God of all grace, whose thoughts toward us are ever thoughts of peace and not of
evil, give us hearts to believe that we are accepted in the Beloved; and give us
minds to admire that perfection of moral wisdom which found a way to preserve
the integrity of heaven and yet receive us there. We are astonished and marvel
that one so holy and dread should invite us into Thy banqueting house and cause
love to be the banner over us. We can not express the gratitude we feel, but
look Thou on our hearts and read it there. Amen.
In God mercy and grace are one; but as they reach us they are seen as two,
related but not identical.
As mercy is God’s goodness confronting human misery and guilt, so grace is His
goodness directed toward human debt and demerit. It is by His grace that God
imputes merit where none previously existed and declares no debt to be where one
had been before.
Grace is the good pleasure of God that inclines Him to bestow benefits upon the
undeserving. It is a self-existent principle inherent in the divine nature and
appears to us as a self-caused propensity to pity the wretched, spare the
guilty, welcome the outcast, and bring into favor those who were before under
just disapprobation. Its use to us sinful men is to save us and to make us sit
together in heavenly places to demonstrate to the ages the exceeding riches of
God’s kindness to us in Christ Jesus.
We benefit eternally by God’s being just what He is. Because He is what He is,
He lifts up our heads out of the prison house, changes our prison garments for
royal robes, and makes us to eat bread continually before Him all the days of
our lives.
Grace takes its rise far back in the heart of God, in the awful and
incomprehensible abyss of His holy being; but the channel through which it flows
out to men is Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. The apostle Paul, who beyond
all others is the exponent of grace in redemption, never disassociates God’s
grace from God’s crucified Son. Always in his teachings the two are found
together, organically one and inseparable.
A full and fair summation of Paul’s teaching on this subject is found in his
Epistle to the Ephesians: ”Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children
by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the
praise of the glory of his grace, where in he hath made us accepted in the
beloved. In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins,
according to the riches of his grace.”
John also in the Gospel that bears his name identifies Christ as the medium
through which grace reaches mankind: ”For the law was given by Moses, but grace
and truth came by Jesus Christ.”
But right here it is easy to miss the path and go far astray from the truth; and
some have done this. They have compelled this verse to stand by itself,
unrelated to other Scriptures bearing on the doctrine of grace, and have made it
teach that Moses knew only law and Christ knows only grace. So the Old Testament
is made to be a book of law and the New Testament a book of grace. The truth is
quite otherwise.
The law was given to men through Moses, but it did not originate with Moses. It
had existed in the heart of God from before the foundation of the world. On
Mount Sinai it became the legal code for the nation of Israel; but the moral
principles it embodies are eternal. There never was a time when the law did not
represent the will of God for mankind nor a time when the violation of it did
not bring its own penalty, though God was patient and sometimes ”winked” at
wrongdoing because of the ignorance of the people. Paul’s close-knit arguments
in the third and fifth chapters of his Epistle to the Romans make this very
clear.
The spring of Christian morality is the love of Christ, not the law of Moses;
nevertheless there has been no abrogation of the principles of morality
contained in the law. No privileged class exists exempt from that righteousness
which the law enjoins.
The Old Testament is indeed a book of law, but not of law only. Before the great
flood Noah ”found grace in the eyes of the Lord,” and after the law was given
God said to Moses, ”Thou hast found grace in my sight.” And how could it be
otherwise? God will always be Himself, and grace is an attribute of His holy
being. He can no more hide His grace than the sun can hide its brightness. Men
may flee from the sunlight to dark and musty caves of the earth, but they cannot
put out the sun. So men may in any dispensation despise the grace of God, but
they cannot extinguish it.
Had the Old Testament times been times of stern, unbending law alone the whole
complexion of the early world would have been vastly less cheerful than we find
it to be in the ancient writings. There could have been no Abraham, friend of
God; no David, man after God’s own heart; no Samuel, no Isaiah, no Daniel. The
eleventh chapter of Hebrews, that Westminster Abbey of the spiritually great of
the Old Testament, would stand dark and tenantless. Grace made sainthood
possible in Old Testament days just as it does today.
No one was ever saved other than by grace, from Abel to the present moment.
Since mankind was banished from the east-ward Garden, none has ever returned to
the divine favor except through the sheer goodness of God. And wherever grace
found any man it was always by Jesus Christ. Grace indeed came by Jesus Christ,
hut it did not wait for His birth in the manger or His death on the cross before
it became operative.
Christ is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. The first man in
human history to be reinstated in the fellowship of God came through faith in
Christ. In olden times men looked forward to Christ’s redeeming work; in later
times they gaze back upon it, but always they came and they come by grace,
through faith.
We must keep in mind also that the grace of God is infinite and eternal. As it
had no beginning, so it can have no end, and being an attribute of God, it is as
boundless as infinitude.
Instead of straining to comprehend this as a theological truth, it would be
better and simpler to compare God’s grace with our need. We can never know the
enormity of our sin, neither is it necessary that we should. What we can know is
that ”where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.”
To ”abound” in sin: that is the worst and the most we could or can do. The word
abound defines the limit of our finite abilities; and although we feel our
iniquities rise over us like a mountain, the mountain, nevertheless, has
definable boundaries: it is so large, so high, it weighs only this certain
amount and no more. But who shall define the limitless grace of God? Its ”much
more” plunges our thoughts into infinitude and confounds them there. All thanks
be to God for grace abounding.
We who feel ourselves alienated from the fellowship of God can now raise our
discouraged heads and look up. Through the virtues of Christ’s atoning death the
cause of our banishment has been removed. We may return as the Prodigal
returned, and be welcome. As we approach the Garden, our home before the Fall,
the flaming sword is withdrawn. The keepers of the tree of life stand aside when
they see a son of grace approaching.
Return, O wanderer, now return,
And seek thy Father’s face;
Those new desires which in thee burn
Were kindled by His grace.
Return, O wanderer, now return,
And wipe the falling tear:
Thy Father calls, - no longer mourn;
’Tis love invites thee near
William Benco Collyer
