This post has been the hardest for me to write to date. For those following along, the last time I wrote here (way back in November of 2019), aside from posting some poetry, was on “The Belt of Truth” as described in the Ephesians 6 “armor of God.” My goal since that passage came on my heart has been to dedicate time to studying and writing about each of the individual elements of the armor of God. In “The Belt of Truth,” we explored the significance of the belt in ancient Roman armor, and the importance of “big-T Truth” throughout the Bible.

            In preparing to write about the breastplate of righteousness, I’ve constantly hit roadblocks. I wouldn’t know what to write, I’d get too busy, I’d wrestle with my own righteousness (or lack thereof), or I’d even get overwhelmed in how much the Bible has to say about righteousness. Righteousness felt like too big of a topic. Countless times I told myself “I’m going to write today” and chickened out when thinking of how significant and difficult a topic like righteousness is. How could I presume to write on righteousness when my own righteousness needs so much work?

            In many ways, I’ve been rediscovering the depth and meaning of the Gospel since beginning grad school, including ways that have specifically targeted my view of what righteousness really is. God has reconstructed elements of my faith that needed fixing, led me to places I never thought I’d go, and opened my heart to see the true need I have of the transforming power of the Holy Spirit in my life. So, after months of promising family and friends that this post was on the way, here we are, well over a year since my last post. I pray that the ways the Lord has used this scripture to work on me over this time will resonate with you as well. I pray that whatever I write, and whatever is taken away by the reader, would not be a result of any humanly “wisdom” (or even any claim that I have any at all), but that it would be by the work of the Holy Spirit that these words become what God desires them to be. It definitely has been evident that the Lord knew what he was doing when He challenged me to write on each part of the armor of God, because my armor has needed some serious upgrades, and it still does.

“Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.” – Ephesians 6:14-15 (NIV)

            In the previous post on the belt of truth, we discussed that the “armor of God” passage in Ephesians 6:10-20 was written by Paul during his time in prison in around 61-63 AD during one of the heights of the Roman Empire under Nero. During this time, the popular body armor used by Roman soldiers was the Lorica Segmentata, which was composed of segments of iron bound together by hooks or straps, offering both sturdy protection and flexibility for movement. The breastplate protected the wearer’s most vital organs like the heart and lungs. It also covered a very large portion of the body, protecting the largest target area that would be under attack from the enemy.

            The breastplate of righteousness is one of the three elements (along with the Belt of Truth and the “gospel shoes”) of the armor Paul mentions immediately after saying to “stand firm.” These three pieces were the essential basics of any set of armor, and without them, a soldier would not have the confidence to stand firm against the attacks of any reasonably trained enemy.

            Even God Himself is described as putting on the breastplate of righteousness in Isaiah 59:15-19, when He saw that there was no justice and truth among His people (the Israelites). In response, He put on His armor and reached out Himself.

“Truth is nowhere to be found, and whoever shuns evil becomes a prey. The Lord looked and was displeased that there was no justice. He saw that there was no one, he was appalled that there was no one to intervene; so his own arm achieved salvation for him, and his own righteousness sustained him. He put on righteousness as his breastplate, and the helmet of salvation on his head; he put on the garments of vengeance and wrapped himself in zeal as in a cloak. According to what they have done, so will he repay wrath to his enemies and retribution to his foes; he will repay the islands their due. From the west, people will fear the name of the Lord, and from the rising of the sun, they will revere his glory. For he will come like a pent-up flood that the breath of the Lord drives along.” – Isaiah 59:15-19 NIV

            I love the Enduring Word commentary on this passage, specifically verses 17-18. “Most people don’t pick up the connection between Isaiah 59:17-18 and Paul’s comments on our spiritual armor in Ephesians 6:10-17. In that passage, Paul calls that armor the whole armor of God, and it is God’s armor in the sense that it belongs to Him – after all, He uses it here in Isaiah 59:17-18 – and He allows us to use it to fight for Him. […] If we don’t put on the armor of God and fight for Him, then eventually God will put it on Himself and fight for His glory. But God’s preference is to work in and through us, with us using His armor.”

            How incredibly cool is that? By putting on the Armor of God, we are literally putting on His armor and fighting with His leading. We are, quite literally, putting on the righteousness of Christ by putting on the breastplate of righteousness.

            So, why is righteousness described as the breastplate, a centerpiece in the armor of God? The words “righteous” and “righteousness” are mentioned well over 500 times in most translations of the Bible. Let’s look at what the Bible says about righteousness and the lives of those who are righteous.

            “Blessed are those who hunger and search for righteousness, for they will be filled.” – Matthew 5:6

            “The fruit of that righteousness will be peace; its effect will be quietness and confidence forever.” – Isaiah 32:17

            “…the Lord loves the righteous.” – Psalm 146:8

            “When calamity comes, the wicked are brought down, but even in death the righteous seek refuge in God.” – Proverbs 14:32

            “In the way of righteousness there is life; along that path is immortality.” – Proverbs 12:28

            “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.” – James 5:16

            Clearly, the Bible tells us that God loves righteousness and those who are righteous, who seek after it, and who put it into practice. We are continually encouraged to pursue righteousness and told that those who hunger and search for it will be filled with it as in Matthew 5:6.

            In a seeming contrast to these verses about living in righteousness, we see also in Romans 3 that “there is no one righteous, not even one” and that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Isaiah 64:6 gives some pretty stark imagery, saying “all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.” The original translation is even less PG. The original words for “filthy” (idim) and “rags” (bagad) literally refer to a garment soiled by a woman’s menstrual cycle[1,2]. This is what our “righteous” acts look like in comparison to a truly, unfathomably holy God.

            How, then, do we put on this breastplate of righteousness if we ourselves are not and cannot be truly righteous through our own actions?

            The answer, as Paul is telling us, and as God has continually been reminding me this past year or more, lies in the armor of God with which we are literally putting on the righteousness of Christ!

            Paul says in Galatians 2:21 “I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” Clearly, Paul knows we cannot achieve this righteousness for ourselves through any acts of being righteous in the eyes of the law (in which he is referring to the covenant law of the Old Testament). Instead, under this new covenant, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:30 “It is because of him [God] that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God – that is, our righteousness, holiness, and redemption.”

            Paul is saying that Christ IS our righteousness! How do we receive this, one might ask? Paul writes in Romans 3:21-24 “But now a righteousness from God, apart from the law, has been made known, to which the law and the prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”

            I feel like too often, I’ve dwelled on verse 23, that I have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, without remembering verses 22 and 24 that immediately surround it – you and I, all of us who believe in Jesus Christ, are justified freely by the grace of God! We don’t have to strive to earn our righteousness anymore or feel condemned when we fall short. Don’t forget that the Bible still calls us to hunger and thirst for righteousness, but remember that even when our own righteousness isn’t enough, when it looks like those filthy rags, we are clothed with the righteousness of Christ!

            I like the way that Tim Keller puts it in his paraphrasing of Martin Luther’s preface to Galatians. Keller describes righteousness as having two forms: active righteousness and passive righteousness. Active righteousness includes things such as civil righteousness (like following state and country laws), cultural righteousness (following things our parents or schools may teach us), and ethical righteousness (following the Ten Commandments and other Biblical law). All of these can be good things in and of themselves, but we must know as Christians that they do not define how righteous we are. As Isaiah 64 said, all of our attempts at this are like filthy rags when compared to a truly Holy God. Being righteousness in the eyes of your country or family, or even doing your best to follow the Ten Commandments, are in no way able to please God or pay the debt of sin.

            What we have as Christians, however, is a righteousness that is imputed to us from God through faith in Jesus Christ. We put in Christ’s righteousness and are declared righteousness in God’s sight, not through any good deeds of our own, but through the saving grace of God and by the righteousness of Jesus Christ when He lived the life we should have lived and died the death we should have died. We do nothing for this righteousness, only receive it as true Christian righteousness. As Tim Keller calls it, this is passive righteousness in contrast to any active righteousness we could pursue on our own.

            That truth, that we are clothed with righteousness outside of anything we have done, are doing or will do in the future, is incredibly freeing for our ability to come before God and live lives that please Him! This is an incredible source of peace, that we can live knowing that Christ has made us righteous without us needing to worry about messing it up. In fact, Jesus even says in Mark 2:17, after Pharisees asked why He at with sinners and tax collectors, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” If we were already righteous, He would have had no need to come and die on the cross for us (as Paul says in Galatians 2:21). “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8).

            Earlier, when I said my thoughts that my own righteousness needed work were holding me back from writing this, I was putting my faith in the “Breastplate of Nathan’s Righteousness” and thinking, wow this breastplate has a lot of holes in it! With every fault or failure of my own, I was seeing it as a chink in my armor. No one wants to go into battle against arrows and swords and fearsome enemies with a faulty breastplate!

            What I really did not realize is that I have already been declared righteous! The breastplate I wear into the battle of everyday life is not my own – it is God’s, and His righteousness is absolutely perfect. With that breastplate, we can have peace going into those battles that confront us in our walks with God. We do not need to feel ashamed of any struggles with personal, active righteousness, because in spite of any of that, what truly matters is that we fight with a righteousness covering us that has been given to us by the grace of God, which protects us from any attack, and which is whole, pure and complete.

            As we go about our daily lives, we go with the confidence of the breastplate of the righteousness that comes from God’s righteousness covering us. In this we say we are fully justified by faith, which means that we have been declared righteous in the sight of God. The parts of us that still need work and continued growth are part of a process called sanctification, wherein we are made to look more like Christ as we grow in faith and, in a sense, build up a bit more of that active righteousness as we hunger and thirst for the righteousness of God. Hebrews 10:12-14 says “But when this priest [Jesus] had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, and since that time he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool. For by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.” As verse 14 says, we have been made perfect forever by the sacrifice of Jesus (which is justification) and are in the process of being made holy (sanctification). Just knowing that we have been justified and made righteousness by faith is what saves us, but for the glory of God and out of love for Him, we still pursue righteousness and seek to obey His will for us. That is a much more peaceful existence to live in than one that is constantly striving for personal righteousness in order to be saved! We now have the freedom to seek righteousness from a position of having already been saved, rather than living in fear of messing it up and losing our salvation because of thinking we need to earn it.

            Psalm 23:3 (ESV) says “He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” I love that truth, and it’s one I’ve been wanting to pray regularly. “Lord, lead me in paths of righteousness for Your name’s sake! Create in me a clean heart that seeks You in all things and desires to model the righteousness of Christ. Grow me and lead me to be like You in the example set for me by Jesus. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”

Related Music:
Paradise II – Jon Keith
Who Am I – NEEDTOBREATHE
Wash Me Clean – A Boy and His Kite