IN thinking over the Scriptures which I have before me, three very different characters rise before my mind’s eye. (1) The self-righteous, or self-justified man. (2) The self-emptied man. (3) The Christ- righteous, or God-justified man; and I seem to see each of them looking in a different direction. The first is looking around at others. The second is looking within at himself. The third is looking up at Christ in glory. I will glance at them in this order.
The first, or self-justified man, we are told in Luke 18:9, “trusted in himself that he was righteous and despised others.” That is, he compares himself with other professors of the same creed as himself, and he finds to his own intense satisfaction that he is much better than most of them. He looks around, it may be, at those attending the same “place of worship,” and sees “extortioners, unjust, and adulterers,” and he thanks God that he is not like them (nor even like that bad man in the next pew to him, (Luke 18:11), nay more, he is actually religious— “I fast twice in the week,” and benevolent— “I give tithes of all that I possess,” Luke 18:12.
Now, unsaved reader, is not this something like what passes through your mind as time after time you enter your “place of worship,” and look around at others in the congregation?
Know, O vain man, that God now judges men not by a merely moral code, nor by his relations to his neighbor, but God is testing everything, by that blessed Man who was rejected and despised by the religious of the earth (see Matt. 27:20, 41, 43; and 1 Cor. 2:8), and was hanged on a tree, but is now raised to God’s right hand by the glory of his power. Tell me, Can any righteousness of your own give you a link with that blessed God-man?
The next character before me is the self-emptied man. The man who, like the publican, has learned that the “extortion, knavery, and adultery” are not in others but in himself, in that breast of his which he beat again and again in agony. He cares not to look around on “others,” and he dares not “lift up his eyes to heaven.” There he stands afar off, for he knows he has no right to draw nigh to God—crying for mercy (or propitiation), for righteousness would condemn him to hell as a sinner.
This is real repentance. A man taking his right place before God. Surely a fit case for “the balm of Gilead,” as it is written in Luke 5:31, “They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” A worthy case for “justification freely by God’s grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus; whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation (or mercy-seat, which the publican cried for) through faith in his blood” (Rom. 3:24-25).
How blessed it is to see that it is our sins which fit us for the pardoning mercy of God.
But now I come to the third character. The Christ-righteous, or God-justified man of Phil. 3:7-11. The man who has seen Christ in glory as the One who has been raised from the dead by the power and righteousness of God for his justification, and he has peace with God by faith in the God who raised Christ. Peace as certain and unalterable as Christ’s place at the right hand of God. And now he trusts in Christ and despises himself. This is the man who can look up, for he has found perfection in Christ risen and glorified, and nothing good in himself.
The God-justified man has despaired of himself. He has come to the same conclusion about himself that God did 1800 years ago, when He condemned sin in the person of Christ on the cross. And he has learned that there is nothing before God now, but Christ risen from the dead, and his whole ambition is to know more of that blessed One in whom he is “complete” (Col. 2:10).
Oh! my reader, what a change is this from what he was before. Once he used to say, “If any other man thinketh that he hath whereof he might trust in the flesh, I more” (Phil. 3:4), but now he calls himself the chief of sinners.
What has brought about this great change in his soul? How is it that the most righteous man has become the chief of sinners? It is in this way—He has not only been born again, but revolutionized by a sight of Christ in glory (read carefully Acts 9:1-20), and he has learned that that blessed One who has had no place at all in his heart or in his religion—because there was “no room” for Him (Luke 2:7)—is the very One who is the center of all God’s affections, thoughts, and counsels.
But now let us listen to the inspired utterances of the Christ-righteous man.
“But what things were gain to me (self-righteousness) those I have counted loss for Christ. Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may have Christ for my gain (or win Christ) and be found in him. Not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith. That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection” (Phil. 3:7). He desires to have nothing but Christ for his present and eternal portion. Oh, my readers, may you know the blessedness of this, for His Name’s sake!
ANON.