“If you know he is righteous, you know that everyone who does what is right has been born of him.”           

Often my life is a blur.  I travel a bit, teach and speak to various groups, and get into interesting conversations. I was talking with someone this week, someone I can’t even remember who it was or where we were, about the fact that a person and society can never rise above his/its concept of God.  I said, “Look at the stories of the Greeks and Romans.  You have a pantheon of gods that act like wicked people on a bad hair day: killing, raping, and stealing from each other, lying and practicing deception.  And even on a good hair day they’re still wicked!  So if the gods act like that, and people worship them, what kind of behavior do you think the people will have?!”  He didn’t need to answer; it was more than obvious.

That’s true of any people and society.  In India, for example, the worldview is pantheistic.  They believe that all is one (monism).  Because it is, karma is the process of balancing good and evil, light and darkness, etc.  Think of the yin-yang circle when it is spun like a pinwheel.  All distinctions disappear into oneness.  That’s how and why they neglect starving orphans living on sidewalks in cardboard boxes (if they’re fortunate enough to have even that), because they’re working off their bad karma from a previous life.  Disrupting their lives with help would consign them to even further bad circumstances in a later life.  So it is actually a good thing to neglect them!  Not to mention it helps people with their own efforts to balance their own karma.  This is the way of their religious system, directed by their gods.

I had another conversation with a fellow in a Christian club at a local college (I remember this one!).  I was doing a 4-part series called “Witness and Worldviews”, and after part two he asked me about the Trinity.  I told him how I describe it — no one can explain it — using the basic foundations of our universe: time and space.  Both are measured by three’s: past, present, future, height, width and depth, respectively.  It takes all three for each one to exist.  Ditto with the Godhead.

But this is the side point; the real point about the Trinity is relationship.  The three Personages of the Godhead exist in holy, eternal and perfect relationship with each other. Adam and Eve began that way too.  That’s why, while he is holy and requires holiness in everyone made in his image, the method that he chose to clinch our salvation, trusting Christ because of his work on the cross and his resurrection, shouts relationship.  You trust someone, Christ in this case.  You don’t work for it as if you’re earning something.  You trust what God says, you trust Christ for what he’s done.  Relationship is front and center with God.

This is clearly seen when we examine the fact that God is righteous from 1 John chapters 2 and 3.

2:29 says, “If you know that [the Father] is righteous, you know that everyone who does what is right has been born of him”.  Righteous means complete agreement and conformity with God’s will, God’s way and God’s law.  And notice the relationship between a righteous God and his people: they are ones “who do what is right” because they have “been born of him”.  This last part describes the relationship between Father and children.

But there is more.  3:3 says, “Everyone who has this hope [of seeing Jesus in his glory and becoming like him in that respect] in him purifies himself, just as he is pure”.  The Greek word for pure is hagnos, meaning clear, separated from the possibility of defilement, contamination and corruption.  From hagnos comes hagios, meaning holy, sanctified, separated to God.  This describes God in his essence, nature and character, and goes deeper in this area than does the word righteous.  Again, notice the relationship connection: his people purify themselves “just as he is pure”.  Not only does this happen in relationship to him, it can’t happen unless God himself is pure!

And it continues: “But you know that he appeared so that he might take away our sins.  And in him is no sin” (3:5).  Here John makes the same point from the negative, or sin, side of the equation. Jesus came to remove our sins because God desires relationship with us.  And he closes the deal with this: “He [a Christian] who does what is right is righteous, just as [Jesus] is righteous.”  Without a righteous God, there would be no hope of living righteous lives or seeing righteousness in the world.  We’ve come full circle.

So it is true that all people, including Christians, can rise to the level of their God.  They usually follow, imitate and worship him/them/it. Is your relationship with God growing more righteousness in you?