"Flee also youthful lusts;
but follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace with those who call on the Lord
out of a pure heart" (2 Tim. 2:22).
The order of Scripture is
everywhere most important, and particularly so in its practical exhortations.
So with the passage before us, to "follow faith" we must "follow
righteousness," and it is the relation of these to one another that I
would dwell on a little now.
It is, of course, in the adoption
of it for ourselves, and not in the exaction of it from others, that we are
called to "follow righteousness." There are those who imagine that
the Apostle Paul’s exhortation to the Corinthians—"Why do you not rather
take wrong? why do you not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded?" (1 Cor.
6:7)—to be really inconsistent with the following of righteousness. They think
that we are called to maintain righteousness upon the earth, and that we are
therefore morally bound to make war upon unrighteousness. Rather it is grace of
which we are the witnesses, as having received grace. Yet this also may be
misunderstood and abused.
Suppose I hid a thief from the
policemen that were in pursuit of him or refused to give him up into their
hands; this would not be grace, but a perversion of it. Allowing a criminal to
get away with his crime is not grace since it tends to reinforce his criminal
behavior and thus is harmful to him. It would certainly be unrighteous on my
part, for I should be interfering with government which God has established for
the restraint of evil. Nor have I liberty to show grace where another’s rights
are concerned and not my own. I am only allowed to give up my own rights, never
another’s, in order to show grace.
But I am to give up my own
rights in order to show grace, as the Lord’s words as to the non-resistance of
evil so emphatically enjoin (for example, Matt. 5:38-48). Such words are indeed
so little akin to the spirit of the world in which we live that if we are
influenced by this worldly spirit at all, we shall not be able to understand
them. The maintenance of rights has all the support of common sense and the
general culture, and unless we are ready to maintain them or even demand them,
we shall be counted as very strange indeed, if not traitors to one cause or
another. The Lord has said, "If My kingdom were of this world, then should
my servants fight" (John 18:36), and most of Christendom has decided that
His kingdom is of this world.
There is no contradiction between
following righteousness and showing grace. Guarding this point, then, it is of
the utmost importance to see that in our personal conduct, righteousness is the
very first necessity. "Righteousness" defines for the Christian a
circle beyond which he cannot go, a boundary line he dare not transgress. He
must therefore know precisely the limit, and in no case act until he is sure
that he is within the limit. Here is need for continual exercise, for the line
is not always perceptible at first sight.
God has denounced an emphatic
"Woe unto those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for
light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for
bitter" (Isa. 5:20). There must be no blurring of the moral boundary
lines. We may not put "faith" before "righteousness." We
may not argue, "We believe this is of God and therefore it must be
good." We must argue the other way:"We know from Scripture this is
good, and therefore we know it is of God." "God is light," and
light is that which "does make manifest" (Eph. 5:13). Thus, only as
walking in the light, and with our eye single to take it in, can we walk
without stumbling.
But alas! how common it is to
allow ourselves to participate in something the character of which is uncertain
to us! How many think it enough to stop where they are convicted of evil, rather
than first making sure before they act that what they do is good!
Righteousness always acts in
consistency with our position and relationship. Thus, to show grace is for a
Christian only righteous. The manifestation of grace is not something over and
above what is required of us. Righteousness embraces the whole sphere of
conduct, for "to him who knows to do good and does it not, to him it is
sin" (Jas. 4:17). How solemn, how searching are such words as these!