The famous verse of the Reformation was Jeremiah 23:6, specifically the naming of God’s people “The LORD our Righteousness”. Many in the years since, have located salvation within (Wesley) or made it based upon a person’s choice (Charles Finney). Yet in reality, justification for the early reformers was something extra nos (outside of us). In a beautiful exposition of this doctrine so well displayed in the Hebrew / Christian Old Testament, Luther once said:
“there is no quality in my heart at all, call it either faith or charity; but instead of these I set Christ Himself, and I say, There is my righteousness. He is my quality and my formal righteousness, as they call it, so as to free me from looking into Law or works; nay, from looking at Christ Himself as a teacher or a giver. But I look at Him as gift and as doctrine to me, in Himself, so that in Him I have all things. He says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life”; He says not, “I give thee the way and the truth and the life,” as if He were working on me from without. All these things He must be in me; abiding, living and speaking in me, not through me or to me; that we may be “the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21); not in love, nor in the gifts and graces which follow.” – Martin Luther
