In my return to the faith, I’ve realized that some words just… lose their meaning after a time. Maybe they are used so many times that they lose their kick/meaning… or maybe we absorb them at some point in our life to mean one thing, only to lose the power of the word in other contexts later.
That being said, I’ve found myself rethinking a few of these lately, and want to start with Righteousness.
What is righteousness, and why are we seeking it?
Let’s start with this:
If we accept that God is the creator of all.
And that God created all things as they are and should be. Then God would have to be (or at least know) what is right to do so.
So, if God is “right.”
It stands to reason that which HE created… must also be right.
God’s essence then is that of being righteous.
And all that comes from his creation (naturally) must be then… righteousness.
This doesn’t just include the “things.” It’s all encompassing. It’s matter and energy, light and dark, positive and negative, birth and death of plants and animals, even justice and truth itself. He is the source of all actions, reactions, chains of reaction exponentially creating more and more complex portions of our reality… the very forces and laws of nature and physics and chemistry and biology itself were (and still are) God… and are, therefore, right by nature.
So how did we fall out of this righteousness?
When we came along as conscious beings… we “chose” to defy that Godly, righteous, natural flow and those natural laws, rules, and realities. We aligned ourselves not with what was right, but against that which was right or natural (read: God) . And in each interaction beyond that, we have chosen to take our futures into our own hands; against the natural, unconscious flow… and each of these steps have been away from what is right, or righteous.
While we ARE capable of making good decisions, altruistic decisions, selfless decisions, integrity-based decisions… the fact is we were born into societies (and generally speaking, bodies) that value “self” over God… or said another way values wrongness over rightness. We are now (by society or genetics… or by the story of the Garden and original sin) naturally aligned with the opposite… trying to control the flow, rather than becoming part of it. We are aligning ourselves with the wrongness instead of the rightness.
So… how do we become righteous?
We first have become cognizant and aware of this shift in focus…
and we have to try (as much as we are humanly able) to choose differently. To seek first righteousness (read: God) and the actions will follow… we will begin to choose others over self. To choose charity over greed. To choose joy over despair. To choose peace over anxiety. To choose acceptance over control. To choose love over indifference. To choose gratitude over despair. To choose the world over ourselves. To choose the course of history at large one the course of our own history.
And every decision we make which helps realign ourselves and the reality around us with the true, originally intended nature of the universe that God initiated… is a step toward that rightness (with God), and gets us closer to changing our own essence into that of being righteous, and makes our actions become those of righteousness. Read all that again as: when you put your focus on God and His nature, and you choose to align more with God than self, you can more successfully grow close to God, and to being right with God through becoming more righteous.
Say it slower and say it shorter:
Becoming righteous means acknowledging the Goodness of God inherent in his total creation… accepting your place within it… as a steward of it… and living your life, behaving in such a way that your continued actions align with His goodness that we’ve all been blessed with and honoring it to your greatest extent… affectively aligning yourself more with what is right and Godly than what is not.