He is Our Righteousness

“That we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” We who believe are now through grace the display of divine righteousness; God has shown how He can be just in justifying all who trust in Him who took our place in judgment. Upon the cross our sins were imputed to Him. He endured what we deserved. He drank the bitter cup of wrath which should have been ours. That was the cup from which He shrank in Gethsemane’s garden. He could not have been the holy Son had He been able to look upon it with equanimity. But He emptied that cup. He exhausted the wrath of God against our sins, and now divine righteousness demands that all who trust in Him be freed from every charge, and thus fully justified before the throne of God. Seated high in heaven’s glory, on the right hand of the Father, He is there as our Representative. His acceptance is ours. God sees us in Him.
Looking back to the cross, the believer can say: “Blessed Lord, there Thou wert made sin for me; there Thou didst bear my judgment; didst endure my desert; I myself am the answer to the cry, ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’”
Looking up to the throne where He now sits exalted, the believer can cry in faith, “Blessed Lord, there upon the throne Thou art my righteousness.” This indeed is full salvation, and it is all based upon the blessed fact that “He who knew no sin was made to be sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”
Any attempt of ours to provide a righteousness which will satisfy God is doomed to end in failure, yet thousands today who bear the Christian name have never faced their sins before God and found their righteousness in Christ. Nothing is sadder than profession without possession; nothing more solemn than having a name to live, when actually dead in trespasses and in sins. Yet this, alas, is true of all whose hope of salvation is based upon the fact that they have been brought up to respect Christianity, and in a sense to reverence its Founder, but have never taken their place as lost, guilty sinners before God, looked in faith to the Lord Jesus Christ, once made sin for them, and received Him as their own personal Saviour.
Let me affectionately ask you the question, “Have you done so?” Remember that in the life of every one who is saved, there has taken place, at some time or other, that great change described in Scripture as conversion (Matt. 18:3). To be sure, the change is not so marked in some as in others, nor could all point to the day and hour when it occurred; but all who are truly born again have been children of wrath on the road to destruction who came to the place where they received Christ in faith, and thus were saved.