Noah: A Faith-Filled Work, Part 3 (Hebrews 11:7)

Hebrews 11:7 and the Gospel Background of Judgment

Hebrews 11, verse 7.

We'll read the verse together before we pray. By faith Noah, being warned by God about things not yet seen, in reverence prepared an ark for the salvation of his household, by which he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith.

Our Father, it is our desire.

And the longing of our heart that we may understand Your Word in its context and the author's intended meaning, the Spirit's intended meaning. We pray that You would help us to see the benefit and blessing of faith and how faith lays hold of Your promises and the blessings that await the righteous, the ones that are yet to come.

Fix our minds and our hearts upon the truths of Your Word here today and may our time here be profitable and productive to the end that we may give honor and glory to the Lord Jesus Christ for all that He has done to secure for us the righteousness we need.

We ask this in His name, amen.

Amen.

Any faithful and biblical presentation of the gospel must contain with it, alongside of it, the truth about the judgment that is to come because the good news is only good news if it has the backdrop of the bad news.

You understand that, most people here. You have heard the gospel presented from this pulpit enough times that you understand how the bad news precedes the good news. The bad news is what makes the good news make sense and if there is no bad news, if there's nothing from which we are saved, it is very difficult to convince men and women that they need to flee to a Savior if you don't first convince them that there is something from which they need to be saved.

And so the bad news is part of the gospel and any attempt to downplay the bad news, to sort of avoid the subject of sin, to downplay the severity of God's wrath and eternal damnation, all that ends up doing is hiding from the sinner the very thing that should motivate them to seek refuge in the Son.

And all you do then is contribute to their own self-deception. Sinners are deceived, they are self-deceived into thinking that they are okay and if we never confront them with the reality that they are not okay, that there is something from which they need to be saved, namely sin and the wrath of God that will be poured out because of that sin, if we hold that from them and refuse to give them that truth, then we're actually encouraging them in that self-deception.

In a way, we are agreeing with them. And we don't want to do that if we're gonna be faithful in the proclaiming of the gospel. The unbeliever will hate that message, of course. The minute we begin to talk about the wrath of God and judgment to come and the realities of that, the unbeliever is going to hate that.

They don't have time to abide that. It goes against everything that they believe, everything that they want to believe, everything that makes them comfortable. And so they will mock that message. This is what Peter was describing in the scripture reference that we read earlier, 2 Peter 3, verses three and four.

Peter says, in the last days, mockers will come in their mocking, following after their own lusts, and saying, where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all continues as it was from the beginning of creation.

The coming of Jesus Christ, that second coming of Christ, is going to be accompanied by all kinds of earthly judgments that will precede it and be part of his coming. It will also include an eternal judgment of fire.

And this, unbelievers mock. They hate that message. They don't want to hear it. They mock it. They mock the truth. They mock righteousness. They mock those who preach the truth, and they mock those who preach righteousness because they mock the word of God.

And they mock the gospel. And they mock the testimony of scripture. And they deny and ridicule the idea that Christ is going to return when you suggest to them that judgment is going to come. Their reasoning is that because judgment is not here now, judgment has never been part of creation.

Judgment has never been part of this world. They look back and they say, well, there's no judgment now. Therefore, there has never been a judgment. And if there has never been a judgment, then there can never be a judgment.

It is easier for them to deny a judgment that is to come if they can convince themselves that there's been no judgments in the presence and certainly no judgment in the past. They would say that just as it is today, so it has always been, and just as it has always been, so it will ever be.

That's what they convince themselves of. And they have to believe this. They want to believe this because as Peter says, he gives us the motivation for this belief. They're following after their own lusts.

The denial of the judgment that is to come and the reckoning for sin is motivated by a thirst for iniquity and by the sinner's own lusts. Paul says in Romans 1, they suppress the truth and unrighteousness.

It is unrighteousness that motivates their denial of what is patently obvious. And so the scoffer mocks the idea of coming judgment because he wants to cling to his lusts. He convinces himself that judgment has never happened so that he can convince himself that judgment will never happen.

And by convincing himself that judgment will never happen, he can muffle the voice of his conscience. And it is a lot easier to sleep next to your crying conscience every night if you can convince yourself that there is no judgment that will come for your sin.

Because that conscience screams at them, but they have to convince themselves that judgment will never come. And Peter says in that passage that we read, he says, when they maintain this, it escapes their notice that by the word of God, the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water through which the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water.

It escapes their notice. That is a very gentle and easy and a far more positive way to say something that the original language actually carries a little bit of a different tone there. The original language is far more negative.

And the King James offers a better translation at that point. The King James says they are willingly ignorant of. Not just that it escapes their notice. Escapes their notice is something that you might say kind of positively when somebody pulls out in front of you into traffic.

Oh, did it just escape your notice that I was here? But when you say that somebody is willingly ignorant of something, you're suggesting that there is a motive behind the willing ignorance. That they willingly, deliberately forget.

That's how the NIV translates it. They deliberately forget these things. The ESV, they deliberately overlook the fact that the world was flooded. And the testimony to that flood is all over the world.

The Grand Canyon was either created by a little bit of water over a long period of time or a whole lot of water over a little period of time. It was created by a whole lot of water over a little period of time.

The canyons, the geographical sedimentary layers that we see, the mountain ranges, the tectonic plates, the fossil beds, you burned on your way to church here today in your vehicle the evidence of a global flood.

They're fossil fuels. You know how fossils are made? When entire civilizations, entire beds of organic material are buried under pressure, that's how fossil fuels are made. The evidence of a global flood is everywhere around us because we live on a monument to a global destruction.

But they willingly are ignorant of that fact that there has been a judgment.

Why?

Because they're suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. And the scoffers of our day are no different by nature than the scoffers that existed in Noah's day. And Noah was a faithful man, a righteous man, and a preacher of righteousness, and he faithfully proclaimed to the people of his day that there was a judgment that was to come.

And in faith, he obediently did what the Lord told him to do and by that act of obedience, he saved his family, condemned the world, and became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith.

And that brings us to Hebrews chapter 11. And the last time we were together, we looked at the nature of Noah's faith, the nature of his faith, that it was a faith that took God at his word, it was based upon God's revelation.

He was warned about things that had not yet been seen. And yet Noah, like the definition of faith in Hebrews 11 verse one, he was convinced of things he had never seen and he treated as substance those things which had not yet come into reality, namely a global cataclysmic destruction.

But it was a faith that was based upon God's word, God said it, God said something to Noah that he had never seen, warned him of something that was to come that Noah had no physical, no scientific, no rational, no observational reason to believe would ever happen, but God said it and Noah believed it.

And then he built an ark and it was an obedient faith. So not only a faith based upon God's revelation, but it was an obedient faith. Noah meticulously did all that the Lord commanded him to do. Genesis six says everything that God said for him to do, thus Noah did.

He was meticulous in his obedience. These are the marks of genuine saving faith, takes God at his word and meticulously obeys what the Lord says. That's biblical saving faith. Now today we're looking at the results of Noah's faith and there are three phrases at the end of verse seven.

These three statements, his faith results in the salvation of his household, the condemnation of the world and he became an heir of righteousness. And we will get through all three of these today because this is our last look at Noah as an example of faith and next week we'll begin to look at Abraham, mentioned in verse eight.

The Salvation of Noah’s Household

First the salvation of his household. In reverence he prepared an ark for the salvation of his household. Now this is not spiritual salvation that's being described here. The word salvation, we typically use that word to describe forgiveness of sins, deliverance from wrath, deliverance from hell, being redeemed and forgiven and justified, et cetera.

And the word can use that. But the word salvation simply means a deliverance or a preservation. So it would depend upon its context in terms of what we are talking about being saved or delivered or preserved from.

If we're talking about a physical danger, then one could be saved and have salvation from a physical danger. But if we're talking about a spiritual peril, then one could be saved and have deliverance from a spiritual peril.

It is not spiritual salvation or deliverance that's being described here in the context. This is physical salvation. Noah's faith in the building of the ark preserved his family through the global flood.

Noah was saved by faith before he ever built the ark. The ark was not the means of their spiritual salvation. Otherwise there would be eight people who would be justified and forgiven because of a piece of wood.

That doesn't happen. All men have justified by faith. Noah and his family would have been the same. Noah was justified and declared righteous by his faith, not because he built an ark. That would be salvation by works.

The building of the ark was the evidence of his faith. The evidence, the faith was manifest in the fact that he obeyed the Lord. That showed to everybody, it justified in the eyes of men that this was a faithful man.

But the ark didn't spiritually save his family. Noah was saved because of his faith, by his faith. Through faith he was justified. Through faith he became an heir of the righteousness, which is according to faith.

There is a connection between the ark and the Lord Jesus Christ that you and I should not miss. And this discussion of salvation here and what is described here gives us an opportunity to make this connection.

Peter does this in 1 Peter chapter three, not the epistle that we read at the beginning of the service, but the first epistle. Chapter three, verse 20, Peter speaks of those who were once disobedient when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah during the construction of the ark in which a few, that is eight persons, were brought safely through the water.

Then Peter makes this connection to salvation. And he says, corresponding to that, baptism now saves you. Now listen, not water baptism, because Peter says, it is not the removal of dirt from the flesh, but an appeal to God for a good conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ who is at the right hand of God, having gone into heaven after angels and authorities and powers have been subjected to him.

So Peter is saying, it is our identification, that's what the idea of baptism is there, the identification, it's not a wet baptism, but a dry baptism. And it's not a baptism in the physical realm, it's a baptism or an immersion in the spiritual realm that Peter is talking about.

Just as Noah was carried safely through the waters of judgment, so it is, because he was in the ark and safe on board that, so it is that you are carried safely through the fires of God's judgment because of your identification with the Lord Jesus Christ in his work, his death, his burial, and his resurrection.

Just as Noah was physically saved from physical judgment, so you and I are spiritually saved through spiritual judgment. And just as there was one ark and one door on the ark, so there is one way and one savior for all of mankind.

And just as all those who were on board the ark were preserved and saved, so all those in Jesus Christ will be preserved and saved. And just as everybody outside of the ark perished in the judgment, so all those who are outside of Jesus Christ and have never repented of their sin and placed their faith in him will perish in eternal judgment.

See, this is the parallel. The ark of God is salvation from temporal judgment of water and the ark of God, which is the Lord Jesus Christ, is salvation from eternal judgment of fire. That's the parallel.

So the flood of Noah's day stands as a reminder to all people for all time that God is a just God, God, that he judges sin, and yet God graciously offers a way of salvation to any and all who will avail themselves of God's grace during the days of grace.

And the one who will not surrender his rebellion and his sin and persists in it in impenitence will stand before God, will be judged for their sin, and will be completely without excuse. Noah's faith moved him to build an ark.

This resulted in the salvation of his family. I think the word is intentional because it is intended to connect in our minds, that word salvation, to connect in our minds the safety of the ark as God's means of saving a few with the Lord Jesus Christ who is our safety and God's means of saving a few compared to the damnation and judgment of the whole world.

Noah saved his family, not a spiritual salvation, a physical salvation which was itself a picture of a higher and heavenly and later reality. Second, by this he condemned the world. Look at verse seven.

In reverence he prepared an ark for the salvation of his household by which he condemned the world. Now here's the question, by what did he condemn the world? There's two possible answers to that question.

This is a bit of an interpretive issue that we kind of have to address, but by what did Noah condemn the world? Was it by his faith that he condemned the world or by the building of the ark that he condemned the world?

See by faith, Noah being warned by God about things not yet seen, in reverence prepared an ark for the salvation of his family by which, by the preparation of the ark or by his faith by which he prepared the ark?

The word, the phrase by which could refer to either one of those things. Either Noah's faith condemned the world or the ark condemned the world. Which one is it? Now at this point you say this is where Jim says it's both.

Well it may very well be both. I don't think that we can separate them very distinctly at this point. Noah's faith was evidenced in the fact that he built an ark. These two things go together in our passage and in the life of Noah.

He was warned by God about things that were not yet seen and his faith moved him to build an ark. So really we could say, I think in the mind of the author that what is in view here is that the world was condemned by Noah's faith which produced the ark itself so that the ark and his faith both work together as an act and a testimony of condemnation to an unbelieving world.

Now I'll give you a few statements as to why this is. I mean how is it that his faith condemned the world? How is it that the ark condemned the world? How is it that the faith building the ark would condemn the world?

And what is meant by condemnation? Let me give you a few sentences or a few statements. First, saving faith is itself a condemnation of unrepentant unbelief. Saving faith is itself a condemnation. It doesn't have to say anything.

Just the existence of a man of faith is itself a condemnation to the world. In order to condemn the world, we don't have to argue with unbelievers, we don't have to strive with unbelievers, we don't have to mock them, we don't have to speak ill of them, we don't have to point out the lunacy of their worldview, we don't have to do any of that.

Just the existence of a righteous man or woman, even the existence of one righteous man or woman like Noah is enough to condemn the entire world because the existence of faith means that there is someone standing in a world of darkness who says, I trust God and his word and I'm willing to stand on that because I know that that is true.

Just that act, just the existence of faith itself by contrast with the world around it shows the lunacy and the inexcusability of unbelief in the world. So the world remains in their unbelief and they're inexcusable in their unbelief and all that is necessary for the world to feel condemned is just the presence of a godly person, just the presence of one righteous person is enough to make the world feel condemned.

In this sense, it is nothing that Noah said, we'll get to what he said here in just a moment, but in this sense, it is nothing that Noah said that condemned the world, it was just the fact that Noah was that condemns the world, just the fact that he exists.

The world hates believers and if there were only one believer on the face of the planet, the world would still hate that one believer because just the presence of faith condemns unbelief because the presence of faith says there is something that we are to believe in that you are not believing and this thing will save you if you will turn to it.

Just the existence of faith is condemnation to the world. Second, the life of saving faith condemns the world. It's the living of your faith that also condemns the world. Those who have faith live righteous lives and they are obedient and that faith condemns the disobedience of the disobedient.

The darkness and the sin of unbelievers life is magnified by the obedience and the light of even one believer. Just the living out of your faith and the reality of walking in truth and according to the faith, itself shines a light into the darkness and nobody really realizes how dark it is until the light shines because the light makes people realize, wow, it really was dark.

Just the existence of light makes people realize how much darkness they were in. This is what Peter is mentioning in 1 Peter chapter four when he says, for the time already passed is sufficient for you, this is verse three, to have carried out the desire of the Gentiles, having pursued a course of sensuality and lust, drunkenness, carousing, drinking parties and abominable idolatries.

Listen to what Peter says. In all this, they, that is the unbelievers, are surprised that you do not run with them into the same excesses of dissipation and they malign you. Unbelievers are shocked. The time passed is sufficient for you to have lived out all the immoralities of your past life.

Now you have come to faith in Christ and the unbelieving world looks at that and they're shocked that you don't run with them into drunkenness and excesses and dissipation and then what do they do, Peter says?

They malign you. They speak ill of you.

They hate you.

They blaspheme you. They speak horrible things about you but Peter says, they will give an account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead for the gospel has for this purpose been preached even to those who are dead that though they are judged in the flesh as men, they may live in the spirit according to the will of God.

You have undoubtedly run across people in your life who are offended and feel condemned and feel guilty and don't wanna be around you simply because you don't run with them into the same sin that you once did because the minute you walk out of that, you are condemning their lifestyle, aren't you?

You don't have to say anything, do you? You don't have to say anything about their immorality. You don't have to say anything about their worldview. You don't have to say anything about their sin. All you have to do is say, no thanks, I'm done with that and what are you, more righteous than me?

Are you a pious, self-righteous Christian? Who are you to condemn me? You don't have to say anything and that's exactly what goes through their mind and sometimes even out of their mouths. It is an irritant to the world because the light condemns the darkness and the righteousness of the believer's life just shows just how unrighteous and unbeliever's life is.

Obedience to the Lord condemns their disobedience. Our belief damns their unbelief and our faithfulness damns their treachery. That's why the world hates it. The world doesn't hate you for your political views.

The world doesn't hate you because you give a portion of your money to religious causes. The world doesn't hate you because you sing Christian songs. The world hates you because you remind them of Christ.

That's why the world hates you. If the world doesn't hate you, well, you make the connection there. Noah's belief was a testimony that there was a way to escape judgment and if there is a way to escape judgment, then there must be a judgment coming.

And if there is a judgment coming and I don't escape judgment, then what? I'm condemned. So it's not just the presence of belief, it's just not the fact of faith that condemns the world, it's also a life that has lived in faith.

Third, it's the preaching of faith condemns the world. This is really, I think, where the rub was for Noah. It was not so much just the fact that he existed, though that was sufficient, and it wasn't the fact that he lived a righteous life, though that would have been sufficient.

But 2 Peter 2, verse five says, Noah was a preacher of righteousness and you cannot preach righteousness and you cannot preach God's righteousness without revealing to men and making manifest to them that they are unrighteous and that they need that righteousness.

So if we are to preach of righteousness and we are to speak of God's righteousness, then we must, in the course of doing that, demonstrate to men and women that they are unrighteous and that they need righteousness.

The necessity of righteousness imputed to them is what we preach, the necessity that they be righteous, that's our message, and you cannot show men that they are unrighteous without, in a sense, condemning them even by what you say because you have to warn them of the judgment that is to come.

Faithful preaching will always mention God's righteousness and the faithful preaching of God's righteousness will always condemn the world because what you are saying is here's the standard and all of us fall short, and if all of us fall short and condemnation comes to everybody who falls short, then you are condemned.

That's the message that we have to preach to be faithful and the only way to avoid preaching that message is to become unfaithful in the way that we explain the gospel. So we have to choose between being faithful or being unfaithful, between offending God and offending the unbeliever, those are our two choices.

There are churches and ministries and philosophies of evangelism and their whole premise is to say we don't want to make anybody feel condemned, we don't want to make anybody feel uncomfortable, we're just here to talk about love, we just want to bring people to Jesus, that's all we want to do, we're not going to condemn anyone.

I got news for you,.

The unbelievers are condemned already. You don't have to condemn them, they're already condemned. It's unloving and ungracious for us not to tell them that. John chapter three, verse 18, he who believes in him is not judged, but he who does not believe has been judged already because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

This is the judgment that light has come into the world and men love the darkness rather than light for their deeds were evil. They are condemned already, they are judged already. What condemned the world was not Noah speaking ill of them, it wasn't Noah mocking them or ridiculing them or calling them names, that was not the condemnation.

The condemnation was in what Noah said, that was the condemnation. They would face God's wrath someday, not Noah's, they would stand before God's standards someday, not Noah's. So if Noah was to be faithful and explain to the world that there's a judgment to come and what that coming judgment was for and why all men deserved it in order to convince people to get on board the ark and be saved, that by necessity he would have to demonstrate their unrighteousness and by necessity he would have to condemn the world.

So did Noah himself condemn the world? Yes, he did in what he said, in what he said by his faith, in what he said by his preaching, in what he said by his lifestyle, but even in condemning the world and in saying the words, there is a judgment that is coming for your sin and you will be judged and damned for that sin if you do not repent, even in making that statement, Noah was condemning the world, but only as God's proxy.

It wasn't Noah's condemnation or wrath that they would face, it was God's wrath that they would face. So Noah did condemn the world, but only as a proxy, a mouthpiece, a spokesman for God who was faithful in doing what God called him to do.

But the ark also condemned the world. It wasn't just the existence of faith and the living of faith and the preaching of faith, but also the work of Noah's faith, the building of the ark would have condemned the world.

For 120 years, he was building that boat. That's a long time, that's a long time. That's half of the time that our country has been a country, it's a long time. 120 years he built that boat. I can only imagine that there were thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people who over the course of that more than a century would have heard about the ark, maybe gone, made trips to go look at the ark, meet Noah.

People would have walked by it. I do not believe for a moment that Noah went and he built this ark out in the middle of some desert somewhere where nobody would see it. I believe it was right where he was at in the middle of civilization.

Thousands of people would have seen that. They would have walked by it. For 120 years, he built a monument, a promise of their coming judgment. Just the sight of that ark itself was enough to condemn them and to make them feel condemned because every time they saw the ark, they would be reminded that he's talking about a judgment that is to come and if I don't get on board that ark, I'm gonna perish in that judgment.

Just the sight of the ark itself would remind them of their unbelief and of their sinfulness and of the judgment that was to come. So in that way, the ark did condemn them. You can well imagine that everybody in Noah's neighborhood would get up every weekday morning and ride on their camel on the way to the office past the ark and they would see it there and then they would all gather around a water cooler and they would talk about nutty Noah and being out there and still building that ark.

Mothers would take their boys to football practice, sat down at the field and they would walk over there and they would sit up in the stands and do their knitting and talk about nutty Noah out there in the plains building his ark far away from any water.

What a crazy man he must have been. Do you realize that when the flood came, there were people who could have been 120 years old who would have said, that thing's been being built for as long as I've been alive.

He started that the month before I was born and all I can remember is the time when that ark was being built out there. For a century and a half, that ark condemned the world because it was the sign and the symbol and it was the promise of their judgment.

The ark was either going to be for them the instrument of their salvation or the instrument of their damnation. The ark, inclusion in it was their salvation and exclusion from it was their condemnation.

Salvation or damnation, those were the two options that they had and those were the two things that the ark screamed at them every time they saw the ark for 120 years. And here is yet another parallel to Jesus Christ.

Just the salvation of the ark itself would have screamed condemnation and I can imagine, and I don't mean to be overly graphic here, but I can imagine the sinners who were treading the waters of judgment and watched that ark floating around out there as their time was drawing to a close.

They would have realized as they saw that ark that they were condemned. That was the promise of their judgment. And this is the parallel to the Lord Jesus Christ again. If one is found in him because you have repented of your sin and trusted him for salvation and you have believed upon Christ and been born again, then Jesus Christ is for you the instrument of your salvation and your deliverance.

But listen, he is also the instrument of damnation and condemnation because there are plenty of sinners who have gone through these days of grace who will stand and stare into his eyes and they will realize that they have spurned his offer of grace during the days of grace and now the days of grace are over.

And that very one standing on that throne, sitting on that throne who offered them salvation for years and decades in this world is now the instrument of their judgment and their damnation.

He is the ark.

Any in him will be saved and all who are outside of him will be judged and damned. That is the promise. The work of Noah's faith, that ark, was itself an instrument of their damnation in that sense. And third, he became an heir of righteousness.

The Righteousness According to Faith

The salvation of his family, the condemnation, the judgment that came upon the world, and third, he was an heir of righteousness. That's a bit of an interesting phrase, an heir of righteousness, because it kind of suggests that righteousness like an inheritance can be handed down, right?

Like Noah got righteousness from his father or his grandfather, his great-grandfather, or that maybe Methuselah died and handed all of his righteousness to Noah.

That's the idea.

Or it might suggest to us that it is in the building of the ark that Noah ended up inheriting righteousness. What is meant by an heir of righteousness? Let's deal with the subject of righteousness first, the end of that phrase, the end of that verse.

He became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith. I think once we understand what is meant by the righteousness which is according to faith, then the idea of an heir and what it meant for Noah will become a little bit more obvious to us.

There are other kinds of righteousness other than a righteousness which is according to faith. There is a human righteousness. Human righteousness is really a righteousness in name only. It is a righteousness that is not pure, it's not undefiled, it's not perfect, it's not glorious in any sense, and it doesn't please God, because human righteousness, righteousness by works, is the righteousness that we try to acquire or attain by all of the good deeds that we think that we are doing to earn salvation.

The merits, the charitable giving, all the things that we think that we do in righteousness, keeping the law, trying to earn good standing before God, that is an attempt at righteousness, but it is an attempt at righteousness by a flawed, failing, sinful, corrupt, immoral, wicked, depraved, helplessly lost sinner.

And therefore, that righteousness is a flawed righteousness and it's not pure. It is a righteousness that is like filthy rags. That's how Isaiah describes it. It's putrid, it's unclean, it's unacceptable.

And that righteousness comes, that human righteousness is the type of righteousness ginned up by a sinner who is unwilling to admit that they have no righteousness, that they stand before God in all of their sin and all of their tattered clothes of their own self-righteousness, they're unwilling to admit that that righteousness is not good enough to please God.

And so they come to God thinking that all of their good deeds which they have done in righteousness in an attempt to gain that righteousness will be acceptable to God. And it is a refusal to believe what God says concerning human sin and human inability, inability to please God.

There is a righteousness then that is according to faith and that is given to the sinner. It is an imputed righteousness. It is a pure righteousness. It is a perfect righteousness and it's the righteousness that we need to stand before God on judgment day.

What does God require for those to stand in his presence? A flawless and perfect record of obedience, perfection, moral perfection, a perfect record of obedience. If that's the standard, then who can attain it?

None of us can attain that standard. That standard is impossible. Nobody who has ever lived has attained that standard, except one. And he gives that righteousness to all who place their faith in him.

That's the righteousness that we need to stand before God. The tattered robes or our own self-righteousness will never be sufficient. We can never stand before God. There is a righteousness which comes according to faith.

This is the righteousness that Paul said when after listing all of his accomplishments according to the law in Philippians chapter three, he says in verse eight, so that I may gain Christ, he said, I count all of those pluses that I had on my account, I count them as rubbish, so that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith.