Many years ago a Chinese prince traveling through his domain came across a farmer offering as a sacrifice to his gods a cup of wine and a pig's foot. As he offered he prayed that his fields would increase their returns, that his gardens would produce beautiful blossoms, that his barns would be filled to overflowing; and that his whole life would be crowned with honor and prosperity.
The prince marveled that a man who asked for so much should offer so little. How like that pagan's paltry pittance is the offering of the self-righteous man who holds before his god his own sin-saturated conduct pattern as the meritorious claim for all of heaven's bounties.
The Subtleness of Self-righteousness
Self-righteousness is the idolatrous substitution of the works of man for the works of the Spirit of God. It divorces God from human living. It is actually a species of self-worship. The self-righteous man experiences no actual contact of his spirit with the Spirit of the Divine. He invariably takes certain attitudes toward God or certain taboos of religion and makes of them the whole concept of righteous living. Like the Pharisees, in Jesus' time, he develops his own behavior pattern. His religion is egocentric.
History testifies to this age-long pestiferous human tendency for man to make his own god and his own righteousness. All paganism abounds with human deities that have been substituted for the true God. In this subtle sin Christianity has not been exempt. It is the darkness of man's failure to rightly relate himself to the true God that enshrouds the modern world. Self-righteousness has been found among the most ardent religionists. In Christ's day it reached its utter inadequacy in what John W. Bowman calls the "meticulous observance of the Pharisaical super-religiosity." It was all to no avail. Jesus said: "Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 5:20).
The rabbis were ethical behaviorists. Their prime interest was outward conduct in conformity to prescribed traditions and legal principles. They substituted their outward obedience to the demands of their legal code in place of a genuine commitment of themselves to God. This is always the core of self-righteousness---the substitute character a man offers the Deity when he is unprepared to make his life commitment to God.
Conduct patterns are built on a false interpretation of righteousness as a set of rules, obedience to which God demands of man, this obedience constituting meritorious works. Conduct patterns make no provision for the infusion of the Spirit of God into the human heart. They utterly fail man in the crisis of his own experience, for righteousness is synonymous with God's character of love and goodness and can only be relatively implanted in man by the Spirit of God and not by any egocentric meritorious works of his own.
Not only does this subtle sin of self-righteousness keep man from his true relationship to his God, but it also mars his relationship with his fellow men. It is actually a transgression of the two great commandments of love (Matt. 22:36-40).
The self-righteous man divides his fellow men into "sinners" and "saints" on the basis of his own conduct pattern. The result is the holier-than-thou concept of self-esteem, and the consequent intolerance of any brother whose conduct pattern does not synchronize with his own. Jesus' maxim was, "Judge not, that ye be not judged," for the simple reason that every man has either a "mote" or a "beam" in his eye and is therefore in no position to speak of himself as a righteous man and of his brother as a sinner (Matt. 7:1-5). Strangely enough, those with the beam in their eye seem to possess special aptitude for seeing the mote in their brother's eye. It is a bit disconcerting to all such that Jesus invariably took the sinner's part whenever the Pharisees leveled criticism at him.
True Christian character transcends all these particulars. It ever seeks to translate the life of Christ's love into active historical living. Jesus, like the prophets of old, was mainly concerned that the "heart" of God's people would cease to be "far from" their God. It is only the inner intent of the heart and the motives of love that identify the Christian with the heart of God. Lip service, with its emphasis on the externals of religious piety, is not true obedience to God even though it outwardly conforms to a prescribed or orthodox conduct pattern.
In recoiling from the God-dishonoring doctrine of antinomianism there is a great danger that the members of our Adventist churches throughout the world will swing to the other extreme of going about to establish their own righteousness by a perfunctory adherence to the external prohibitions of the law that so many antinomians have flaunted to their own destruction. Actually, however, "he who is trying to become holy by his own works in keeping the law, is attempting an impossibility." —Steps to Christ (Pocket ed.), p. 60.
Jesus Is Christianity's Religion
Jesus' life on earth was God's Word in action in human flesh. "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth" (John 1:14). He was God's divine life fulfilling God's divine Word. He was what true religion ought to be. His life demonstrated that a life filled with God's grace lived God's truth. In Him we read God's formula of salvation: The Word became flesh in human history.
Jesus was so completely in rapport with God that when He spoke it was the word of the Father, and when He acted it was the act of the Father. Jesus lived what God is. This and this alone is righteousness. Of Abraham Lincoln it has been said: "He was everybody grown a little taller." Of Jesus our representative we may well say: "He was everybody living what God is." His life was the one perfect reflection of God's moral person on the plane of history. In living this life Jesus, as God's own Son, was God's perfect revelation of His love and righteous character; and as the Son of man, He was man's only perfect response to the absolute requirements of perfection.
True religion, then, can be experienced only by the indwelling Spirit of Jesus living anew in the lives of twice-born men and women. Jesus alone is our righteousness, and only in Him do we become the righteousness of God (1 Cor. 1:30; 2 Cor. 5:21). In Him alone the righteousness of God is fully manifested in human history (Rom. 3:21, 22). No conduct pattern can ever be substituted for such a life. Only the Christ pattern can be sufficient. Only the indwelling Spirit can impart it to our lives. Although we cannot hope to equal Christ's life, we cannot hope for eternal life without receiving His imputed and imparted righteousness. "We cannot equal the pattern; but we shall not be approved of God if we do not copy it and, according to the ability which God has given, resemble it."—Testimonies, vol. 2, p. 549. The goal of the Christian is to ever manifest the Spirit of Jesus—the justice of Jesus, the integrity of Jesus, the mercy of Jesus, and the love of Jesus. To the extent to which man permits God's grace to enable him to resemble Jesus, to that extent does he aid God's church in practicing the spirit of Jesus in contemporary history.
Jesus' matchless life, atoning death, and triumphant resurrection, as man's universal representative and God's only begotten Son, is both God's answer to man's need and man's reply to God's love. Jesus accomplished in human history both the justification of God and the salvation of man. John Wick Bowman in his Religion of
Maturity, page 282, aptly summarizes this thought as follows:
As God's act he [Jesus] accomplished God's righteous will for man's salvation and so manifested the Father to his people. At the same time he also vindicated man in God's sight by achieving on man's behalf the Imago Del, which it had been God's purpose that man should become. . . . In the former capacity Jesus was God's act of revelation; in the latter he was equally man's response to that revelation.
In the light of this image of God in man, how utterly useless is the religion of self-righteousness, which only reflects the self-assertive nature of man. On the other hand, Jesus' matchless life shows that a godly life can be lived in an imperfect world by the power that comes from above, and that it is the only practical spiritually mature life that can solve the multivarious problems of human existence. Thus it is that in the imparted Christ life, the power of God becomes available for men. Jesus alone is God's act of salvation, both vicariously and regeneratively.
The true gospel minister will endeavor so to lead his people into personal relationship with Christ that they will abandon all their conduct patterns of self-righteousness for the Christ pattern of living, that they may be "found in him," not having their "own righteousness, which is of the law," but rather "the righteousness which is of God" (Phil. 3:9).
Self-idolatry, which is the "foundation of all sin" and the "root of alienation" between man and his God, is the principal ingredient of self-righteousness. It is the fatal deception of spiritually paranoiac personalities who have no concept of growing by God's grace into "mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" (Eph. 4:13, R.S.V.). The religion of maturity dedicates "all" the heart, and "all" the mind, and "all" the soul to loving God and man (Matt. 22:37-39). The emotions, the intellect, the will, of the mature Christian can never be satisfied with conduct patterns but only with the Christ pattern. Jesus is man's sole deliverance from sin. Only by experiencing Him in our lives can the demon spirits of evil be expelled, for "if I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you" (Luke 11:20).
God's Redemptive Society
The ultimate goal of all true pastoral and evangelistic efforts is that they become the divine channel through which God can establish the redemptive community. This colony of heaven is made up of individuals so Christ centered and Spirit directed that Paul describes them as the "body of Christ." This metaphor stands for the actual spiritual reality of church members manifesting Christ's Spirit in contemporaneous history.
God proposes that each individual member of the "body of Christ" should be a partner with Him in His final acts of human redemption. A true church member is on consecrated ground. He and his fellow church members have been called to be God's "saints" and God's "labourers" (1 Cor. 1:2; 3:9), and in this fellowship they are expected to provide the physical body through which the spirit of Christ's love can reach out for the redemption of the world. Such loving Christian conduct in its practice of justice, mercy, goodness, and love will be so superior to mere man-made ethical or legalistic conduct patterns that any comparison between the two would be sacrilegious.
When the kingdom of God actually comes within, it achieves an inward transformation of personality at the core of our character. "The good man out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil man out of his evil treasure brings forth evil" (Matt. 13:35, R.S.V.).
"Heart" refers to man's entire inner nature, the motivations and objectives of his life. The "image of God," which is formed by the incorporation of the Word of God and the holy law of love into human living, is both life and deed. The life is the source of the deed, and not the deed the source of the life. This image is produced in man only through the indwelling of the Divine Spirit, when an individual maintains a total surrender to the will of God, and seeks ever to emulate the Christ life.
The Religion of Maturity
The religion of maturity, then, is far more than a mere schematized rule of life, made up of a conduct pattern of do's and don'ts. In the religion of maturity the life is basically filled with the good treasure of the Spirit, which exemplifies the Christ conduct in producing the fruits of the Spirit in daily living.
To recapitulate, then, we who are the ministers of the new covenant, and who live in this climacteric hour of history, should do all in our power to help our fellow men to see that:
- Self-righteousness breeds all forms of religious exhibitionism and ends in complete spiritual stagnation. It makes worship a form of the deification of man, and Christian living an ego culture of insipid piety. It is the principal sin of the conduct pattern Christian, who substitutes his own righteousness for the righteousness of God. Its egocentricity is one of the deadliest forms of man worship. The two extremes of antinomianism and self-righteousness are probably Christendom's greatest barriers to the formation of Godlike characters.
- True righteousness is the whole moral character of God and not merely the doing or the not doing of certain specific acts. Jesus is the only person who ever completely lived God's righteousness on the plane of history, and the Spirit of God alone can implant such character in the inner life of man. Even relative righteousness is a matter of inward character, not of outward culture. It governs the motivations and the disposition of the heart and not merely the deeds of the cultured self. It is not just separation from everything tabooed, but rather participation in the righteous nature of God. The gospel's ultimate product is the "image of God in the soul." There is no adequate concept of righteousness other than this.
- The church is to become a community of morally mature personalities who reflect the image of God's moral righteousness on the plane of human history. To achieve this inner transformation of character is its great goal. It is God's plan to give truly loving and lovable characters actuality on the historical plane. And then "the world will be convinced, not by what the pulpit teaches, but by what the church lives. The minister in the desk announces the theory of the gospel; the practical piety of the church demonstrates its power."—Testimonies, vol. 7, p. 16. We can only win the heart of the world when the world sees the heart of God in the heart of His church.
When the church reflects an image of what God is, and what His mercy, grace, and love accomplish in human hearts, it will then become the greatest testimony for the working of the power of God in contemporaneous history. Then, and only then, it will indeed be God's redemptive community—a colony of heaven at work as the saving remnant in human history.
J. A. B.
