In the shower just now to think. (I do that a lot.) And after a moment I said out loud to myself, quite surprised at what I had realized, “Why should I believe anything I’m thinking? My heart is a spiritual cesspool right now.” And immediately after that I said with equal surprise, “Why should I believe that then?” And this led to the point of this post. Alien righteousness.
This is Tim Hoelzel’s favorite topic. I think he got it from the Westminster Standards. The righteousness offered us in the gospel is one from outside ourselves, not our own but imputed to us, reckoned to be ours, declared to be ours, not on the basis of our actual actions or righteousness but on the basis of the declaration of the God of all. How very much we need a righteousness not our own. My shower experience helped me realize we are also in need of alien wisdom and alien knowledge. How very much indeed we need a righteousness not our own. Isn’t it true we also need a mind not our own? Left to our own righteousness we are lost. Is it not true that left to our own thoughts we are fools? How good of God that we have received the mind of Christ, and that while no man knows the thoughts of a man but the spirit that is within him, we have received the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God.
We praise Thee, O God!
For Thy Spirit of light,
Who hath shown us our Savior,
And scattered our night.
