stem or the root. God’s law is indestructible,--the everlasting stereotype, which can no more be destroyed than the Eternal Himself can be dethroned from the supremacy of the universe. Setting out, then, with the postulate, that there is, and must be, such a thing as God’s moral law,--the language of which is, Do, and live,--Do not, and die,--we proceed, in the second place, to notice, that every member of this justified Church, with every child of Adam, has broken and violated that law. The next inquiry is, How can man be saved, and this law retain its unbending and awful strictness? Shall the whole race perish? for the whole race have broken God’s law. Blessed be God, His love and mercy would not suffer this. If not, shall God’s holy law be abrogated and annulled in whole or in part! His justice, His truth, His holiness cannot suffer that. Here, then, is the question, which no earthly OEdipus can solve; the labyrinth, which no human wisdom can unthread. Ancient philosophers, who saw dim and shadowy the attributes of the Eternal, even they were perplexed with difficulty here; and Socrates himself admitted, that it was extremely difficult to see how God could possibly receive to heaven them that His holiness must see to be sinful. Having thus noticed the impossibility of finding anything that could meet our case, let me ask again, Shall God be unjust, in order that sinners may be saved; or shall God be unmerciful, and this, in order that His law may remain just? God so loved us, that He would not let us perish; and yet God is so just, that He would not let His law be violated; how then can it be, how shall it be, that God shall remain infinitely just, infinitely holy, infinitely true, and yet that His love shall rush forth, and fill men’s souls with its fulness, and the wide world with the multiplication of its trophies? The answer is given, “This is the name by which He” (Christ) “shall be called, the Lord our Righteousness”; and “this is the name by which she” (the Church) “shall be called,” through an interest in Him, “the Lord our Righteousness.” By that atonement which Christ consummated on the Cross, and in virtue of that righteousness which Christ achieved by His life, it now comes to pass, that God may be just whilst He justifies the ungodly that believe. This righteousness of Christ, which constitutes the only title of the believer, is called in Scripture by various names. It is called “the righteousness of Christ,” because He perfected and consummated it. It is called “the righteousness of God,” because He devised it, and it is His mode of justifying the sinner. It is called the righteousness of faith, because faith receives it; and it is also called our righteousness, because it is made ours by the free and sovereign gift of God.

1. Let me now observe of this righteousness that it is a perfect righteousness. When Christ exclaimed on the Cross, in the language partly of agony, and partly of triumph, “It is finished,” He announced in these accents that that moment there was provided a perfect robe, of perfect and of spotless beauty, for every sinner under heaven, who would put forth the hand of faith, and appropriate it “without money and without price.”

2. This righteousness is an everlasting righteousness. Death shall not tarnish it, the grave shall not corrupt it, the wear and tear of life shall not destroy it.

3. This righteousness is ours, to the exclusion of all other whatever. Christ says to the queen on the throne, and to the meanest beggar by the wayside, “Ye must both be saved by putting on the same perfect righteousness, or ye must be lost for ever.”

4. This righteousness is ours by imputation. Our sins were transferred to Him, and He endured the consequences of them; His righteousness is transferred to us, and we realise the fruits of it.

5. This righteousness is received by faith, and by faith alone. There are three things to be noticed; first, the spring; secondly, the water; and thirdly, the pipe that conveys the water. The spring, in this instance, is the love of God; the element, that justifies us, is the righteousness of Jesus; and faith is the channel, or the conduit, by which that righteousness is conveyed to us and made ours. It is the mere medium, not the merit; it is the mere hand that receives; and in no sense has it any part or share of the merit or glory.

6. I would observe of this righteousness that it insures, wherever it is, everlasting glory. “Whom He justifies,” “He glorifies.” Where He begins, He finishes; what He commences by grace, that He consummates and creams in glory. The Church’s glory, derived from her Lord, is the righteousness of Christ; her beauty is that moral and spiritual beauty, which derived from heaven, defies the assaults of earth and hell, making its heirs the meet companions of Christ at heaven’s high festival.

7. This Church, thus justified in the righteousness of Christ, is, in the next place, free from all condemnation. All things minister peace and blessedness to her who is at friendship with God, and identified with Jesus. For “this is the name by which she shall be called, the Lord our Righteousness.”

8. This way of salvation excludes all boasting. Just because man is saved wholly through grace--wholly through the righteousness of another, and his very name is the name of another, therefore, this redeemed, elect, ransomed Church will east her crown before the throne of God and of the Lamb, and say, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain,” &c.

9. I observe that this mode of justification does not make void the law of God. “Nay,” says the apostle, “we rather establish the law.” You have in this fact clear and decisive evidence that it is the elevation of the Cross that makes all the moralities rise and cling and coil around it, and bloom and blossom. The Gospel alone in fact can give true and high-toned morality.

10. This righteousness is that alone in which we may glory. There is nothing but the Gospel that is worth glorying in. There is a moth in the fairest robe--there is a worm in the goodliest cedar--there is disease in the healthiest frame and rust on the purest gold. None of these things can satisfy men’s souls with happiness. There is no glorying but in the righteousness of Christ, that is bright, pure, enduring, the prolific source of all that is good. (J. Gumming, D. D.)

Christ, the perfection of righteousness

Matthew Arnold, one of the prominent leaders of modern Agnosticism, thus speaks of Christ in his Literature and Dogma: “Christ came to reveal what righteousness really is. .. Nothing will do except righteousness; and no other conception of righteousness will do except Christ’s conception of it; His method and secret.” And in another part of the same book he writes: “For our race, as we see it now, and as ourselves we form a part of it, the true God is and must be perfect.” (Great Thoughts.)