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[Newbie]

Isaiah 3.10 talks about righteous people. Why would God say this if people couldn't be righteous? Ps. 14.1 says no one is righteous.

[jimwalton]

Certainly you understand that the same word can mean something different in a different context. If you really respect someone's advice, you might consider them wise. If you really disrespect someone's smart-aleck insults, you might say they're a wise guy. Same word, opposite meaning. We do this with a lot of words. We go to the county fair; we say that a judge is fair. Completely different things.

Certainly words also have nuances. A word like "wealth" can mean different things to different people, and though we may be talking about money, we may also be talking about contentment. So also with righteousness.

In Isa. 3.10, Isaiah is talking about good people. Certainly we all agree that there are good people. So does the Bible. This verse says that in this case, the good person will actually receive some comforts and rewards, rather than the garbage of life that sometimes seems to be all around us.

That's different, say, from Psalm 14.1, where it says "there is no one who is righteous." There it's talking about the person who says there is no God, which the writer regards as the most extreme depth of spiritual blindness. In such a place there is no righteousness.

[gmw803]

I understand your point, Jim. But I have to wonder, By what measure were they counted righteous? To paraphrase Habakkuk 2:4, "The righteous man is by God called righteous because he has placed his trust in God."

[jimwalton]

Great comment. Thank you for encouraging me to clarify. Lots of people (many or most, so it seems) consider themselves "righteous" because they considered themselves to be pretty good people, and also because they compare themselves with others and think that they stand in pretty good ranking when compared with others (well, at least in the top half!). This is NOT the way the Bible defines righteousness. Righteousness in the Bible is the perfect character of God, and the only way humans can be truly righteous is by turning their lives over to God, who at that time will impute his righteousness to them. It's not a righteousness that comes by works (earning, deserving, comparing), but by God looking at you as righteous because you have been covered by the blood of Jesus. (I know that's theology-speak, but anyone who wants to know more, or an explanation, just needs to ask.) It's a concept that the Bible uses the word "justification" to explain: God makes us right with him.

I'll end with a quote from Christianity Today magazine that I hope will help: "Most of the time, religion is an attempt to avoid the living God. We tend to create rituals and beliefs, rites and ethical systems to justify our existence, to placate our guilt and fear of death, to make ourselves useful to the world and acceptable to God. In short, religion is our valiant attempt to get right with God while ignoring the fact and way that he has gotten right with us: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ. To continue to work for our justification instead of accepting our justification is the essence of religion."

[gmw803]

I'm glad I placed the post, because I would not otherwise have read your response.