Revelation

Rom 1:17
For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.

It's just that one little phrase that arrested me.

... the righteousness of God revealed ...

Can you picture it?

If you can, you can picture lightning being hidden.

I was once close enough to lightning to hear it sizzling for hours before the thunder finally like'd to broke my eardrums. It seemed to be days later when I finally jumped for the ground and hugged it like never before. It had to have been 20 feet away from me, at most. I never saw it, and I've never done anything so fast in my life as dive for mama earth just then. The bolt sealed herself up again and went home to papa before my first flinch, though. The power, the speed, the brightness, the overkill in that split second of power revealed from heaven never left me.

Lightning cannot be hidden.

The righteousness of God is more powerful, and yet it cannot be found.

We cannot know this holiness. There is nothing in our experience to indicate perfect righteousness exists. They say that if you can imagine a thing, it proves that it exists - that we cannot imagine anything that cannot be. But here is an example of a thing that does exist, and that we cannot imagine. We can try to picture white, if we set our minds to it, but we cannot conceive of an unmixed motive. Everything to us is yin and yang. The seeds of righteousness exist in every evil, and the seeds of evil exist in every righteous deed.

In God, though, only righteousness is revealed because that is all there is. The I AM never changes, and from the moment the first atom blinked into existence until the last atom flashes back into the void, God never flirted with sin. God's care IS always pure, His eye IS always single, His love IS always sacrificial.

This is revealed to us by faith, and from faith to faith. This blinding, thundering, deadly, life-giving righteousness is seen only by the eye of belief. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing comes by the word of God, but the righteousness of God is revealed in and by faith.

I don't have a point. It was only an impression, and I hope I expressed a little bit of it. It really needs to be a poem, but I don't know that I could deliver on it so I had to write it this way.