God was revealing His righteousness to His creation through the life and death of Jesus Christ. Christ came as a man, in the likeness of sinful flesh, and became a sin offering. He was born under the Law of Moses and lives His life in perfect subjection to the law. When Christ was crucified, He bore the sin of the whole world. In His life and His death, the Law was fulfilled.

So Paul declares that "Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes." When we are baptized into Christ, we are placed into His body. His relationship to the Father, His relationship to the law, and His relationship to sin and death become ours. Christ becomes the end of the law for all that believe in Him because the law has no more hold over Him. He lived to the law and died to the law. The law cannot condemn a man to death more than once.

"The word is near you, in your mouth, and in your heart." God has promised to be near. Sometimes we feel that God is distant and removed from our lives and our situation. That is because we have isolated ourselves from Him. We quit listening and try to work out our own problems. God wants us to depend on Him in every situation. God wants us to include Him in all the situations in our lives.

When we begin to believe in the power of God our lives are transformed. God is always acting, always revealing Himself. When we believe in Him and act on our beliefs we are changed by that faith. Our perspective of the world is different when we begin to see God at work.

It is possible to have a zeal for God and yet not to have faith. Paul writes that Israel pursued a righteousness of works and did not subject themselves to the righteousness that is by faith. They lived their whole lives with the false assumptions that they understood the word of God and yet they were not listening to Him. God sent His own Son and tried to tell them what He desired but they would not believe His words.

How do we avoid their mistake? We must subject ourselves to the righteousness that comes by faith by realizing that we are lost without the work of Jesus Christ in our lives. We must believe that through Jesus Christ God has the power and the desire to save us. We must accept the righteousness that God offers by faith and realize that we are entirely dependent on God's mercy and His love to sustain us.

If we confess the Lord Jesus Christ with our mouth and believe in our hearts then we will be saved. God has declared it. The way of salvation is open to all, Jew and Greek. God makes no distinction. All sins can be forgiven; all people can be redeemed.

Do you confess that Jesus Christ is the Son of God? Do you believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead?