“Grace to you, and peace, from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” In the New Testament we have nine different letters that Paul wrote to churches. In each and every case, he opened the letters with these words.
The grace of God is one of the most amazing things imaginable. Why, you might ask? Well, for two reasons. One is simply because of the sinfulness of man. God is totally pure, perfectly righteous and completely holy. Because of this, sin is not allowed to dwell in His presence. But it is not that man is simply not perfect like our Creator, the Bible says that, at the core of man’s nature, he is totally corrupt. The prophet Jeremiah described man’s innermost being (his heart) as, “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked: who can know it?” He follows that verse with these words, “I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins (the mind), to give to every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doing.” (Jeremiah 17:9-10).
The Apostle Paul confirms this in Romans 3:10-12 where he writes, “There is none righteous, not one. There is none who understands; there is none that seeks after God. They are all gone out of the way, they have together become unprofitable; there is none that does good, no, not one.” When we consider how holy God is and we compare Him to what we are; it is simply amazing that He does not eternally banish all of us from His presence.
But the second reason his grace is so amazing is because of what He was willing to do to save man. Because He is perfectly just and cannot violate His character, the only way salvation was possible was by providing a means to pay the penalty for all the violations of His holiness. In the beginning He told Adam that if he ever ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that in the day he did, he would surely die (Genesis 2:17). Adam ate and he died. He also tells us in Romans 6:23 that “the wages of sin is death,” and because we all sin, we all die also. So, for God to accept mankind back into His presence, a way had to be devised whereby the penalty for sin could be paid by one who knew no sin.
No man who was descended from Adam could ever meet this demand because, by nature and by deed, all of them sin. So the only way for God to achieve the payment for this penalty was by Him sending His Eternal Son into the world, for Him to become a man, live a perfect life, and be willing to die a substitutionary death for us. And that is what He did. He gave His Son, who of His own free will, died in our place that He might impute His righteousness to us.
I heard a man speaking years ago on some of the paradoxes we find in Scripture, sometimes in the words men speak, and I’ve never forgotten it. One he told of was when Jesus was dying on the cross, that the chief priests, the scribes and elders (the ‘religious’ leaders), were mocking Him saying, “He saved others; Himself He cannot save. If He be the King of Israel, let Him come down from the cross, and we will believe Him” (Matthew 27:42).
Little did those mocking Him that day understand the truth of what they were saying. Had He chosen to save Himself, He could not have saved others. It was only by His remaining there on that cross, by suffering and dying, that our sins could be paid for and our salvation made possible. Yes, He chose to stay there even as they mocked Him, and it is only as we consider what God the Son was willing to do, in accordance with the plan and purpose of the Father, that we can begin in any measure to grasp and appreciate the amazing grace that our God has for those He has called to be His own.
For God’s glory and His alone,
Pastor Terry.