How Is It Possible?

Proverbs 11:31 (KJV) Behold, the righteous shall be recompensed in the earth: much more the wicked and the sinner.

Once again, this word “righteous” just keeps coming up.  This time it’s in Proverbs.  Other times it’s in Psalms.  The word is not isolated to these two books.  And yet we have people quoting Paul saying that there are none righteous.

A recurring problem we have when reading the Bible is that we are dealing with the translation.  This is common to many books.  It is especially a problem with the Bible when we take the meanings that we attach to our modern words and try to automatically transfer them over to the Bible without thinking about what the original Hebrew or Greek actually is trying to convey.  I think that’s part of what we’re dealing with with the idea of righteousness.

We tend to think of righteousness in a moral sense.  While the moral sense is included, the basic idea behind the Hebrew is justice.  It involves a straight up allegiance to the law.  It involves possibly fairness but not in our modern sense of fairness when we say, “That’s not fair”.  It is very possible to live a moral life in most areas and to be rejecting justice and thus rejecting righteousness.

So?  So live a righteous life.  Pay your bills.  Be quiet after 10 o’clock at night.  Don’t start up your jackhammer before eight in the morning.  Park between the lines.  Execute serial killers.  It has many applications. We can do this, because God makes it possible.