If only Christ's righteousness is acceptable to God, then why did God sacrifice His Son to redeem mankind?
God is all for good works; however, His standards are perfect. God's redemptive work and our works are really not related. Consider the following:
Isa 64:6
But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.
KJV
2 Cor 5:21
1 He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
NASB
Thanks for the essay, BB.
God's standards are perfect. Yet He made a world that was Good, not perfect.
God made man to be good, not perfect. But man could turn away from the Good: God made man that way -- with free will.
So not only was man less-than-perfect from the get-go, but by defying God's express commandment, he made himself contemptible in the sight of God. And thus man fell -- and took the world with him.
Then God reached out to man again. First He came to Abraham, and established a people in Abraham that the Lord consecrated to Himself -- the Twelve Tribes. And through Moses, gave them His Law, the binding Covenant between His chosen and their God.
Later, the Lord settled a second dispensation on mankind, this time addressed, not to tribes, but to individual souls. The seal of this dispensation was the incarnation, suffering, and sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God slain in atonement for all sin, going back to the original sin, the Fall of Adam. And Christ is "the way, the truth, and the life," the Alpha and the Omega, the Son of God, eternal savior, eternal mediator -- Emmanuel, the "God with us" -- between God and man.
Now the point is, folks in the twelve tribes -- and individual souls under the second dispensation -- were (and are) incorrigible backsliders when it came to God's Law.
"Old [cultural] habits die hard." The Twelve Tribes of Israel were still well within the precincts of what Voegelin has called "cosmological consciousness" -- a world full of local gods and idols. They could readily believe the construction of the Golden Calf was more beneficial to them than a remote, nameless God could ever be.
The same habit of mind seems to perdure in the post-cosmological Christian dispensation. Certainly perceived "goods" that are "closer in to us" than God get most of our attention these days.
And so, I do question the premise that "God's redemptive work and our works are really not related." Superficially, they are not -- just look at the usual preoccupations of most people these days.
But in the realm of salvation, I cannot imagine how it could be possible that man's "work" and God's "work" can be wholly separate. For God calls, man must answer -- or decide not to hear the call, as the case may be.
Man has a free decision here: It seems to me to answer positively indicates a great work of the spirit must have first occurred in man's soul.
For that to have happened, it seems clear to me that man must have first said "yes." God moves the human soul by persuasion, not by force.
Thus the redemptive work of God requires the full participation of the human soul. Christ is savior, mediator, and the soul's final judge. But the turning of the soul -- the tuning of the soul -- towards Christ in Love is a free human act, which a man may perform or not.
Thank you so much for writing, HalfFull. I'd love to hear your thoughts RE: the above.