Convicting the World of Righteousness
David W Palmer
Jesus was nearing the end of the Last Supper, where he had been sharing the intimate details of his heart with his 11 remaining disciples. He had called them to begin following him as his apprentices three years earlier; but during this intimate time around supper, he called them his friends. Now, as his conversation with them is drawing to a conclusion, he gave them some profound doctrinal insights regarding the Holy Spirit and his work. What he revealed to them can help us immeasurably:
(John 16:8–10 NKJV) “And when He has come, He will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: {9} of sin, because they do not believe in Me; {10} of righteousness, because I go to My Father and you see Me no more.”
Today, we take another look at the Holy Spirit’s work of convicting the world of sin and righteousness. Jesus showed his angle in this: “because they do not believe in me.” The only way to have our conscience cleared of guilt is through faith in Jesus and the innocent blood he shed as the Lamb of God. Otherwise, the manifest presence of God’s Holy Spirit will only heighten our guilty conscience—the deep inner witness that we have fallen short of his standard through sin:
(Romans 3:23 NLT) For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.
(Romans 10:9–10 NKJV) That if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. {10} For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
Here, the Holy Spirit shows that faith in the heart is the only way to get rid of sin and its guilty stain; true faith receives God’s righteousness. His righteousness is like pure white light; it totally eliminates the darkness of guilt:
(Romans 4:5 NKJV) But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness.
Because of Jesus’s death as the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”; and because his innocent blood was shed on our behalf; we become the “righteousness of God in him” when we believe in our heart that God raised Jesus from the dead:
(John 1:29 NKJV) The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”
(2 Corinthians 5:21 NKJV) For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
No earthly power can cleanse a human conscience completely from the stain of guilt over sin. There is no natural soothing of a guilty conscience; only one cleaning agent can expiate it and restore the human conscience to purity:
(Hebrews 9:14 NKJV) How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?
The Holy Spirit is amazing—note his name is “Holy” Spirit; he can not only accredit to us Jesus’s right standing with God, he can also empower us with his holiness. This means that he can give us his unlimited power to live free of sin:
(Romans 8:13 NKJV) “For if you live according to the flesh you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.”
In John 16:10, Jesus said that the Holy Spirit will convict the world “of righteousness because I go to my Father and you see me no more.” Why is it Jesus’s resurrection that the Holy Spirit uses to convince the world of righteousness? This is because when Jesus died, he died for us—paying the price for our sin; he also died as us—taking our old sinful nature on himself; and he died as sin:
(2 Corinthians 5:21 APE) For he who had not known sin made himself to become sin in your place, that we would become the righteousness of God in him.
When our amazing Lord Jesus went to the cross, by faith he took on himself every evil thing about us—our old nature, the
