"The robe of righteousness" is a familiar phrase with evangelical Christians. Adopted, undoubtedly, from the passage just read, it is used to denote that righteousness of the Lord Jesus which they who believe in Him are supposed to have attributed to them by God, so that their actual personal imperfections and defects disappear before Him, like some foul or ugly object beneath the overspreading of a fair white mantle; and He is enabled to accept them for what they are not to regard and deal with them as sinless.
I. Now here is, first, an assumption the false and cruel assumption that the great Father, while waiting the gradual accomplishment of our complete purification from sin, requires to have our existing sinfulness hidden from Him, requires to have it veiled and concealed; that He must not be revolted nor disturbed by the spectacle; that we must be made somehow, nay anyhow, at least to look clean to Him, whatever our actual uncleanness may be; that He is not capable of enduring the sight of His children as they are, but needs that a mask shall be worn by them, to smile between Him and their unseemliness. Is it conceivable that God should ever be content to be blind to that which is, that He should ever endure to have any reality disguised to Him? Canaught be hidden from Him, the All-seeing One?
II. Turn now to the prophet, whose noble figure has been so miserably perverted, so falsely applied, and observe how different his idea of the robe of which he speaks. "The Lord hath covered me," he says, "as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels," which seemsto imply certainly a putting on from without, and nothing more; yet, if we consider, the writer may well have discerned, in the lavish decoration of themselves on the part of the bridegroom and the bride, something more than that not a mere imposition, but an expression, the natural expression, of what was within. But then, as if apprehensive of mistakes as if anxious to guard against the conclusion that the robe of which he sang was only flung over him from without the prophet hastens on to a further and more complete illustration (Isaiah 61:11), as though He had said: While in the self-adorning of the bridegroom and the bride on their wedding-day, I find an image of the grace with which my Lord clothes me, and of the joy that belongs to it, yet this fails to represent the whole of the matter fails, indeed, to represent the profoundest and most important part of it, viz., the modus operandithe way in which my clothing is effected. Thatis adumbrated, in the world of material nature, in the vernal decking of the bare brown fields, and the winter-stripped pleasure grounds. What is it, and whence comes it? Is it not just a growth from withinan efflux upon the surface of life that throbs below a bursting through and running over of the earth's own germ-charged bosom? And God's robe of righteousness is the forth-flowing upon me of His hidden movement and working in my soul not a robe laid on, but a robe coming out not a robe assumed, but a robe issuing; it is the holy character and the holy living that are begotten of His Divine inbreathing.
S. A. Tipple, Echoes of Spoken Words,p. 107.
Reference: Isaiah 61:10. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. xvi., p. 17.