What is righteousness in the Bible?
What is Righteousness? A summary
Written by Max Jeganathan, speaker and writer for OCCA, The Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics.
Most non-Christian viewpoints define righteousness by performance or personal effort. Conventional righteousness seeks to be a “good person” by meeting common ethical standards like honesty. Secular righteousness takes this further, equating goodness with intense self-sufficiency or self-actualisation. However, this view has at least two problems. First, it lacks a fixed external authority, which often leads to moral relativism, where the definition of right and wrong is unstable and shifts according to individual or societal opinion. This instability highlights the need for an Objective Standard—a fixed, external moral benchmark necessary to ensure justice and prevent ethical goalposts from constantly changing.
Second, it places an unbearable burden on people, making the ‘good life’ contingent on how well someone performs morally.
By contrast, the Christian definition fundamentally shifts the focus from performance to relationship. It asserts that true righteousness is not something we can earn but is a gift of grace from God, received through faith in Jesus Christ. This is known as imputed righteousness, where an individual is placed in a “right relationship” with God by having Christ’s perfect life cover their own shortcomings. Living a righteous life, therefore, is not about moral self-sufficiency but about accepting this covering and engaging in ongoing repentance as a response to salvation.
What is righteousness?
According to the famous poet William Wordsworth, the idea of ‘righteousness’ is the root of all noble action. It’s an encouraging and hopeful declaration. But the word ‘righteousness’ can be tricky to understand, and even trickier to live out. As is often the case, the concept has meant different things at different times, and in different cultures and contexts. So, what does ‘righteousness’ actually mean? And perhaps more specifically, what does it mean for you?
Conventional definitions of righteousness refer to the quality of being morally right, just or virtuous. So perhaps at its simplest, righteousness is about being a ‘good person.’ This seems to fit with what most of us aspire to – honesty, integrity, kindness etc. There seems a deep longing on human hearts, to do the right thing as much as we can and to be the right kind of person – a righteous person. A righteous life is one that meets a certain moral standard – someone that measures up to a set of ethical expectations.
We are repeatedly told to work hard, to be kind, to be honest, to be ethical, to live righteously. The message that comes through our movies, music and literature is that the path to righteousness is a combination of personal effort and performance. The sociologists call it self-sufficiency, the psychologists call it self-actualization, the seminal thinker Carl Jung called it individuation. It is the same idea that underpins so much of the self-help, life-coaching, and new-age philosophy we see today. We are called to look into ourselves and pull ourselves up by our own moral, physical, emotional and existential bootstraps.
Where does righteousness come from?
The first challenge we face in making sense of righteousness, is determining what it consists of. One suggestion widely tried in the name of post-modernism or secularism, is the idea that moral truth is a personal and private matter. Each of us are responsible (and empowered) to decide on what’s right and wrong for ourselves. We must construct ethical, moral and social standards that we deem to be righteous – and then live by them. It’s all up to us.
There are a couple of problems with this idea. With no objective reference points and the demands of moral creation and performance on our shoulders, many of us are simply guided by what feels right or by what society thinks of as ‘good’ or ‘acceptable.’ The problem with this approach is that these things tend to change over time. Society regularly shifts on what it considers righteous. And as individuals, so do we. People rarely hold the same political views across their entire lives. And laws on marriage, voting and tax looked very different 300 years ago than they do today. With these moral goalposts regularly changing, we seem to be left with no fixed model of what the ‘good life’ actually looks like, except the shifting sands of opinion – both ours and our society’s.
Second, the idea of floating and personal moral truth never actually works in real life. There are simply things that we all know are objectively wrong (and deeply unrighteous) regardless of what anyone thinks – abuse, discrimination, cruelty, murder etc. The innate sense of right and wrong on human hearts doesn’t feel limited to me. It feels universal. Furthermore, building cohesive societies requires objective moral standards.
Part of the challenge of being righteous requires a clear standard of righteousness that exists outside of your opinion and my opinion. As author and social commentator Os Guinness puts it, an absence of a morally absolute reference point results in structural inequality through which the strong prosper and the weak suffer.1
Here, the Christian message offers an important response. The Bible sets down a clear objective reference point for righteousness, which sits outside of human opinion, time, culture and ideology. It is a moral standard that comes from God himself. There are several examples in the Bible declaring God to be the ultimate standard of righteousness. Psalm 11:7 says that “the LORD is righteous; he loves righteous deeds; the upright shall behold his face.” Psalm 119:142 declares to God “Your righteousness is righteous forever, and your law is true.” Daniel 9:7 has the prophet Daniel proclaiming to God, “To you, O Lord, belongs righteousness, but to us open shame…” Accepting that God as a worthy standard of righteousness solves one of our problems – the need for a clear righteous benchmark free of human opinions. It frees us from having to invent moral standards or argue over whose conception of righteousness is more righteous.
Falling short of righteousness
However, another challenge arises, when we try to make sense of righteousness in our own strength: We keep failing at living ‘righteously.’ Even when we get to set our own standards of what’s righteous, we generally fail to meet them. Whether it’s contempt for difficult colleagues, anger with those who cut us off in traffic, or impatience with trying family members, doing the ‘right thing’ is strenuous at the best of times and often, just impossible.
Clearly, however we think of righteousness, we aren’t getting much better at it over time. As a species, humankind has made incredible strides in science, technology, medicine, law and in improving our quality of life. However, higher level indicators of human flourishing and ethical living seem to be at all-time lows. Suicide, depression, divorce, anxiety and social dislocation continue to soar. Our moral condition remains—as ever—dangerously untethered and our technological advances have made our struggles ever-more visible to us.
The Bible recognises our struggle to meet our standards of ‘living rightly’, whatever those standards may be. In his letter to the churches in Rome just a few decades after the resurrection of Jesus, the evangelist Paul wrote that “we all fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Many centuries before Paul put ink to parchment, the Psalmist powerfully agreed with him, declaring the universal human need to be rescued from our failures, our imperfections, our immoral nature and ultimately, from ourselves (Psalm 51). We see these truths in our lives every day. Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously wrote that the line that divides good and evil cuts through the heart of every man and woman. Regardless of what one’s faith or cultural background might be; his statement is a difficult one to disprove.
Of course, there are those that deny the human need for help. Society tells us that we have everything we need within ourselves and therefore, all we need to do is look deep down inside for the answers we seek. Superficially reassuring though such sentiments may be, experience points in another direction. The more we look inside ourselves, we not only see an absence of answers but even more questions. The evidence is undeniable. We need rescuing from ourselves.
Righteousness in the Bible
According to the Christian message, righteousness is turned upside down – reimagined in a way that doesn’t fit with conventional ideas. It addresses head-on, the problem of our immutable imperfection. This is where Christianity’s true compelling power and uniqueness is revealed. How? Because according to the Christian message, righteousness is not primarily moral. It is relational. And it begins with a relationship with God, through Jesus Christ. As the author C.S. Lewis put it, Righteousness is the opposite of self-righteousness. It is not about being good in our own eyes, but about being made right in God’s. Righteousness does not begin by being morally upright, but by being right with God.
Jesus lived the perfect righteous life for which we all strive (2 Corinthians 5:21). By stepping into the world as a person, taking all of our brokenness (I.e. our unrighteousness) onto himself, paying the price for it, and rising from the dead, Jesus Christ’s perfect life (i.e. his righteousness) becomes accessible to us. As the Apostle Paul puts it:
“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” – 2 Corinthians 5:21
According to the Bible, righteousness doesn’t come from moral effort on our part, it is a gift from God. By accepting God’s offer of relationship with Jesus, we are cloaked with His righteousness. Paul reiterates this repeatedly through his letters to the early churches:
“But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law… the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.” – Romans 3:21–22
“…not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ…” – Philippians 3:9
In contrast with the world’s idea of righteousness as something to earn, strive for or live up to, the Christian message audaciously admits that we can never be truly righteous in our own strength. Instead, we are offered it as a gift, by grace and through faith. All it takes is to believe in Jesus Christ, repent, and step into a relationship with him (Romans 4:3, Hebrews 11:7). According to the Christian message a righteous person is simply someone who is in right relationship with Jesus.
He takes away our guilt and shame, covering over our imperfections with His perfect righteousness and adopting us into the family of God, where we are assured of eternal life and an eternal identity as his children. It is the greatest rescue mission ever carried out. And it’s on offer for you today.
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Max Jeganathan