NOTES for Ti2 2:19
Speaking of the spiritual foundation laid by God, Paul gives two quotations from the Book of Psalms and from the literature we today call instructional, or the writings of the sages: "Yahweh knows His own" and "let everyone who confesses the name of Yahweh depart from iniquity." These two sayings briefly set out the Yahwistic and Jewish teaching on righteousness as we find it in the Bible. Righteousness is not a human matter, but God's. Only God is righteous, and only to Him does righteousness belong as something inseparable. To a human being, by contrast, it is not natural. For a human being, righteousness is not a property or a quality, but only a state in which a person may abide, and such abiding contradicts fallen human nature.
In a certain sense one could say that a person can be righteous only in spite of himself, not his true self, of course, but the self he became after the fall. But it is possible for a person to abide in a state of righteousness only when God "knows" him, in God's presence. Of course, God in one way or another sees and knows everyone; no one can hide from Him anywhere. But His immediate presence beside a person is not merely knowledge that such and such a person lives in the world, nor even the omniscience by which no human heart is hidden from God.
Here there is always the will of God directly addressed to a specific person, and this is impossible if the person himself does not seek God and does not strive for communion with Him. Through such striving a person becomes "His own" for God, not in the sense that such a person becomes God's favorite, but in the sense that the person's relationship with God becomes conscious. But consciousness also implies something else: the one who is conscious of his relationship with God and puts it first must shape his life accordingly, keeping the Torah in view, and above all the inner Torah.
Only if the commandment becomes an inward imperative for a person, spiritual and moral, will he be able not only to become conscious of his relationship with God, but also to make it stable. And where relations with God are stable, conscious and voluntary sin can no longer have a place in a person's life. Of course, anyone can stumble and fall, but such things usually happen apart from a person's will. This building of conscious and stable relations with God is the spiritual foundation of which the apostle speaks.