GOD’S DRESS CODE

INTRODUCTION.

Most of us have had to abide by dress codes at one time or another, e.g., at work or at school. When I was a student at the Cincinnati Bible Seminary in the late 1950s, one aspect of the dress code was that the hems of women students’ skirts and dresses could not be higher than the knees. This was later changed to say that the hems could be no higher than two inches above the knees. (Some of us wondered who had the responsibility of carrying around a tape measure and making sure the code was observed!)

Some dress codes have been more of a social expectation than an official decree. From my early youth I learned that you didn’t wear just anything to a wedding or funeral; these events deserved your very best outfit.

In recent years the whole idea of dress codes has been seriously challenged and considerably weakened (cf. “casual Fridays”; “zoom” conferences). However, there is one dress code that has never changed and never will change, and that is GOD’S DRESS CODE! Has God laid down a dress code that we must follow? YES! But I am not talking about the outer material clothing that we wear here or there, especially to church. I am talking about the spiritual clothing with which we are dressed, especially that with which we are clothed on the inside, where only God can see.

Any person who hopes to be welcome in God’s presence, and who hopes to live in God’s presence for eternity (rather than in hell), MUST be spiritually dressed in the proper manner!

If you were invited to meet England’s Queen Elizabeth personally, you would be expected to wear proper clothing. One summary from the internet puts it thus: “Opt for formal clothing—those with neutral tones and modest designs. … Bright colors, unnecessary skin-showing or anything offbeat should be reserved for other occasions. Show respect to Her Royal Highness and dress in an elegant and sophisticated manner.”

But here we are not talking about standing in the presence of some temporary and usually accidental earthly monarch. We are talking about being in the presence of the eternal and infinite KING OF THE UNIVERSE! What does He require us to wear in order to be accepted into His presence?

We can sum God’s dress code up in one word: RIGHTEOUSNESS. We are required to wear a garment of righteousness! The following three points show how this works out.

I. GOD REQUIRES US TO WEAR A GARMENT OF RIGHTEOUSNESS.

The first point is that God requires us to wear a garment of righteousness. (Note that this is a requirement, not a suggestion.) It is crucial to understand the meaning of “righteousness.” This idea is key. Specifically, “righteousness” before God means being RIGHT with God’s LAW, or satisfying the requirements of His law.

When you hear the word “law,” what do you think of? You probably think first of commandments that God requires us to obey. Some might think of the Ten Commandments. That is appropriate, but extremely limited. In fact, the Bible is filled with divine commands that we must obey to be righteous. Even the Old Testament has many commands that are part of the Christian’s law code. E.g., “Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling” (Psalm 2:11). “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5). The New Testament Scriptures are filled with both general and specific commandments on how to be righteous and holy. We all have access to God’s law for us.

So here is how God’s dress code works. To satisfy His dress code, we MUST wear a garment of righteousness; and to possess this righteousness we must obey the commandments of His law. To be more precise, we must obey these commands one hundred percent. Did I just say – 100%? YES! To be righteous before God we must obey ALL of the Biblical commandments that apply to us in this New Covenant age! And – we must obey them perfectly, both on the outside (where other human beings can see us) and on the inside, in the heart (where only God can see us).

This perfect obedience to God’s law is what constitutes our required garment of righteousness, and God’s dress code requires that we must wear this garment constantly, all our lives. Such a life consisting of our perfect obedience to God’s law commands would look like a pure white robe.

I have said that we are required to wear this garment of righteousness. It is a necessity. WHY? Why is this the case? Because God’s own nature is perfect holiness, and He cannot tolerate anything that contradicts His perfect nature. Thus we who hope to fellowship with the holy God MUST also be holy and righteous, otherwise – the HOLY GOD will cast us into outer darkness, away from His holy presence!

Jesus warns us thus in His parable of the wedding feast in Matthew 22:1-14, which you should read. In this parable the king prepares a wedding feast to which the first invited guests decline to come and are thus condemned (vv. 1-8). The king then sends his servants to invite anyone they can find, and a great crowd showed up (vv. 9-10). “But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who had no wedding garment. And he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot and cast him into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’” (vv. 11-13).

God’s dress code is serious business. Wear the garment of righteousness – perfect obedience to His laws – or else!

II. WE DO NOT HAVE THIS REQUIRED GARMENT OF RIGHTEOUSNESS.

This leads to our second point. The truth is that we do not have the garment of righteousness that God’s dress code requires! Search all you can through your spiritual closet, and you will not find it. We know this because of God’s fearsome judgment in Romans 3:10, 23 – “ ‘None is righteous, no, not one’ …. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

Now, you may say, “Hey! Wait a minute! I do a LOT of good things! In fact, I obey most of God’s laws, at least most of the time!”

Maybe so, but you seem to be forgetting something. To be truly righteous before God, you cannot be just partly good and holy. True righteousness is not determined by a balance scale where good works are weighed against sins, to determine which you have more of. No! To be truly righteous, you must be 100% good – wholly holy, on the inside as well as on the outside!

The fact is that we are all worse in God’s eyes than we think we are. See Isaiah 64:6 – “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.” As the KJV familiarly puts it, “All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags” (literally, “as a menstruous cloth”). The scary part of this truth is that Isaiah is not saying that our sins are like filthy rags. He says that even our righteous deeds are like that polluted garment!

In terms of our personal efforts to live up to God’s dress code and to obey His laws, we can think of ourselves as wearing—NOT a pure white robe, but a dirty black robe. So where are we, then, in terms of God’s dress code? Is our situation hopeless? Not if we submit ourselves to the third point, below!

III. GOD GIVES US THE GARMENT OF RIGHTEOUSNESS THAT HE REQUIRES OF US!

We now come to the good news—the gospel, as that gospel is found in Isaiah 61:10: “I will greatly rejoice in the LORD; my soul shall exult in my God; for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation; he has covered me with the robe of righteousness”! Good news! God has established the strictest possible dress code; and when we utterly fail to meet its requirements, He Himself gives us the robe of righteousness that He requires!

What is this gift of a “robe of righteousness”? First, we must consider this: the righteousness that God gives us, and with which He covers all our sins, is not some kind of righteousness that WE have produced! It is not OUR righteousness, but GOD’S OWN RIGHTEOUSNESS! As a child I used to sing the familiar hymn, “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’s blood and righteousness.” But in my mind I was thinking it thus: “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’s blood and MY righteousness.” I knew nothing about GOD’S righteousness, and this kept me from having any assurance of my salvation!

The Apostle Paul shows us that we must learn to sing the song thus: “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’s blood and JESUS’S righteousness”! He says in Romans 1:16-17, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for … in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith”! In Romans 3:21-22 he adds, “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from … law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe”!

See also 2 Corinthians 5:21, where Paul says that God the Father put Jesus in the place of sinners and treated Jesus as if He had the sins of the world upon Him, in order that He might treat us as if we had the righteousness of God upon us! In Philippians 3:9 God inspires Paul, speaking of Jesus, to say that he wants to “be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from … law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.”

What is this righteousness that is produced by God, belongs to God, comes from God to us, and becomes an entire robe of righteousness that covers us? Specifically, it comes from something that Jesus—God the Son—did. I like to think of Jesus as coming into the world as a kind of tailor, for the specific purpose of sewing an unlimited number of these robes of righteousness to distribute to all sinners who will accept one by obeying the gospel!

What did Jesus do that has this effect? We will remember that righteousness means being right with God’s law or satisfying the requirements of His law. So far, we have seen that this law has life-governing commands that God requires us to obey. Did Jesus produce this kind of righteousness? Yes indeed! He is the only human person who has obeyed the commands that applied to Him perfectly, sinlessly, 100%. But this is not a kind of righteousness that He can share with anyone else; as a human being He was required to obey the law’s commands for Himself.

Thus the robe of righteousness that God gives us is not sewn from the deeds of Jesus’s perfect LIFE; Jesus did not prepare this robe from His perfect obedience to the law’s commands.

Where does this leave us, then? Well, the fact is that COMMANDS to be obeyed are only ONE PART of any law code, and are just one part of God’s law. What is the other part? The other part of God’s law is the PENALTY required to be paid when those commands are not obeyed! And the righteous nature of God must and will see to it that this penalty of His law is paid in full! When His law is broken, the penalty must be paid!

Here is where Jesus comes into the picture. By His perfect life He satisfied the law’s commands for Himself; but also by His perfect DEATH He suffered and paid the law’s PENALTY for US, in our place! When He died as the propitiation for our sins (Romans 3:25), He was sewing together a garment of salvation—a ROBE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS—as a gift for any sinner who will accept it by obeying the gospel! Jesus’s payment of sin’s penalty in our place is the robe of righteousness with which God covers our sins!

If you (the reader) are a Christian who is sincerely believing in Jesus Christ right now, you are wearing this robe of righteousness and are therefore satisfying God’s dress code!

This is how we are RIGHT—i.e., RIGHTEOUS—before God: not because He sees us as having perfect character or perfect obedience to the law’s commands, but because He sees us as having paid the penalty that His law requires for our sins! He sees us like that because JESUS paid that penalty for ALL our sins, and has applied that payment to our account! “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”—no penalty, no punishment, no retribution (Romans 8:1)!

Notice: this text says we are “IN Christ Jesus.” We are wearing Him like a garment! And this garment is the robe of Jesus’s own righteous payment of the penalty for our sins. It is called a ROBE of righteousness because it is big enough to COVER everything else we are wearing, i..e, all our “filthy rags.” We should think of this as a RED robe of righteousness, i.e., red for the blood of Jesus Christ!

Here is a crucial point to understand. As a Christian, you are wearing this red robe of righteousness right now, all the time, 24/7 – as long as you are believing in and trusting Jesus as your Redeemer. You began wearing this robe in your baptism, where you received it as “the free gift of righteousness” (Romans 5:17). We know it happened in baptism because of what Galatians 3:27 says, namely, “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.” You went into the water of baptism with only filthy rags showing; you came up out of the water with only the red robe of righteousness showing and covering all of those rags!

The crucial point is this, that because of your continuing faith in Jesus, this robe of righteousness has been and is constantly covering your sins—not just your past sins, but the sins that keep cropping up in your Christian life. Here is a point so often misunderstood: YOU DO NOT LOSE THIS ROBE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS EVERY TIME YOU SIN! This robe is “the righteousness that comes by faith” (Hebrews 11:7), not by how well you obey the law’s commands. It COMES to you in baptism by your faith in Jesus, and it STAYS with you by faith as long as that faith continues.

If you had to give up your robe of righteousness every time you committed a sin, its whole point as a cover for your sins would be lost! (This would be like saying you have been given a coat to keep you warm; but you have to give it back every time you go outside into the cold!)

I will close by citing the key stanzas from the hymn mentioned earlier about JESUS’S righteousness:

My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’s blood and [Jesus’s] righteousness!
I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus’s name.

When He shall come with trumpet sound, O may I then in Him be found—
Dressed in HIS righteousness ALONE, faultless to stand before the throne!

On Christ the solid rock I stand; all other ground is sinking sand.