And he [Abram] believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness.

Genesis 15:6, NKJV

One of the most grace-filled, and yet at the same time gravely demanding, names of God found in Scripture is YAHWEH-Tsidkenu – “The Lord our righteousness”. The context of the verse quoted above will shed much light on this matter. God had just promised Abram that his son, who was yet to be born, would be the one through whom God’s promises to Abram in Genesis 12:1-6 would come to pass. Abram had been trying to figure things out on his own, but God had already mapped out the entire plan. And here, in Genesis 15:6, we are told that Abram, in simple, child-like faith, believed God. The name by which God revealed Himself to Abram here is “YAHWEH-Tsidkenu”.

In this verse, along with many others found in the Bible, we see the gracious act of God in His provision of righteousness to the unrighteous. This is a sovereign act of God, provided through His preordained plan to send His own Son, Jesus Christ, into the world to provide salvation for sinful man.

The imputation of righteousness, and the impartation of righteousness.

This act of God provides two essential needs of man which no man can provide for himself. These are: the imputation of righteousness, and the impartation of righteousness. In order to understand this, we need to re-visit the story of Adam and Eve. When Adam committed his act of disobedience in the Garden of Eden, he was immediately cursed with the penalty of rebellion against God. As the head of the human race, his sinful nature was then passed down to all humans born. This is the act of the imputation of sin: we are sinners because we are born with a sin nature passed down from Adam.

The imputation of Adam’s sin also means that the ability to sin, or, to put it a better way, the inability not to sin, was passed down to us. Because of the imputation of the sin nature, we sin because we are sinners. We do not become sinners when we sin.

As a result of this sordid spiritual mess we find ourselves in, we have no hope of a relationship with God. None! We are spiritually dead in trespasses and sins, as Paul says in Ephesians.

So, God did what only God could do. He is YAHWEH-Tsidkenu, the Lord our righteousness. Since all of our righteousness is “as filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6) before God, we are in desperate need of someone providing righteousness for us. God did this in providing His Son to be the propitiation for sin – the sin-bearer, who paid the full penalty of our sin through His sacrificial death on the cross through which He objectively met the righteous demands of God’s law.

Through this act, He provided for the imputation of His righteousness to the unrighteous. This is the reason Paul can say that we are saved by grace – through this amazing act of Jesus Christ on the cross. His righteousness is now, by virtue of His victory over death, hell, and the grave, imputed to lost sinners. When God the Father looks at the believer, He now sees the righteousness of His Son, and not the unrighteousness of the individual. He can then say, as He did to Abram, that his faith was counted to him as righteousness. Not because Abram was inherently righteous, but because God’s righteousness was imputed to him. Amazing grace!

But that is only half of the story. Alongside this declaration of the grace-filled imputation of righteousness is the declaration of the gravely demanding impartation of righteousness. Not only has God imputed to the believer the righteousness of Jesus Christ, He has also imparted to us the ability to live righteous lives. Remember, Adam’s act of sin resulted in the fact that all of humanity would be unable not to sin. We all sin and fall woefully short of God’s demands for righteousness.

But now, through the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, we are able not to sin. And with this ability not to sin comes the command of the Bible that we be perfect. In the Sermon on the Mount we hear Jesus say that we must be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect (Matthew 5:48). Wow! Is that even possible? How can a sinful human being be perfect? We still have our old nature, don’t we? Yes! We still have the ability and the propensity to sin, don’t we? Yes! So how are we to live under the crushing weight of this demand for perfection?

It is through the imputation, and the impartation, of the righteousness of Jesus Christ. It is through His ability that I am made able. It means that I have the ability to say “No” to temptation. It means that, as Paul says, I have the ability to walk in the Spirit, and by doing so I will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. It means that by His grace I have His righteousness imputed to my account, and I have His righteousness imparted to my being. I am pronounced righteous, and I am made righteous.

Have you paused to thank God that He has pronounced you righteous by the righteousness of His Son? Have you paused to petition Him to grant you the daily grace to live life righteously, to His glory? If you are a child of God, then you are the recipient of His saving grace which gives you the imputation of His righteousness, and you are the recipient of His daily, sanctifying grace, which provides for you the impartation of His righteousness which enables you to live in victory over sin.

Until next time:

Blessings!