sola gratia

This week I have been pondering what might be the overarching, biggest of big ideas in the Bible. These ideas pervade so much of the canon and are reflected in the specific main ideas of individual passages.

So far we have pondered God, creation and sin. Now to the continual surprise of the Bible:

4. God’s solution to great sin is the greater power of His glorious grace.

God’s right to rule has been profoundly challenged by the rebellion of Lucifer and humanity. Surely if God is God then the response from above must be the crashing fist of divine judgment?

Surprisingly, yet unsurprisingly, God’s solution is grace. Surprisingly because in our power-hungry corruption of the divine image, we naturally would judge all sin in a self-serving display of divine wrath. Unsurprisingly God is not like the fallen us, but He is just like Himself – that is, self-giving, generous, the God who is love.

Yet surely this is to deny another side of God, another mood of His? Surely we must balance God’s love with God’s wrath?

No, we do not honour God by offering a schizophrenic portrait of a two-sided God. Nor do we help by making the Father angry and the Son kind. We must instead seek to present God as He does in His Word. God’s love spurned leads to wrath, but this shows the fullness of His love, not the reining in of love.

The holiness of God is His perfect, untainted, uncorrupted love. This profoundly loving God has a purity about all He is and all He does. So the prophets presented both the muscly arm of divine recompense, right alongside the arm that tenderly cares for the sheep that have young. And the climax of that prophetic vision is not the crashing down of the fist of divine judgment on sinners, but the outstretched arms of the Lamb upon whom that fist would fall. All sin will be judged, the wonder is that mine is judged already.

We should always be surprised by grace since it is by definition undeserved. We should never be surprised by grace since it comes from the core of who God is.

There are glimpses of grace in every corner of the canon, whispers of love when screams of vengeance would fit. Threaded from the fall in one garden to the rising in another garden is the ribbon of God’s great promise:

In a fallen world there is hope in the coming seed. There is to be blessing for all the families on earth through the seed of one man. There is hope for the firm and forever establishment of the kingdom of the seed of another man in the same line. The ribbon of God’s great promise threads through sinning kings and trusting prostitutes, through flawed heroes and unknowns, showing grace on its journey to grace made flesh in the single seed of the woman, of Abraham, of David. The seed that must fall into the ground and die, yet in humiliating death demonstrate the depth of God’s glory.

The great corruption of sin marks every passage, and the super-abounding solution is not raw justice, but unjust grace. God in His goodness moves toward his harlot creation in love, giving of Himself, so that the greatest of sins pale before the greater glory of God’s goodness and grace.

If we preach the Bible with a pounding fist of self-righteous indignation, what are we doing? Surely the Bible preached should lead to a pounding of the hearts of those captivated by God’s extravagant grace.

In different church settings there are different theological issues. The kind of issues that may polarize a group of believers, or at least some within the group. It may be the Calvinism/Arminian debate. It may be some aspect of eternal security. Or perhaps differing positions on the millennium. Maybe there are both dispensational and covenantal proponents present. Or conservatives and charismatics. There are many such issues that see Christians diverge from each other. What do you do when you are preaching a passage that could spark division among those listening?

Know your listeners. As best you can, know the people to whom you are preaching. If you are a visiting speaker and consequently don’t know them so well, let that be a red flag before you wade into some theological controversy.

Evaluate the choice of passage. It is not automatically wrong to preach a potentially controversial passage, but it is worth thinking it through. If you are preaching a stand-alone message, perhaps it would be better to preach another passage. But if it is part of a series, do not avoid the tough passages. People need to ear the whole counsel, including the parts that may make them uncomfortable . . . but it is fair to say that it is worth evaluating whether you, the passage and this particular occasion are a good combination for this to occur. If it seems appropriate to preach the passage, then:

Preach the passage. If we preach the passage before us, we remain on relatively safe ground. It is once we start adding theological labels and make a presentation of a position that we veer off into a mine field. If you preach the passage and say what it says, then people can see it for themselves and are less likely to become contentious.

Preach wisely. Even sticking in the passage does not guarantee unity. Be wise in your choice of words. There may be a whole string of possible words to state a point in your particular passage, but some will definitely ignite a reaction, others might be just too much, others are safe. Again, sticking with the terms of the text is usually better than importing terms from theological tomes (for various reasons). We are not afraid of theology, but sometimes it is wiser to do theology without people realizing it.

Tomorrow I will complete this post with three more suggestions. Feel free to comment now or after the next post.