Righteousness
It is to be so in love with what is fair and right to make it impossible for a man to do anything less than be absolutely fair. It is not the love of righteousness in the abstract that makes anyone righteous. It is instead the love of fair play towards everyone we encounter. Anything less than the fulfilling of fair play, in the joy of our divine relationship with others, is not righteousness. Righteousness is simply common sense. It is being in right relationship with everything and everyone in the Divine life of the Trinity and all creation. It is not about being right and everyone being in agreement with us. If we don’t love our neighbors and enemies as the Father, Son, and Spirit do and give to all fair play, we are not and will not be righteous.
Man’s Righteousness
Through our tortured words and concepts, we have invented religious systems that contain no true righteousness, that deny the common sense of the Divine heart and mind. They are systems that misrepresent the very character and nature of God. Claiming we can be made good without being good! Claiming we can be given a place in a heaven of man’s design without real righteousness. God’s heaven is only heaven because of its participants’ union and self-giving love. It is heaven because each one shares their very lives with and for the interest of the others. Heaven is found in this selflessness.
To remain as we are, focused on ourselves, would be to live in disharmony and be incapable of living in or enjoying God’s selfless heaven. It would be as if you told a fish to enjoy life in the sky.
God’s Righteousness
A righteous life is not becoming what we are not, fish becoming birds, but becoming what we are as children of our Father, through the Son, in the power of the Spirit in us! God in His love would never pretend we were right with the cosmos when we were not. For instance, gluing feathers on a fish to make it a bird does not change it from being a fish. Imputed righteousness is an attempt to cover or clothe the fish (us) through the imputation of feathers (righteousness) that does not make us (righteous) birds or capable of living in the sky (heaven)! To enjoy life in the air of heaven, you must be able to fly.
Imputed and legal inventions of righteousness cannot make the selfishness in this life or the next, heaven. To continue to live in unrighteousness would be hell in a heaven whose lifeblood is centered in self-sacrificing love.
Real Righteousness
To be relationally right is righteousness. This righteousness is who and what God is by nature. There is no righteous relationship with our God without thinking what He thinks, loving what He loves, and caring for nothing but His will as Jesus did! Heaven, eternal joy, is to be in harmony, union, and communion with all of Their creation, children, and Life!