Righteousness and Life

“If there had been a law given which could make alive, verily righteousness would have been of the law.” This shows us that righteousness is life. It is no mere formula, no dead theory or dogma, but is living action. Christ is the life, and He is, therefore, our righteousness. “The Spirit is life because of righteousness.” The law written on two tables of stone, could not give life, any more than could the stones on which it was written. All its precepts are perfect, but the flinty characters can not transform themselves into action. He who receives only the law in letter, has a “ministration of condemnation,” and death. But “the Word was made flesh.” In Christ, the Living Stone, the law is life and peace. Receiving Him through the “ministration of the Spirit,” we have the life of righteousness, which the law approves.GTI 145.1

This twenty-first verse shows that the giving of the law was to emphasize the importance of the promise. All the circumstances attending the giving of the law,—the trumpet tone, the awful voice, the quaking earth, the “fire, and blackness, and tempest,” the thunders and lightnings, the bounds about the mount, beyond which it was death to pass,—all these told that “the law worketh wrath” to “the children of disobedience.” But the very fact that the wrath which the law works comes only on the children of disobedience, proves that the law is good, and that “the man that doeth them shall live in them.” Did God wish to discourage the people?—Not by any means. The law must be kept, and the terrors of Sinai were designed to drive them back to the oath of God, which four hundred and thirty years before had been given to stand to all people in all ages as the assurance of righteousness through the crucified and ever-living Saviour.GTI 145.2