The Model Righteousness of Jesus

Reading the 7th chapter of By This Standard: The Authority of God's Law Today, is like having a crash course in Christology, biblical law, and Christian ethics. This is the 2nd part in Bahnsen's trinitarian approach to prove the continuing validity of biblical law. 

After reading the chapter, I was impressed with the wealth of exegetical insights and biblical material. I think this is a good material for teaching the adult Sunday School. And so I decided to reorder this chapter into an outline format. In doing this, I place a couple of paragraph here and there under the section, which I think is most suitable. 

The theme of the whole chapter is Jesus' model of righteousness. Dr. Greg Bahnsen structured the chapter's content under three major divisions:

• The centrality of Jesus throughout the Bible

• Jesus' life is in complete conformity to the law of God

• Christian life understood as imitating Christ means following the same moral standard

The Centrality of Jesus Throughout the Bible

1. From creation to the promise of His coming as the Messiah

• He was as the Word of God, active at the creation of the world (John 13)

• He providentially upholds all things by the word of His power (Hebrews 1:3). 

• He was the seed of the woman who would crush the serpent's head (Genesis 3:15). 

• The entire Old Testament prepares for His coming as the prophet (Deut. 18:15-19), priest (Ps. 110:4), and king (Isa. 9:6-7).

2. The New Testament speaks of the centrality of Jesus. 

• The Gospels tell of His life and saving ministry

• Acts tells us of the continuation of His work through the presence of the Holy Spirit in the church

• The epistles are His letters through His chosen servants (for example, Galatians 1:1) to his elect people

• The book of Revelation is His revelation 

• His church now labors to make all nations His disciples (Matt. 28:18-20)

• At the consummation of history, He will return again to judge all mankind (Acts 17:31). 

• From beginning to end, the Bible speaks of Jesus Christ who is "the Alpha and the Omega" (Rev. 22:13).

• He is the key to God's special revelation and the one who should have preeminence in our lives (Col. 1:18).

Jesus' Life, in Complete Conformity to the Law of God

Under this section, Rushdoony discussed the relationship between Jesus and the law of God. The life of Jesus is described as a life of perfect obedience to the perfect moral standard of God.

"A short survey of Biblical teaching discloses that God does not save His chosen people by lowering His moral standards; the very reason why those people need His saving mercy is because they have violated His moral standards. If such standards were expendable or arbitrary, then God could choose to ignore their transgression and save people by sheer fiat or decree of pardon. However, the law could not be thus ignored. To save His people, God sent His only-begotten Son to die sacrificially in their place. In order to qualify as the Savior, Christ lived a life of perfect obedience to the commandments of God. In order to atone for sins, Christ died in alienation from the Father to satisfy the law's demand for punishment. Consequently in His life and death Christ perfectly obeyed the law of God, and this has unavoidable implications for Christian ethics - for imitating the Christ portrayed throughout the Bible."

The Scriptures regard the work of Christ as that of perfect obedience:

• In defining the purpose of His Messianic advent, Christ said "I have come down from heaven to do the will of Him who sent Me" (John 6:38). 

• The pivotal event in the accomplishment or redemption was Christ's laying down His life and taking it up again - His death and resurrection; in these things Christ· was obeying His Father's commandment (John 10:17-18). 

• His work of atonement was performed in the capacity of a suffering servant (cf. Isa. 52:13-53:12). As such He was subjected to the law (Gal. 4:5) and justified us by His obedience (Rom. 5:19). Obedience to the will and commandment of God was therefore crucial to the life and ministry of our Savior. 

• As our great High Priest He was sacrificed to discharge the curse of the law against our sin (Gal. 3:13; Heb. 2:17 -3:1; 4:14-5:10). 

• As the prophet of the law, Christ rendered its proper interpretation and peeled away the distorting traditions of men (Matt. 5:17-48; 15:1-20). 

• And because He obeyed the law perfectly and hated all lawlessness, Christ has been exalted as the anointed King (Heb. 1:8, 9). 

We see here that Christ's saving work and His three-fold office are determined by His positive relation to the law of God, the permanent expression of His holy will.

• Since Christ is the exact representation of God's nature (Heb. 1:3) and since the law is a transcript of the holiness of God, Christ embodied the law perfectly in His own person and behavior. 

• Christ challenged His opponents with the stunning-virtually rhetorical-question, "Which of you convicts me of sin?" (John 8:46). Of course, no one could, for Christ alone was in a position to declare, "I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in His love" (John 15:10).

• Christ was tempted at every point with respect to obeying the commands of God, yet He remained sinless throughout (Heb. 4:15). 

• Because He kept the law perfectly, Christ had no need to offer up sacrifice for His own sins (Heb. 7:26-28). Instead He offered Himself up without spot to God, a lamb without blemish as the law required, in order to cleanse us of our sins (Heb. 9:14). 

• The Old Testament had foretold, "righteousness will be the belt about His loins" (Isa. 11:5), and the Messiah could declare, "Thy law is within my heart" (Ps. 40:7-8; Heb. 10:4-10).

• We read in Galatians 4:4 that "when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem them that were under the law."

• Christ was neither lawless nor above the law; He submitted to its every requirement, saying "it becomes us to fulfill all righteousness" (Matt. 3:15). 

• He directed the healed to offer the gift commanded by Moses (Matt. 8:4), kept the borders of his garments (9:20; 14:36), paid the temple tax (17:24-27), attended to the purity of the temple (21:12-17), etc. 

• He directed His followers to do those things which conformed to the law's demand (Matt. 7:12), told the rich young ruler to keep the commandments (19:17), reinforced the Old Testament law by summarizing it into two love commandments (22:40), indicted the Pharisees for making God's commandments void through traditions of men (Mark 7:6-13), and insisted that even the most trite or insignificant matters of the law ought not to be left undone (Luke 11:12).

• Jesus severely warned His followers not even to begin to think that His coming had the effect of abrogating even the slightest letter of the law; teaching that even the least commandment had been annulled would eventuate in one's demotion in the kingdom of God (Matt. 5:17-19). 

• Christ submitted to the law of God even to the very point of suffering its prescribed penalty for sin. He died the death of a criminal (Phil. 2:8), taking upon Himself the curse of the law (Gal. 3:13) and cancelling thereby the handwriting which was against us because of the law (Col. 2:14). "He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities.... Jehovah has laid on him the iniquity of us all" (Isa. 53:4-6).

• Sin cannot avoid the dreadful judgment of God (Nahum 1:2-3; Habakkuk 1:13), and therefore God does not save sinners without righteousness and peace kissing each other (Ps. 85:9-10).

• Jesus remains just, while becoming the justifier of His people (Rom. 3:26). Accordingly the law's demands could not be arbitrarily pushed aside. Christ had to come and undergo the curse of the law in the place of His chosen people; He had to satisfy the justice of God. That is why it can be said that the death of Christ is the outstanding evidence that God's law cannot be ignored or abrogated. 

• According to the law there is no remission of sin apart from the shedding of blood (Heb. 9:22; Lev. 17:11). "Therefore it was necessary that Christ offer up himself in sacrifice for sin" (Heb. 9:23-26). The necessity of the law's continuing validity is substantiated by the saving death of Christ on our behalf.

• For us to be saved, it was necessary for Christ to live and die by all of the law's stipulations. Although our own obedience to the law is flawed and thus cannot be used as a way of justification before God, we are saved by the imputed obedience of the Savior (1 Cor. 1:30; Phil. 3:9). Our justification is rooted in His obedience (Rom. 5:17-19). By a righteousness which is alien to ourselves - the perfect righteousness of Christ according to the law - we are made just in the sight of God. "He made the one who did not know sin to be sin on our behalf in order that we might become the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Cor. 5:21).

• It turns out, then, that Christ's advent and atoning work do not relax the validity of the law of God and its demand for righteousness; rather they accentuate it. Salvation does not cancel the law's demand but simply the law's curse: "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us" (Gal. 3:13). He removed our guilt and the condemning aspect of the law toward us, but Christ did not revoke the law's original righteous demand and obligation. Salvation in the Biblical sense presupposes the permanent validity of the law. 

Throughout His life and teaching, and even up to the point of death, Jesus upheld the law's demands in the most exacting degree.

Imitating Christ

• At many times in the history of the church, Christian living has been understood most generally as "the imitation of Christ." 

• Because Christ is the central personage of the Bible, there is a sense in which Biblical ethics can likewise be summarized as imitating Christ - striving to be like Him, taking His behavior as the model of Christian ethics. Indeed, to take upon oneself the name of "Christian" is to be a disciple or follower of Christ (cf. Acts 11:26). Believers take their direction from the example and teaching of Christ. Accordingly, Biblical ethics is the same as Christian ethics.

• Christian ethics is a matter of imitating Christ, and for that reason it does not call us to flee from the law but to honor its requirements. We are to have in ourselves the attitude which was in Christ Jesus, who humbled himself and became obedient (Phil. 2: 5, 8). We are to follow in His steps of righteous behavior (1 Pet. 2:21), showing forth righteousness because the Holy Spirit unites us to Him (1 Cor. 6:15-20). Therefore the Biblical ethic is the Christian ethic of following after the example of Christ's obedience to God's law. John expresses this point clearly: "Hereby we know that we are in Him: he that saith he abideth in him ought himself also to walk even as he walked" (1 John 2:5-6). 

• Christians should therefore be the last people to think or maintain that they are free from the righteous requirements of God's commandments. Those who have been saved were in need of that salvation precisely because God's law could not be ignored as they transgressed it. 

• The Holy Spirit indwelling all true believers in Jesus Christ makes them grow in likeness to Christ - "to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fulness of Christ" (Eph. 4:13, 15; cf. Gal. 4:19).

Christ walked according to the commandments of God. Therefore, we cannot escape the conclusion that Christian ethic is one of obedience to God's law, for Christ's perfect righteousness according to that law is our model for Christian living.

• Jesus therefore must have the supremacy in Christian life. Because of our sinful disobedience to God's commandments, Christ came to atone for our offenses and become our eternal Savior. As such, He deserves our undying devotion and gratitude.

• As the resurrected and ascended Son of God, Christ is Lord over all and deserves our obedience and service. Thus the lifestyle and ethic of those who have been redeemed by Christ as Savior and Lord will naturally center or focus on Him

Conclusion

From beginning to end the Bible centers on Jesus Christ. From beginning to end His life was lived in conformity to the law of God. And from beginning to end the Biblical ethic of imitating Christ calls us likewise to obey every command of God's word.

Source: Bahnsen, G. L. (1985). By This Standard: The Authority of God's Law Today. Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics.