The active obedience of Christ is His perfect, positive fulfillment of all the precepts of God’s law throughout His earthly life, rendered as the second Adam in the place of His people, and imputed to them for their righteousness. It is distinguished from His passive obedience—His suffering of the law’s penalty in His death—though the two are never separated, being but two aspects of the one obedience of the one Mediator. The law of God requires not only that its penalty be paid for transgression, but that its commands be perfectly kept; a sinner needs not only the cancellation of his guilt but the possession of a positive righteousness to stand accepted before God and inherit life. This righteousness man could never produce. Therefore Christ, made under the law, rendered to it the flawless, lifelong obedience that Adam failed to render and that we cannot: He loved God with all His heart and His neighbor as Himself, fulfilled all righteousness, did always those things that pleased the Father, and finished the work given Him to do. This active obedience is reckoned—imputed—to the believer, so that by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous. In justification, then, there is a double transfer: the believer’s sins are imputed to Christ, who bore their penalty (passive obedience), and Christ’s righteousness is imputed to the believer, who is clothed in His perfect law-keeping (active obedience). The believer is thus not merely pardoned but positively righteous in God’s sight, accepted as if he had himself kept the law perfectly. To deny the imputation of the active obedience is to leave the justified sinner forgiven but naked, his slate wiped clean but lacking the wedding garment of righteousness; to confess it is to know oneself clothed in the spotless obedience of Christ.