Un-Righteous

I started noticing the word “unrighteousness” in the Bible. I thought, why
not use a stronger word like wickedness or depravity? Why just put an “un”
in front of righteousness? But I’m not an ancient language scholar, and I
assume Bible translation teams know what they’re doing. So, I let the
question remain in my mind, holding it loosely to see if God might answer.

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And soon after, I noticed something. A young deer, lifeless, discarded on
the side of the road. It was probably hit by a car on its way to the woods.
Maybe it was following its mother but got scared and froze. Maybe the
driver stopped. Maybe they didn’t. But now, the body that was once warm and
breathing was now cold, its insides turned outward. Pink. Those innards,
those intestines and kidneys, should have been tucked safely inside the
deer’s belly. Kept warm by skin and fur. Instead, someone had draped an old
coat over the dead body to hide its ugliness. But the wind snatched the
coat away.

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Un-righteous. A perversion of what is right and good. Wholeness become
un-wholeness. Life become death. Innocence become collateral damage. That’s
what sin does. Sin takes what is good and lovely and turns its insides out.
That’s what happened to the world when the first humans went their own way
against God. All that God made, everything that existed, was good. But our
sin made things un-good. Twisted. Broken. Violent. Un-righteous. Now,
instead of doing good, we kill. We steal. We destroy. We let our greed
trample the innocent. We revert to self-preservation and accusation. We do
what is un-righteous.

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But God still loves His creation. He still loves us. And He came to save
us. When Jesus lived among us, He embodied righteousness. All He did was
good, through and through. No mixed motives, no “ends-justify-the-means”
rationale. And yet, we killed Him. We turned His insides out, ripped at His
flesh and exposed His blood to the sky. And He let us. Because He wanted to
forgive us. . . and set His creation free from unrighteousness. Though
Jesus’s body hung lifeless on a cross, though Joseph of Arimathea and
Nicodemus wrapped Jesus’s cold corpse with spices and strips of linen
before the tomb was sealed, death was not the end. Unrighteousness would
not prevail. Because on the third day, Jesus the Righteous One rose from
the dead. • Hannah Howe

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• Where have you seen unrighteousness in the world or in your own life?

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If we’ve put our trust in Jesus, we have the Holy Spirit in us, who
empowers us to live righteously. And when Jesus returns, He will put an end
to all unrighteousness and we will live with Him forever in restored
creation. How can these truths give us hope?

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For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous,
to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the
Spirit. 1 Peter 3:18 (NIV)

Read Verses:

John 10:10; John 19:38-John 19:42; Romans 8:18-Romans 8:22; 1 John 1:9; 1 Peter 3:18