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