RIGHT RELATIONSHIP

It is Dr. Tim Mackie - who knows his Hebrew - who defines the word "righteousness" as "right relationship". But he points out that the "rightness" for a relationship will differ one to another.

A right relationship with your own child is going to have very different entailments than a right relationship with your boss.

You might be able to rank the importance of your various relationships. Perhaps a spouse would rank at the top and children just below that, followed by parents or siblings and then relatively distantly by a friend, a boss, a co-worker, and all the way down to the stranger who changes your car's oil. 

A relationship with the God of the universe - your Creator - should be by definition THE key relationship in your life. And if He is pure and holy and good and wants you to call Him "Father", then a right relationship with Him is going to be very much in line with the sort of things we traditionally associate with the word "righteousness". Especially since He commands you to love everyone, even the stranger changing your oil. 

But remember that Mackie combines "right" with "relationship" - and both are essential to biblical righteousness.

You can do what might otherwise be right in God's eyes - feeding the hungry, standing up for the voiceless, giving money to a charity - but do it all for the wrong reasons. Maybe you're simply virtue signaling or trying to impress somebody or trying to earn a place in Heaven. 

In any of those cases, the relationship is not actually right. In fact, our good deeds might involve zero relationship with our heavenly Father. And then they are just going to backfire.

"Get your sins forgiven so that you can go to Heaven someday" is the anemic version of the gospel. The full, true gospel is really only available to those who desire to be right with God.