God with Us in Moral Conflict: Divine Righteousness Personified

Introduction

The scriptural tradition for Jews and Christians begins by stating an origin, ‘In the beginning,’ described as ‘good’ by God. On the heels of that statement, the tradition identifies human resistance, or at least neglect, towards intended divine goodness. The human shortcoming includes disobeying God, choosing to go against God’s expressed will, even when good human life is at stake. The resulting problem includes competing wills, divine and human, with contrary results at times: moral life vs. moral death. The article explains how God seeks something good for humans in a context of ongoing divine-human conflict of a morally relevant interpersonal sort. Understanding that moral conflict, we shall see, is central to understanding God’s being ‘with us’ and corresponding evidence for God’s reality and goodness.

Having made humans in the divine image (Gen 1:26–28), God puts them in a context of moral expectation and challenge: ‘The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die”’ (Gen 2:15–17, NRSV here and in subsequent biblical translations, unless otherwise noted). The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is thus a potential danger for humans. If they approach it in a certain way, by eating of it, they will die. We need to clarify what lies behind this morally relevant challenge that amounts to life or death. Since the disobedient humans did not have an immediate physical or bodily death, we should consider a different kind of death for them: moral death as lack of moral sustenance and approval by God.

Human disobedience towards God emerges in Genesis 3 and persists in various forms throughout the Jewish and Christian scriptures. It begins as follows, with prompting from a mysterious outside power, ‘the serpent’: ‘The serpent said to the woman, “You will not die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise [ לְהַשְׂכִּ֔יל‎; lə-haś-kîl ], she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate’ (Gen 3:4–6). It is noteworthy, if often overlooked, that the initial motivation for disobedience included desiring something ‘to make one wise’. The disobedience towards God thus seemed good from the perspective of a human quest for becoming ‘wise’. It is also noteworthy that its motivation included distrust towards God, on the assumption that God was grudgingly withholding something good from humans, namely, ‘knowing good and evil’. This distrust prompted fatal disobedience. It also invites the question of whether we have an available ground for deeming God trustworthy.

The wisdom in question is morally significant, given its dependence on the fruit of the tree of knowing good and evil. We thus may think of it as moral wisdom entailing knowledge of how to live a morally good life approved by God, the good source of human life. It matters, however, from God’s perspective how a person gets knowledge of good and evil in relation to God. So, God protects the means of access to the tree of good and evil from human abuse (Gen 3:24).

The issue, from God’s standpoint, is whether humans give God a due role in the sustenance of a morally good human life. They fail on this front if they grasp at the gift of knowledge without honoring its divine gift-giver, that is, if they seek the valued product without due attention to its divine producer. This includes clamoring for good life without fitting regard for its divine source. Humans are not self-sustaining in having a good life, of course, and a good God would seek to disabuse them of any contrary assumption. Divine-human conflict of a moral sort can result from that divine corrective effort.

We have a formative moral conflict, at the start of Genesis, between obeying God and a familiar human approach to ‘making oneself wise’. The latter approach treats God as at best optional in the human quest for wisdom in life. The immediate question becomes: Who is in a good position to set the standard for becoming wise: God or humans? Specifically, who is in a better position to advise on wisdom for a human life: God or humans? We know the answer of the initial humans, represented by Adam and Eve, and we also know the conflicting answer from God, represented by God in Genesis and later by Jesus. We need to clarify these conflicting answers as a means to illuminating God’s distinctive moral character and an inferior human moral character.

Conflict in Moral Life and Wisdom

Whatever we think about wisdom, it is not just knowledge. We could have extensive knowledge but very little wisdom, because our knowledge could fail to give us sound ranked priorities for a morally good life. Our knowledge, for instance, could be coupled with our having bad moral priorities or even moral indifference about human life and related matters. In that case, even given extensive knowledge, we would not be morally wise, given a serious defect in moral priorities and motivation. Extensive knowledge, even of moral information, lacks the resources to correct this problem. Properly ranked and motivated moral priorities are integral to moral wisdom, because such priorities are central to living a good human life.

A pressing issue concerns how moral priorities are to be ranked in a good human life. What are the top priorities, and what are the lower priorities? Should we put our own pleasure at the top, with other priorities as lower means to that end? When, if ever, is our own pleasure to be subjected to a higher priority, and what is that higher priority, if it exists? In the absence of definite answers, our moral wisdom will be at a disadvantage, because it will lack the kind of moral guidance we need for a morally good life. Genesis 3:6, as noted, indicates that the tree was ‘a delight to the eyes’, and that this figured in the decision to disobey God. Such pleasure can become a ranked priority in a way that prompts opposition, or at least neglect, towards God and divine goodness.

The book of Jeremiah sets a theocentric normative standard for human wisdom, delight, and boasting: ‘Thus says the Lord: Do not let the wise boast in their wisdom; do not let the mighty boast in their might; do not let the wealthy boast in their wealth; but let those who boast in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the Lord; I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight, says the Lord’ (Jer 9:23–24). The suggested standard is clear: Human wisdom, delight, and boasting are to honor, conform to, and depend on, available divine wisdom, delight, and boasting. Specifically, they are to rely on knowing God, the source of suitable wisdom, delight, and boasting. The human disobedience of Genesis 3 runs afoul of this normative consideration stemming from divine righteousness as perfect moral goodness in relationships. ¹

The apostle Paul places suitable human wisdom, delight, and boasting in the theocentric context suggested by Jeremiah. He identifies a human tendency to go against this context, with human suppression or disregard of the truth about God’s central status (Rom 1:18), as follows: ‘Though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools. . .. They did not see fit to acknowledge God’ (Rom 1:21–22, 28). The human claim or desire to be ‘wise’ thus can go astray, leading to ‘darkened’ understanding, despite its seeming to be good and attractive. Perhaps Paul had in mind Eve’s reliance for self-justification on what she thought would make her ‘wise’.

Paul thinks of human wisdom apart from reliance on God as dangerous for humans. Citing the book of Isaiah, he represents God to say: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart’ (Isa 29:14), adding: ‘Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scholar? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? . . . In the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through [its] wisdom’ (1 Cor 1:19–21). The ‘wisdom of God’, then, does not fit with, and seeks to destroy, ‘the wisdom of the world’. We need to identify where the conflict lies between divine wisdom and merely human wisdom.

Paul takes needed wisdom and corresponding good lives for humans to be divine gifts, and not human self-provisions. God, in his perspective, is a gift-giver who offers to meet vital needs for humans, particularly good life and its righteousness in relation to God and others (1 Cor 4:7). Paul thus remarks that ‘the Spirit [of God] gives life’ (2 Cor 3:6; cf. Rom 8:6), and he adds that ‘God . . . gives life to the dead’ (Rom 4:17). Courtesy of God’s power, according to Paul, Jesus ‘became a life-giving spirit’ through the resurrection (1 Cor 15:45). Paul thus sums up his message in terms of God’s gift of life through Christ: ‘the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Rom 6:23).

Paul has in mind righteous eternal life. Indeed, Paul remarks that ‘the Spirit is life because of righteousness’ (Rom 8:10). The righteousness from this Spirit for humans is a gift from God, credited to humans through faith in God (Rom 4:3–5). Paul thus refers to ‘the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness [that will] reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ’ (Rom 5:17; cf. Rom 3:24). At the center of this gift is the offer of God’s Spirit, whom he calls ‘the Spirit of Christ’, to responsive humans, to be with them in a relationship of ongoing communion (Gal 3:2–5, Rom 8:9–11, 2 Cor 13:13).

Paul’s understanding of God’s role for Christ extends to life, righteousness, and wisdom for humans. He thus speaks of ‘Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God’, adding that ‘God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom’ (1 Cor 1:24–25). Returning to a theme above from Jeremiah 9, Paul gives a central role to ‘Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord’ (1 Cor 1:30–31). Paul does not elaborate on the ways in which Jesus is ‘for us wisdom from God,’ but he does refer to ‘our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand’ (Rom 5:1–2). Perhaps Jesus is also a means of access to divine wisdom for humans, in contrast with the failed role of Adam in disobeying God. In any case, if divine wisdom and righteousness are personified in Christ, as Paul suggests, they are inherently interpersonal and not to be depersonalized as matters of mere rules or principles.

Adam, according to Paul, is a ‘pattern’ or ‘type’ foreshadowing Christ by way of contrast in relating to God (Rom 5:14). Paul adds that ‘just as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so through the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous’ (Rom 5:19). The exact conditions for the many being ‘made sinners’ and the many being ‘made righteous’ are complex and need not detain us now. We are attending instead to what was lacking from the kind of wisdom sought in Eve’s initial disobedience towards God. Paul suggests that a failure to honor God in a vital role towards humans was at work. In Paul’s language that is the role of divine ‘grace’ towards humans, the offering of unearned gifts of righteousness, wisdom, and good life, in filial relationship with God. Such grace, working through divine righteousness (Rom 5:21), challenges human self-credit and self-boasting for the gifts in question, given a human failure to honor God’s key role in such vital gifts.

Divine-human conflicts over divine grace bear on wisdom, righteousness, and good life for humans. They lead to ongoing divine-human conflicts in those areas and in related areas. Unlike Adam, according to Paul, Jesus did not presume self-sufficiency apart from God but yielded to God in obedience, to the extent of dying for God as a result. In addition, Paul took this obedience to be a model for humans in relating to God:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he existed in the form of God,

 did not regard equality with God

 as something to be grasped,

but emptied himself,

 taking the form of a slave,

 assuming human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a human,

 he humbled himself

 and became obedient to the point of death—

 even death on a cross. (Phil 2:5–8)

Paul’s point is that Jesus became obedient to God, thus giving God a central role of authority in his human life, in a manner that contrasts sharply with Adam and Eve.

Paul’s understanding of the needed obedience to God is inherently interpersonal, because it requires presenting oneself to God, not just to an impersonal rule or principle. He comments: ‘No longer present your members to sin as instruments of unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace’ (Rom 6:13–14).

Paul has in mind ‘obedience which leads to righteousness’ (Rom 6:16), which is the ‘obedience of faith’ (Rom 1:5, 16:26), and he thinks of such obedience to God as a fitting response to God’s grace in righteousness. This grace comes with an important but widely neglected divine intention: It is intended to be received in an ongoing relationship where humans respond cooperatively to divine righteousness. In that relationship, divine righteousness can come to its intended fruition in human lives and the salient moral power of God can be experienced and recognized, including as evidence for God’s reality and goodness.

Paul thinks of the expected obedience and presenting to God as akin to, including reciprocal to, the self-giving of Jesus to God in Gethsemane and on Calvary. He writes to the Roman Christians: ‘I appeal to you . . . on the basis of God’s mercy to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship’ (Rom 12:1). ² This fits with Paul’s understanding in Philippians 2 of the obedience of Jesus in dying for God as a model for his followers. It also fits with Paul’s understanding of a human need to use the power of God’s Spirit to put to death their own evil deeds (Rom 8:13), given that what the Spirit of God desires opposes the ways of human unrighteousness (Gal 5:17). The human will in opposition to God, according to Paul, must undergo a death for God akin to the dying commitment of Jesus to God in Gethsemane and on Calvary. This commitment includes dying to one’s own will, regarding its anti-God aims, for the purpose of living to God, as a living sacrifice to God.

Paul writes: ‘We who are living are always being handed over to death for Jesus’s sake, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our mortal flesh’ (2 Cor 4:11). He adds: ‘Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day’ (2 Cor 4:16). Paul’s exemplar for humans is Christ, regarding not only our experienced mortality but also the direction of our will and life: ‘We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, so we might no longer be enslaved to sin. . .. The death he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus’ (Rom 5:6, 10–11). We have here a divine-human conflict between moral life and death, that is, a conflict between life with God in righteousness and human moral death from disobedience to God. Jesus showed the way, through self-giving obedience, to opt for God’s moral life over death. He thereby represented in action God’s conflict against the disobedience in unrighteousness, exemplified in Adam and Eve, that leads to moral death for humans (Rom 6:16). The conflict includes a human problem with trust in God.

Trust in Divine Accompaniment

Eve evidently had a problem in trusting God for wisdom and therefore decided to disobey God in an effort to gain wisdom. Her disobedience prompts a vital question: Why should humans trust God, if they should, to supply what they need for a good life? Clearly, they should not trust God to give them everything they desire, because they often desire things that are unrighteous and thus unworthy of God. If God is trustworthy, then, God is trustworthy only for things worthy of God as perfectly righteous. (We may use the perfectionist title ‘God’ to require worthiness of worship and hence perfect righteousness.)

Courtesy of an unmatched divine perspective, God would have a decisive and fitting role in ranking the divine delivery of righteous gifts to humans. As a result, God would give the gifts in the priority ranking favored by God, in keeping with God’s perfectly righteous character and will. In addition, God would set the timing for the delivery of the ranked gifts to humans, with consideration of whether humans are ready to receive them with benefit. A recurring theme of various biblical writers is that God does not place at the top of the list for humans a full explanation of the divine purposes in allowing human disobedience and suffering. The book of Job is the classic statement of this theme, and Jesus echoes the same theme (Luke 13:1–5). From God’s perspective, there is a gift more important than humans’ having such an explanation now, and that gift can be had now without the full explanation. Even if we cannot adequately explain, then, God’s allowing the initial human disobedience, we should consider a more important gift available to humans.

The top gift in question, according to various biblical writers, is God’s being with, or accompanying, his people to guide and save them in righteous relationship as their faithful companion. The Oxford English Dictionary, 3d edition, offers this lead definition of ‘to accompany’: ‘To go with (a person) as a companion’. This fits with some prominent biblical ideas of divine accompanying and leading, and it gives helpful content to our use of the nouns ‘divine accompaniment’ and ‘divine accompanier’. God accompanies as one from whom a cooperative human receives divine power of righteousness for a living relationship approved by God, despite a larger context of evil and suffering. We shall see that the relevant power and companionship exclude partnership in crime or other evil, owing to their intentional focus on cooperation in divine righteousness. ³

The book of Isaiah portrays God to say to the people of God: ‘I am the Lord; I have called you in righteousness; I have taken you by the hand and kept you’ (Isa 42:6; cf. Hosea 11:3–4, 8–9). In addition: ‘When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you. . .. Do not fear, for I am with you’ (Isa 43:2, 5). Perhaps the most influential statement of our theme is the psalmist’s response to God, after claiming that God ‘leads him in paths of righteousness’: ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for thou art with me’ (Psalm 23:4, RSV). Divine righteousness and divine accompaniment thus go together, inextricably, in various passages.

The key theme is also expressed in terms not only of God’s accompaniment but also of a psalmist’s being with God: ‘I am continually with you; you hold my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me with honor’ (Psalm 73:23–24). Similarly, both God’s closeness and human closeness get attention at the same time, with priority for divine nearness: ‘I keep the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved’ (Psalm 16:8). Finally: ‘As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness; when I awake I shall be satisfied, beholding your likeness’ (Psalm 17:15). We find here no claim to a full explanation of God’s purposes. Instead, we hear of an experience of being with God in closeness, and its center includes the sharing of divine righteousness in relationship.

The human experience of God’s ‘being with’ people can be helpfully understood as God’s interactively being with humans for the sake of righteousness in divine-human relationships. It should not be understood, however, as God’s being constantly present to human awareness, because it is clear that God is not present in that way. According to Martin Buber, ‘YHWH is the One who is with [Israel], the One who remains present to them, thus the One who comes-along with them (Ex 13:21, Num 14:14, Deut 1:30, 33), the Leader, the melek’. ⁴ Buber identifies a central role for the divine leading of humans by God as king, but this divine role is more complicated than he suggests. God’s ‘remaining present’ to the people of ancient Israel is not as continuous as Buber suggests. The recurring themes in the Jewish Bible of divine self-hiding and of the human need to seek God confirm the complexity of the matter.

The theme of divine self-hiding from humans arises repeatedly in the Jewish Bible. For instance: ‘Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior’ (Isa 45:15). Similarly, the psalmist asks God: ‘Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression?’ (Psalm 44:24). The biblical theme of a human need to seek God fits with the theme of occasional divine self-hiding. Thus: ‘When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord’ (Jer 29:13–14). These remarks assume that God’s ‘being with’ people does not entail constantly ‘remaining present’ to their awareness. Indeed, they assume that God actively self-hides from people on occasion. ⁵

A second extreme understands divine accompaniment in terms of divine causal influence of an indirect (perhaps analogical) sort without any direct human experience of God’s moral character. According to Thomas Aquinas, ‘we do not name [or know] God except from his likeness in creatures. But when we name a thing from its likeness to another, such a name is predicated of it not essentially but metaphorically’. ⁶ Thomas thus denies, by implication, direct divine self-manifestation to humans in experience, by limiting their experience and evidence of divine reality to indirect divine ‘likeness in creatures’. Any resulting belief about God, he holds, does not represent God ‘essentially but metaphorically’. We thus do not experience God’s essential moral character, even if God is ‘with us’ in some analogical or metaphorical sense. This position involves a kind of skepticism about human experience and knowledge of God’s essential moral character.

The position of Thomas neglects the needed role of human experience of God’s moral character in God’s being with people as their guide for a righteous relationship. A key issue concerns how the relevant divine activity and interactivity occur in human experience. It would be unhelpful to postulate divine moral activity but not give any definite indication of God’s corresponding moral character in human experience. That would neglect needed evidence for the relevant moral activity in human lives as being divine (rather than a counterfeit). An undesirable kind of fideism then would threaten about divine goodness, leaving any theological claims about divine accompaniment without adequate grounding, owing to an inadequate connection to God’s actual moral character. The indirectness of Thomas here is foreign to many biblical writers.

The psalmist refers to God as ‘you who test the minds and hearts, O righteous God’ (Psalm 7:9). Psalm 17:3 adds to this portrait of God as probing for righteousness: ‘If you try my heart, if you visit me by night, if you test me, you will find no wickedness in me.’ Similarly, Psalm 139:1–3: ‘O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways.’ The divine intervention and accompaniment, according to a psalmist, aims to save people in a foundation of divine righteousness: ‘In your righteousness deliver me and rescue me; incline your ear to me and save me. Be to me a rock of refuge, a strong fortress to save me, for you are my rock and my fortress’ (Psalm 71:2–3).

The writer of Psalm 71 continues:

Your power and your righteousness, O God,

 reach the high heavens.

You who have done great things,

 O God, who is like you?

You who have made me see many troubles and calamities

 will revive me again;

from the depths of the earth

 you will bring me up again. (Psalm 71:18–20)

Once again God’s righteousness is the powerful focus and foundation, and it endures alongside ‘troubles and calamities’ without full explanation for humans. What matters mainly to the psalmist is God’s righteous loyalty, enduring in its restoring people to God. God thus accompanies his people in order to save them in righteousness, despite their various troubles and their deficits in explanation. This theme emerges sharply in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew when on Calvary Jesus receives no divine explanation of his felt abandonment but is nonetheless rescued in God’s good time, through resurrection. Jesus as God’s righteous child survives death, thanks to God’s being with him faithfully, even in the absence of a full divine explanation for him in response to his ‘Why?’ question. Jesus shows trust in God by calling to ‘my God’, despite his lack of a full explanation for his fatal predicament.

Conflict in Conscience from its Gift Giver

The divine-human conflict for moral life over death intrudes in the human ‘heart’, including conscience, according to Paul. He thus remarks of the Gentiles: ‘They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, as their own conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them’ (Rom 2:15). Paul sees the Spirit of God at work in this moral conflict for life over death. He thus appeals to conscience to test for God’s work in his ministry: ‘We commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God’ (2 Cor 4:2). He adds that his conscience confirms the truth of his message by the Spirit of God (Rom 9:1). God’s Spirit thus works in human conscience, and hence in moral experience, to do the needed confirming of truth regarding God’s reality and goodness.

Humans face conflict in conscience, but this is compatible with divine self-disclosure there. This disclosure is best characterized, as the aforementioned psalmists and Paul suggest, in terms of uncoercive divine probing and nudging in human conscience for the sake of righteousness in relationships. ⁷ This divine activity exhibits goal-directedness over time and thus qualifies as intentional or purposive, rather than blind or mechanical. Paul describes it thus: ‘It is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure’ (Phil 2:13). So, there is a divine purpose or intention at work in some humans. This divine work does not coerce human wills, but it does conflict with them and, given human cooperation, guide them for the sake of righteousness in relationships. Its uncoercive character is confirmed by Paul’s suggestion that humans can ‘frustrate’ the grace of God (Gal 2:21; cf. 2 Cor 6:1).

Paul calls for human discernment by God’s Spirit to recognize the gracious gifts, including moral gifts, of God for humans. He writes:

Now we have received not the spirit of the world but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual. Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. (1 Cor 2:12–14)

So, Paul understands God’s Spirit to be at work not only in challenging humans towards righteousness but also in instructing them of God’s gifts of righteousness and wisdom. Whether humans receive the gifts and the corresponding instruction depends on whether they are willing to cooperate with God’s will, after the model set by Jesus in Gethsemane. Humans thus are not pawns in a divine game of coercion. Instead, they are responsible agents before God, as the book of Genesis confirms after the initial disobedience (Gen 3:13–19) ⁸ .

We easily miss the main divine-human conflict for moral life and its divine resolution if we focus on the desired gifts without the divine gift-giver. The main conflict concerns rightful interpersonal lordship (and thus relationship) in a clash of humans against divine supremacy. Adam and Eve represent the origin of the conflict in a quest for wisdom and life without recognizing divine lordship for their lives. They assume, at least in practice, that the desired goods could come to them without the lordship of God. Common religious talk of moral values and principles without recognition of God as needed sustaining moral agent follows that misleading tradition. Paul opposes such a fatal approach when he indicates that divine moral power is needed to empower humans against moral weakness (Rom 7:22–25). He also identifies a human need for God in preventing human moral efforts from collapsing into futility from final death (1 Cor 15:32, 54–57). We have noted his emphasis on presenting oneself to God in obedience, thus maintaining an interpersonal priority. The divine gift-giver is needed as the Lord who is intentional moral leader for humans in need of moral leading towards righteousness in relationship (Rom 8:14). Apart from honoring that gift-giver, moral defeat and death ensue, as seen with Adam and Eve.

Triumph over Moral Defeat and Death

Moral triumph with divine accompaniment over disobedience and other evil is not misplaced triumphalism, because it stems from divine righteousness exemplified in God’s self-giving power of salvation. Paul gives a central role to such triumph in human moral life: ‘Thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession and through us spreads in every place the fragrance that comes from knowing him. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing: to the one group a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life’ (2 Cor 2:14–16). Paul thus thinks of moral triumph as a person’s being led by God (as powerful accompanier) to moral life over moral death. He cites Christ as the model and leader for such moral victory, courtesy of God’s power.

Moral triumph for humans requires their enduring in divine righteousness in the spirit of the crucified Christ, in relation to God. The divine power for moral triumph thus encompasses a deep irony, as suggested: It comes through the crucified Christ in his death shared by his followers as they respond to God’s moral challenges towards their receiving divine righteousness. They share in Christ’s obedient death in order to participate in the divine triumph of his resurrection, even in this life. Paul thus speaks of Christ’s followers as ‘those who have been brought from death to life, and [therefore]. . . as instruments of righteousness’ (Rom 6:13), with the aim that they ’might walk in newness of life’ (Rom 6:4). Paul remarks that God vindicated and exalted Christ on the basis of his obedience to the point of death (Phil 2:8–9), and he seeks to share in that triumph on the same cruciform basis (Phil 3:10–11).

The crucified Jesus, in the wake of Gethsemane, provides the exemplar of the crucified human will relative to God’s righteous will. Similarly, he exhibits, in the submission of his will to God, the model of a crucified quest for wisdom relative to God’s supreme wisdom. His conformity to crucifixion, as Paul notes, is thus about his obedience to God, not about his physical suffering. Sharing in his crucifixion is, then, about yielding what humans desire and seek to God’s righteous will, even when the result seems dire.

What of trust or faith in relation to the obedience demanded by God? If humans do not trust the divine righteousness on offer, they typically will not yield to it in obedience. At best, they then will become stuck in the initial tentative response of Jesus in Gethsemane: Remove this cup from me. In effect, Eve stopped there in her quest for what appears to make for a life of wisdom contrary to God’s wisdom. In the absence of trusting divine righteousness to bring needed good, humans typically refrain from proceeding with Jesus to yielding as follows to God: ‘Yet not what I want but what you want.’ Instead, they opt for: ‘what I want for the sake of what I deem to be good or wise.’ God credits righteousness to humans through their faith, according to Paul (Rom 4:5), and without their trust or faith in God they block divine moral power and approval.

In the absence of the trust needed, how are people to proceed? How can they create trust in divine righteousness? In the end, they cannot on their own. God has an acknowledged prior role here, alongside a definite role for human responsibility. The parable of the sower suggests as much. In Luke’s version, God initiates the redemptive process by bringing a good word of challenge towards righteousness for humans, and they respond variously, many uncooperatively. Some do respond cooperatively, however, and ‘when they hear the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart and bear fruit with endurance’ (Luke 8:15). Paul also assigns the initiative in righteousness to God, who shines to humans the light of divine goodness, including in the face of Christ, but he nonetheless maintains human responsibility for a response: Humans are expected to ‘turn to’ the Lord in repentance (2 Cor 4:6, 3:16), but their responses are mixed. Some trust God’s intervention for righteousness in relationships; others do not.

The result, despite the best divine effort, is partly oppositional to God, after the pattern of the human crucifixion of Jesus. The submission of Jesus to God is a triumph worthy of his resurrection and exaltation, but it prompts opposition or at least indifference from many people, as the parable of the sower foreshadows. God has no decisive recipe for full cooperation, however, so long as free responsible agents are involved. Divine coercion would not serve, because human motives matter in response to God, as Luke’s Gospel suggests in referring to a ‘good heart’. So, God faces the uneven consequences of responsible human agency, given the reality of persons with their own wills. Some might ‘taste and see’ that God is good, but others might prefer to opt out, as the parable of the sower suggests.

Conclusion

We now see that the divine-human conflict over righteousness is, at its heart, a struggle for the divine accompaniment of humans in righteousness, given their frequent resistance. The conflict, therefore, is not merely moralistic as a matter of mere obedience to moral rules or conformity to moral principles. The contrary view depersonalizes divine righteousness by omitting the central role of its gift-giver and empowering sustainer. The needed empowering is often misunderstood in terms of the satisfaction of highly valued human desires, such as the desire for something to make us wise (see Eve). Instead, it is the power to die to our anti-God ways in order to live to and with God as God accompanies us through circumstances we sometimes do not fully understand. In some cases, God’s will resists easy discernment by us, but these cases do not exclude what we know to be required by righteousness. We therefore remain as works in progress. Progress towards righteousness, however, is a discernible reality of a good moral life, especially if God is with us in the ongoing conflict of moral life over death. ⁹