Righteousness Matters

Jeremiah 7:8-15 ⁸ Behold, ye trust in lying words, that cannot profit. ⁹ Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense unto Baal, and walk after other gods whom ye know not; ¹⁰ And come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, We are delivered to do all these abominations? ¹¹ Is this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, even I have seen it, saith the LORD. ¹² But go ye now unto my place which was in Shiloh, where I set my name at the first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my people Israel. ¹³ And now, because ye have done all these works, saith the LORD, and I spake unto you, rising up early and speaking, but ye heard not; and I called you, but ye answered not; ¹⁴ Therefore will I do unto this house, which is called by my name, wherein ye trust, and unto the place which I gave to you and to your fathers, as I have done to Shiloh. ¹⁵ And I will cast you out of my sight, as I have cast out all your brethren, even the whole seed of Ephraim.

Jeremiah prophesied to Judah and more specifically to Jerusalem at a time when Babylon was coming to execute God’s judgment on a people who had turned their back on the one God who had given them everything.  Judah had become rebellious toward the Lord God Almighty.  God had sent many prophets to warn them in hopes that they would repent and return to the Lord that loved them and had delivered them time and time again.  But the people refused to hear the Word of God and the men of God. 

The message God sent through Jeremiah and many other prophets was essentially the same.  God’s message was that Righteousness Matters.  Righteousness in a biblical sense is doing what is right in the sight of God.  In our contemporary culture, as in the days of Jeremiah, the definition of righteousness had become lost to the minds of godless people.  Not godless in the sense that they were not religious or sought to worship the gods, but godless in the sense that they were completely out of touch with the one true God.  This is the case in our day, people are religious, but they are largely ignorant of the one true God and as a result have lost touch with the meaning of divine righteousness. 

Hence, righteousness became a matter of the god you worshipped, and in that sense it became a matter of opinion.  When righteousness is a matter of every man’s opinion then righteousness does not matter any more, because no one seems to really know what righteousness is any more.  When those who claim to be in touch with God (religious) live lives of lying, stealing, adultery, murder, and all other kinds of immorality then they reveal that they really know nothing at all about God. 

Righteousness matters because Almighty-God is righteous.  Hence, those who really know God will find themselves compelled to lives that are right in the sight of God.  These will not be right lives because our fellow man thinks we are good and right.  No, these will be right lives because God, and our deep relationship with him, finds our lives right in His sight. 

Righteousness Really Does Matter!

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