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by Charlie Wolcott

Jehovah Tsidkenu: The Lord My Righteousness
Jehovah Mekoddishkem: The Lord My Sanctifier

The names of God are numerous mostly because our human minds cannot truly grasp an infinite description of an infinite being. Much of the names of God we find are based off His character and His actions. Here we see God being the standard of righteousness and the One who separates His people to be holy and pure, unique from this world.

I chose to tackle these two names of God together because they both address the same core process: taking sinful man, declaring him righteous, and making him holy. Christianity makes absolutely no sense at all to the natural man. It is not merely that we have a crucified Savior, but that we have a pure, righteous, and holy God administering perfect justice and justifying the wicked. It is called the “Scandal of Grace.” Yes, a “scandal” is an appropriate term, yet it was done without breaking any laws nor violating any part of God’s character. Let’s dig into this scandal.

Everything always should start with the character and nature of God. The whole story is about Him. God is a Holy God. He is pure, perfect in every detail and aspect about Him. He is righteous and just. He rewards those who do good and gives those who do evil their just reward. Every man will reap what he sows, whether good or bad. The problem is once Adam and Eve sinned and ate of the fruit, it wasn’t just them who were affected, but all of their offspring were affected too.

People complain that it wasn’t fair to be judged for a sin we didn’t commit. That is true. We did not eat of that tree, however Adam and Eve gave us that nature. That which is corrupted cannot produce that which is pure. We understand this in genetics. When a mutation in a parent takes place, that mutation is then carried on to the offspring. It is not the fault of the offspring, but it does not make situation the offspring is in null or void. We inherited the “mutation” of sin from our parents, but unlike a mere genetic mutation, we have each partaken in our own sin and that is what we will be held accountable for. We won’t be held accountable for the sins of our fathers, just the sins we commit.

But this leads to the grand conundrum. How can God be a perfect and righteous God and show mercy to wicked sinners? If God does not punish sin, He cannot be righteous. Yet how can God be merciful if He punishes every sinner? The answer is found in Jesus Christ. I like to use the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant to illustrate this point. The first servant had a completely unpayable debt and begged for mercy to repay it. It would take him multiple lifetimes to have a hope of repaying it. Yet the master forgave it. The debt didn’t go away; the master simply did not hold the servant responsible for repaying it. So, what happened to the debt? The master took it upon himself. The master “ate the bill” so to say. The parable goes on to show this servant never paid attention to what happened to him, but my point is made here. Jesus enabled the Father to forgive us by taking on the debt we owed. Because Jesus was without sin, He had no debt against God himself, and therefore He was able to repay that debt. But that debt was death. Jesus paid the debt with his very life and did so by becoming a man, living as a man, and doing what man was always intended to be able to do.

There is so much more to say on this, but here is the short and skinny: when Jesus died, all who believe in Him and have been born-again, everything that originally belonged to Christ was imputed, transmitted, onto us. His righteous, His perfect, His purity, His holiness, His standing with the Father, is given to us. This is why we can call God, Jehovah Tsidkenu, the Lord my righteousness. It is not of our own doing, not of our own works, not of our own efforts, but of Christ and Christ alone.

Jesus Christ is our righteousness. When God looks upon us, He does not see the scarlet red of sin but instead sees the red blood of Christ. He sees the debt we owed as settled and cancelled. In God’s eyes, we are not seen merely as though we never sinned, but even better. The term is “restored.” When a car guy restores a car, he takes an old car that was used, abused, and no longer as good as it used to be. He strips it down to its core chassis and then begins the restoration process. He gets new parts, new paint, etc. and eventually the car ends up looking exactly like the original, only now it is far more valuable than it would have been brand new from the factory. That is us. We are going through the restoration process. The theological term for this is sanctification.

God is Jehovah Mekoddishkem, the Lord my sanctifier. He takes us through the restoration process which first must strip us down to the core being and from there He can begin putting us back together the way he intended. As a clay potter must work out the stones and hard chunks before he can mold the clay into the shape and vessel he wants and as a goldsmith must melt the gold so the impurities can be scraped off, God must remove the sin in our lives so He can work with the pure substance. This is not a fast process. While the formal moment of salvation, the moment of spiritual re-birth, is instant, sanctification is not. If the goldsmith rushes the process, he’ll lose a fair amount of gold with the impurities. Likewise, if God were to just instantly wipe out our sin, He’d lose much of us in the process.

But while the process takes a long time, we can be assured that God will see the work He started through until it is completed. That said, the process can certainly take much longer than it should if we don’t cooperate with God. Very often, God has to break someone down to powder so in order to be able to rebuild him back into what He wants. It is HARD to die daily but that is what it takes to be sanctified and to be made into the image of Christ. However, when we surrender and let God do His work, the end result will always be worth it. Let us put our trust and let Jesus Christ be Jehovah Tsidkenu, our Righteousness, and Jehovah Mekoddishkem, our Sanctifier.

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