The Righteousness of God

The obedience which the law demands, is called righteousness; and those who render that obedience are called righteous. To ascribe righteousness to any one, or to pronounce him righteous, is the scriptural meaning of the word to justify. The word never means to make good in a moral sense, but always to pronounce just or righteous. Thus God says, I will not justify the wicked.§ Judges are commanded to justify the righteous and to condemn the wicked.|| Wo is pronounced on those who justify the wicked for a reward. In the New Testament it is said, By the deeds of the law shall no flesh be justified in his sight.** It is God who justifieth, who is he that condemneth?  There is scarcely a word in the Bible the meaning of which is less open to doubt. There is no passage in the New Testament in which it is used out of its ordinary and obvious sense, t When God justifies a man, he declares him to be righteous. To justify never means to render one holy. It is said to be sinful to justify the wicked; but it could never be sinful to render the wicked holy. And as the law demands righteousness, to impute or ascribe righteousness to any one, is in scriptural language to justify. To make (or constitute) righteous, is another equivalent form of expression. Hence to be righteous before God, and to be justified, mean the same thing; as in the following passage, Not the hearers of the law are righteous before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified.^ The attentive, and especially the anxious reader of the Bible cannot fail to observe that these various expressions, to be righteous in the sight of God, to impute righteousness, to constitute righteous, to justify, and others of similar import, are so interchanged as to explain each other, and to make it , clear that to justify a man is to ascribe or impute to him righteousness. The great question then is, How is this righteousness to be obtained? We have reason to be thankful that the answer which the Bible gives to this question is so perfectly plain.

Source: Charles Hodge, The Way of Life. Philadelphia, American Sunday-school Union (1841).