A Devotion from George Whitfield

This is the name by which he will be called: The Lord Our Righteousness.—Jeremiah 23:6

The Lord is our righteousness by imputation.  For it pleased God, after he had made all things, to create the human race in his own image. And so infinite was the condescension of the one who lives forever that, although he might have insisted on the everlasting obedience of Adam and his posterity, he obliged himself by a covenant made with his own creatures, on condition of obedience, to give them eternal life. For when it is said, “For when you eat of it you will surely die” (Gen. 2:17), we may infer that as long as they continued obedient and did not eat of it, they would surely live. Genesis 3 gives us a full account of how our first parents broke this covenant and therefore stood in need of a better righteousness than their own in order to procure their future acceptance with God.

Here then opens the scene of divine philanthropy—God’s love to humanity. For what we could not do, Jesus Christ undertakes for us. And that God might be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus, he took the nature of a servant, even human nature. In that nature he obeyed and thereby fulfilled the whole moral law in our stead; he also died on the cross and by that became a curse for, or instead of, those whom the Father had given him. As God and human in one person, he satisfied at the same time that he obeyed and worked out a full and perfect righteousness for all to whom it was to be imputed.

Here then we see the meaning of the word righteousness. It implies the active as well as passive obedience of the Lord Jesus Christ. Generally, when talking of the merits of Christ we only mention the latter—his death—whereas his life and active obedience are equally necessary. Christ is not the Savior we need unless we join both together. Christ not only died but lived; not only suffered but obeyed for, or instead of, sinners. And both these jointly make up that complete righteousness that is to be imputed to us, as the disobedience of our first parents was made ours by imputation. This is what [Paul] elsewhere terms our becoming in Christ the righteousness of God. This is the sense in which the prophet would have us understand the words of the text—the church itself “will be called,” having this righteousness imputed to her, “the Lord Our Righteousness” (Jer. 33:16). A passage, I think, worthy of the profoundest meditation of all the descendants of Adam.