At the dinner table, after we’ve eaten but before we clean up, Christel and I spend time having some table talk. Martin and Katie Luther made the practice famous with their Tischreden or Table Talk, and Ligonier calls their magazine Table Talk. But all that we do with our three sons is discuss a passage of Scripture or working through the New City Catechism.
What does the righteousness of God mean?
As the last boy ate his last bites, I opened up Romans 3:21 and read the passage:
But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it
Romans 3:21
Since kids attention spans are short, we don’t like to make our table talk a seminary class. So my plan was to look at the first part of this verse.
My question to the table was “What does the righteousness of God mean?” A good response back was that it meant God’s holiness. Another response was that is was God’s rightness.
I went with that. God’s righteousness, I tried to explain, was his character of perfect rightness, which is always holy, which is always good. He’s right and he’s always right.
From “But now” to Butt Jokes and Back Again
From there we switched to looking at the phrase “But now”. I asked the table about the “but”. Of course, the boys started making butt jokes. Whose butt? As the conversation turned toward smelly butts (very Luther-like), I reined us in and asked why the “But now” was there.
A boy suggested that something different was happening. And it was happening right now.
I agreed. We then had a discussion about how long is ‘now’. I explained the concept of an unending moment, what theologians would call an eschatological ‘now’ or the grammarians call a gnomic present (mercifully none of which I included in my explanation). A boy waved his hands and said it is now forever and ever. And I said he had got it exactly right.
Connecting the ‘But now’ with ‘the righteousness of God’
At this point, we had to start wrapping things up. We still hadn’t connected the contrast between what had been discussed in chapters 1-3 and what Paul was saying in Ro 3:21. I asked the table about the righteousness earlier in chapter 3. One boy remembered that there is “none righteous, no, not one” (Ro 3:10). I asked how did everyone know what was right and what wasn’t. In a dramatic courtroom judge voice, one boy declared, “The Law!”
At this point, we were nearing the max of our table talk attention span. I left our discussion with that judge-like declaration. Ready to continue the discussion at the next table talk.
If you would like to read more about how our family conducts this table talk, you can check out an interview at The Gospel Coalition Canada.