The "Rational" Theory of the Atonement
A few months ago, between finishing seminary and moving across the state, a friend of mine who is not a Christian, but willing to have open and honest dialogue with Christians, invited me over to talk about faith and God. I always enjoy these conversations and this particular friend is a wonderful dialogue partner; he is always respectful and willing to listen, but he is also not afraid to ask the tough questions.
From my point of view, the most significant point in the conversation came when he said to me, "This is what my life looks like right now. I'm pretty darn happy with how things are going. Why should I believe in Jesus." All of a sudden, it struck me that there is a considerable portion of the church that would want me to bring up the doctrine of hell and use that as the reason why he should believe in Jesus. The argument being something like this. "You should believe in Jesus because, if you don't, you're going to go to hell."
The only problem with this is that it is radically unbiblical. By that, I don't mean that hell is not something spoken of in the Bible, nor that it is not real, nor that it is not a serious consequence that goes along with obstinate unbelief, but rather it is not biblical in the sense that nowhere do we see hell used as a threat to get someone to believe. Jesus warns people about it, pleads with them so that they need not go there, but he never threatens people with it. I mentioned all this to my friend and gave a different response.
I said (words to this effect, at any rate), "I think that you should believe in Jesus and the gospel because I have this deep and abiding conviction that it is true." Now, this might seem like something of a copout. After all, why should my personal convictions be the yardstick by which other people's opinions and lives should be led? And yet, I have become more and more convinced, not only that such a response was not fundamentally wrong, but that it really is the only responsible answer. Here is why.
At the end of the day, why should we believe in Jesus? Well, one strand of apologetics argues that we should believe in Jesus and be Christians because Christian faith is remarkably consistent with the deep ethical convictions of most Americans. Of course, this is somewhat begging the question, as our American culture has been deeply formed by the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition. How can we be surprised that our culture's approach to morality and ethics is remarkably similar to the tradition that shaped it. That is a basic insight of sociology, and not a distinctly Christian one.
Another approach is that we should believe in Jesus because, if we don't, we will be punished and sent to hell. This has at least one advantage over the previous view in that it acknowledges Christian faith to be more rich than, and irreducible to, morality, a problem that people on both the left and the right make (though it takes different forms). This also has an emotional element in it. After all, none of us want to go to hell, nor do we say that we want anyone else to go to hell (it is at this point that hell becomes not only a motivation for a personal decision but also the primary impetus for evangelism). However, as I mentioned above, I am more and more convinced that to make hell the primary reason to believe in Jesus is to put the cart before the horse. If Jesus talks a lot about hell, but never as a threat, it would do us well to follow his lead. Let us acknowledge hell, let us understand its seriousness, but let us never threaten.
The fact of the matter is that there is a stereotypical practice of evangelism that says, "Look at yourself. You aren't really all that good, are you? Compare yourself to the Ten Commandments, especially as interpreted by Jesus. You can't say you're all that righteous can you? No you cannot. You are in trouble and you need saving from beyond yourself. Now, here comes Jesus to do what you could never do yourself." Now, it is certainly the case that, if we take these elements separately, they are all in agreement with scripture. However, when taken as a whole, we find no precedent anywhere in the Bible. The closest we get is the beginning of the book of Romans, where Paul uses the sinfulness of the world to demonstrate how much we do, in fact, need saving. However, he is writing to an established church, and we cannot divorce those chapters from the rest of the letter, which is remarkably Christocentric and Trinitarian.
Christ is not, first and foremost, the solution to a problem. In fact, if Christ had never come, we never would have realized that we even have a problem that needed solving. It is only when we see God take up residence in our human flesh and live so radically differently than we do, when we see that sin is such a big problem that the only way it can be solved is by the second Person of the Trinity taking on human flesh (a tremendous sacrifice in itself), living a human life, being hated, mocked and mistreated, and finally killed, could wrench us out of the clutches of evil, that we understand that we need a savior. The realization of our need for salvation is historically identical with the culminating act of atonement. Nowhere do we see the Biblical writers work out a doctrine of sin independently of Christ and then use Christ as the solution to the problem.
At the end of the day, everything that we believe as Christians has its roots in Christ. It must be noted that by this I mean Christ as understood as an Israelite and in light of the whole witness of the Old Testament, not a kind of spaceless and timeless Christ (whatever that might be). Our understanding of morality is not primarily rooted in tradition or even the Ten Commandments, but in the actual life of Christ as the pattern and standard of rational human life. All false understandings of the world of space and time are revealed to be what they are because, in Christ, their faulty presuppositions are exposed for what they are. Even our doctrine of the Trinity is not independently generated, but is rooted in the belief in the Incarnation (that is, we would never have arrived at a doctrine of the Trinity if God did not take on human flesh and live among us).
In the systematic theology that I wrote, I included something that, in hindsight, is something of a summary paragraph of all my convictions. Here it is:
If it is true (as Christian faith has always proclaimed) that only in Jesus of Nazareth do we see God fully revealed to humanity, then all of our thinking about God must be utterly rooted and grounded in the person of Christ. When we declare that Jesus is Lord, we are not only saying that Jesus is truly God, but that God is truly Christ-like. This quickly becomes the overarching criterion or datum of all our thoughts and statements about God, humanity, and the interaction between the two, and we must begin our refection upon every topic by asking the question, “What does the Incarnation tell us about this?”
Those first four words, "If it is true," are of crucial importance. If, indeed this central conviction of Christian faith is true, if it stands firm, then all the rest of Christian teaching hangs together; if it is not true (which I would claim is harder to prove than some might think), then it all falls apart. Everything depends on whether God actually became a human being and lived among us in and as the man Jesus of Nazareth. It is precisely the conviction that this is indeed what has happened that is the reason we should believe, and any other benefits or reasons to believe must take a secondary position to this conviction.
It is really not altogether different from the way science works. As modern science has advanced and been forced to account for the objective status of reality (the same objective status that much of modern philosophy has been trying to doubt out of existence), we have had to deal with the radical challenges this advance has made on how our "reason" would like us to view the universe. The Copernican view of the universe won the day over the Ptolemaic view, not just because it proved to be a simpler way to account for the observational data, but because of a deep and abiding conviction that it actually was a more true way of looking at the universe. Relativity physics did not win out over Newtonian mechanics because the people just liked it better, because they didn't. It actually was quite confusing at first and forced us to revise our understanding of things that seemed so self-evident, like space and time.
For example, even secular science no longer believes that the universe is infinite, both in space and time. Rather, because of the belief that the universe had a specific beginning point and because there is a limit to how fast things can move (that is, the speed of light), the universe, in all its vastness, is not infinite. It does not matter how much our "reason" would desire it to be different than it is, it is finite and no amount of argument or wishful thinking can make it otherwise. Why should we believe that the universe is finite and not infinite? Because, at the end of the day, that is the way it is, and it would be irrational to think otherwise. Rationality and irrationality is not determined by public opinion but by reality itself.
Here again was my response to my friend that I mentioned earlier. "I think that you should believe in Jesus and the gospel because I have this deep and abiding conviction that it is true." It is because of this deep conviction that God actually has taken on human flesh that I think you should believe it, too. Not first and foremost because you will go to hell if you don't (I don't think we should make any decision, least of all major ones like this, based on fear), not because you can't do good things if you aren't a Christian (though I do believe that it is incredibly hard to take a real stand if our morality and ethics do not go back to Christ), but because this is what God has done, and if it is indeed true, it is of staggering significance. It means that God does not consider it to be too much of a sacrifice to step into his creation, to become one of us and one with us. It means that God is so far from being deaf to our pains and hurts, our trials and tribulations, that he stepped into the midst of them and made them his own, standing in complete solidarity with us, those who hated him.
That is why, for lack of a better term, I have chosen to call this the "Rational" theory of Atonement. Not because every other way of thinking about atonement is irrational, but because this places the impetus for faith on deep ontological convictions, without which the whole structure of Christian faith collapses. It is because our understanding of the universe is vastly different depending on whether or not God has come among us in and as Jesus Christ. It is from this conviction that God has indeed done this that everything else flows.
Showing posts with label Justification. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Justification. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Justification by Grace
10/23/11 Justification by Grace Grace UMC
One of the words that has played a dominant role in Christian faith, especially since the time of the Reformation is justification. Though people have used it many times, it is one of those words that some people may not have heard or, if they have, they may have written it off as one of those "church words," those words that pastors and other church leaders get all excited about but don't have any real connection with our daily lives. But justification is an absolutely central part of our Christian faith. Without it, the Reformers said, the whole of Christian faith would come crashing down. It is the article by which the church stands or falls.
But what exactly is it? What does it mean to be justified by grace? Ultimately, the Christian doctrine of justification is the answer to the question that shows up several times in the New Testament, "What must I do to be saved." The Greek word from which we get justification is δικαιοσυνη, which can be translated either "justice" or "righteousness." To be justified is to be made righteous, to be made just. Specifically, the issue is how we, who are unjust and unrighteous, can be delivered from the consequences of that injustice and unrighteousness.
Now, before we can go any farther, we need to deal with a situation that is growing much more common in our world today, though it isn't really anything new. What I am saying, and what the church has said since the very beginning, is two things: First, we find ourselves in a situation where we need saving and that we need to be saved by someone outside of ourselves, since we are not capable of fixing our own problems. The second thing is that this salvation is indeed possible. In fact, it is so possible that it has been offered to us in Jesus Christ without price.
The fact of the matter is that there are people out there who will challenge both of those points. The first group of people tend to be, but are not always, militant atheists. Their position is to deny that human beings, in general, are in need of being saved at all. There is actually a long tradition, that stems from the Enlightenment, that human beings are basically good and not tragically flawed and fallen that, while it is true that human beings seem to be the cause of our problems, it is equally true that human beings are able to solve those problems in one way or another themselves. The problem might be that people are just not educated well enough, that they have simply not been taught the difference between right and wrong, or, given that they have, they might not know how to go about living appropriately in light of it. The basic conviction is that human beings are good enough, or at least, they'd better be, since we are all we have. A recent rallying cry for many people today is, "I don't need God to make me happy," or "I don't need God to make me a good person." According to such a view, which is increasingly common and outspoken, human beings simply do not need to be saved, or that their salvation must come from themselves.
Actually, it would be unfair to imply that such people do not think that people need to be saved. In point of fact, they do, often, think that people need to be saved, they need to be saved from religion and faith itself. In light of the fact that many Christians' lives are not marked by hope, joy and peace in the midst of turmoil, but rather with guilt and shame over not being good enough, it does not take much for someone to conclude that our faith is precisely the problem. So far is this from the Christian point of view that we need God to save us, that it says we need to be saved from God.
Another group of people that would disagree with the Christian message of salvation are those who believe that there is no such thing as absolute truth, justice, goodness, meaning, or anything like that, or if there were, we would have no way of knowing it. We might have a deep longing and desire for truth and meaning, but we cannot obtain it. We might desperately need saving, but there is no such salvation possible. Clearly, this deviates from the Christian position that salvation is not only possible, but near at hand if we will only receive it.
When we say that we are justified by grace, or that we are saved by grace, what exactly do we mean? I think that we might misunderstand what this means unless we spend some time and reflect a bit about how we are not justified. First of all, we are not justified by what we do. This is a theme that has been emphasized by countless writers, especially since Martin Luther. It is something that, if we take a moment and read the New Testament, especially certain letters of Paul, like Romans and Galatians, we will find all over the place. We are told over and over again that, when we are accepted in the eyes of God, it is not because of anything we have done. We are not saved because we have been really good people, nor because we have done more things right than wrong, nor because we are better than certain people we know. You are not loved by God because you come to church every Sunday, or at all. You are not saved because you give a lot of money to charitable causes. We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
Another thing that does not save us is our intentions. It does not matter if you have intended to do all kinds of good things, but just never managed to get it done. They used to say, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," but while that phrase emphasizes that our intentions are no good if they do not ultimately turn into actions, my point is that intending to good and doing everything you can toward that good end is not what saves us. It isn't by having pure intentions that makes us loved by God and we are not saved by them.
Thirdly, and this is something that cuts especially hard on people like me, we are not saved by our opinions or our convictions. This cuts against me because I am very interested in what people believe and why they believe it. Sometimes, I can get so caught up in it that it is almost as if I am more concerned with people thinking the right way and having the right opinions than I am about them being transformed by the power of the Gospel. A well-known Christian pastor wrote a book earlier this year and caught tremendous fire for doing so. There were many other Christian leaders who attacked this man, claiming that he had abandoned proper theology. The implication was that people simply could not be saved unless they had the right understanding of salvation. If someone was misled in the nature of salvation, it would make it impossible for them to be saved. The retort made by other leaders, with which I agree, was, "If we cannot be saved unless our theology is just right, who can be saved?" If God cannot save us in spite of our bad theology, we are all in a lot of trouble.
So you might be wondering, "If we aren't saved by what we do, or by what we intend to do, or by our opinions and convictions, how in the world can we be saved?" The answer is that we are saved by grace alone. In our text, we heard Paul declare that, independent of Christ, we are all, we must hear that all, people who lived according to the passions of our flesh and were, by nature, children of wrath like everyone else. After that serious declaration, what do we read? "But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ." The question we want to know the answer to is, "What is it about us, either as humanity as a whole, or as us as individuals, that makes God take us from being those who are dead in our sins to being alive in and with Christ?" And the answer is grace.
You may recall a few months ago, back in July, when I had the chance to preach a sermon where we asked the question, "What is Grace?" I suggested that grace is not, in fact, a what at all, but is a who. Grace is, in its fullest and most complete sense, Jesus Christ, and if Jesus Christ, then God. Grace is certainly unmerited favor, and it is true that we can do nothing to earn grace in any way, shape or form, but what it is, what it really is, is Jesus Christ.
We can see this at work on a smaller scale when we look at the advances of science. Once, most people believed that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun went around the earth. Copernicus suggested that the earth actually rotates and travels around the sun. The reason why the Copernican view of the universe was ultimately accepted was not because people just liked it better, because they didn't, as it forced us to realize that we are not the center of the universe, nor because the old way of thinking couldn't deal with what they saw, but because, after long scrutiny, it was felt that it was simply closer to what really is the case. The ultimate judge was not just one person or another, but the nature of the universe.
Likewise, Einstein's theories of Relativity overturned Newtonian mechanics, not because people liked it better, in fact, when Einstein first published his ideas, only about a half dozen people in the world knew what he was talking about. It was because, as helpful as Newton's way of thinking had been, it was felt that Einstein had gotten down to a deeper understanding of reality. At the end of the day, it was not a debate that solved the issue, but the nature of reality. There were debates about the merits of various theories, but at the end of the day, the answer to the question, "Why Einstein and not Newton," is "Reality itself."
But if we aren't used to this way of thinking, this kind of answer isn't very satisfying, is it? We aren't, in our day and age, used to appealing to ultimate things. We want to talk about reasons, we want to know why things are the way they are and not something else. To simply say, "That's the way it is," seems like it is avoiding the issue, but sometimes, it is the only answer there is and there is no probing behind it.
I think that sometimes we want to know the reasons why is not so we can have conceptual clarity, that we can connect the dots, but so that we can have some control over things. We want to be able to say, "Our scientific findings are what they are for this reason, and they can't be anything else because of this reason," but we can't do it. We can imagine the world being different than it is, but things are the way they are and not some other way.
The same kind of thing is true with our understanding of salvation by grace. We want to say, "Alright, God takes us who were dead in our sins and makes us alive in Christ. Why exactly does he do this?" At the end of the day, the only answer we have is the ultimate fact that God is who he is. Whether we like it or not, this is the only answer we have. When Moses was speaking with God when he saw the burning bush, he says to God, "If I come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?'" God's response is, "I am who I am." I think part of the point is that God does not put himself in a box by saying that he is like certain things or unlike certain things, but simply that he is, that he exists, and that he is who he is and not anything else. God was not able to give an argument, that he could be understood in terms of something else. God does not say, "I am the good one, or the merciful one," though he is both good and merciful. God is who God is and there is no reason beyond the fact that he is.
This is the point. We are saved by grace, we are saved by God. Why are we saved? Because God loves us. Why does God love us? There is no reason beyond the fact that God is who God is. And God demonstrates who he is by coming among us in Jesus Christ. The only God who is is the God who meets us as Jesus Christ, who enters into our world of space and time, who shoulders our burdens, who heals us of our brokenness, who endures our scorn and hatred without vindictively retaliating, and offers us forgiveness long before we ever ask for it.
But the message of grace does not always seem like good news to us, does it? Do we not like to earn what we have? Do we not like to think that we have done something, anything to deserve what we receive? Are we prepared to receive the treasures of the gospel and of all the riches of God, what Paul calls "the immeasurable riches of" God's "grace in kindness" at absolutely no cost? We need to understand that when God offers salvation to us by grace alone, it does not mean that we could have earned it some other way, but he is offering us an easier way. Indeed, God is actually offering us a harder way, one that costs everything. You see, to say that we are saved by grace is to say that absolutely nothing short of God's almighty grace is sufficient to save us. We are people who are in need, unable to be who we ought to be, and in need of a savior. It is not as though God simply makes it so we do not have to give anything in return, it is that we have nothing to give. Our hands are empty and we simply cling to Christ, knowing that, if Christ does not save us, we are surely lost.
Just a few days before Jesus is crucified, he says this to the chief priests and the pharisees. "Have you never read in the scriptures: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord's doing, and it is amazing in our eyes...' The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls." If we have erected a hope that is independent of Christ, no matter how sound and sturdy it seems, it is and will be crushed by Christ and shown to be insufficient. Nothing that we create with our hands, or with our minds, or even with our lives, is capable of doing what grace can do. When we give ourselves to Jesus and trust entirely in him, our plans for self-righteousness are shattered. And if there comes a time after we have given ourselves to Christ and we somehow get it into our heads that we need grace plus something else, the moment it comes in contact with the cornerstone that is Christ, it too is shattered.
Make no mistake. Salvation by grace alone is not a "get out of hell free" card, it is not taking the easy way out. To be saved by grace is the single most costly, humbling, thing you can do. It is to say, "I have nothing to offer, my hands are empty; Lord, save, or I perish." It is to come before God, not with a list of good things you've done, not with a list of evil things you have avoided, not even with a list of the things you need to be forgiven for, but simply with the empty hands of faith. The life of one who is saved by grace is not necessarily any better than that of one who is not, though it should improve as you grow in grace; nor is it necessarily any worse than one who is not. This is a good rule of thumb to see if you are living a life that is fully consistent with one that has been marked by grace. If, at the end of the day, it were to turn out that there is no God, that Jesus Christ was simply a man and nothing more, your life should make absolutely no sense. Our lives should be so devoted to God, and because of that, to one another, that the things we do should be completely incomprehensible to those who do not believe in God. With that in mind, let us go live in ways that are so devoted to God in every way, that to the unbelieving world, it is simply unbelievable. Let us pray.
AMEN
One of the words that has played a dominant role in Christian faith, especially since the time of the Reformation is justification. Though people have used it many times, it is one of those words that some people may not have heard or, if they have, they may have written it off as one of those "church words," those words that pastors and other church leaders get all excited about but don't have any real connection with our daily lives. But justification is an absolutely central part of our Christian faith. Without it, the Reformers said, the whole of Christian faith would come crashing down. It is the article by which the church stands or falls.
But what exactly is it? What does it mean to be justified by grace? Ultimately, the Christian doctrine of justification is the answer to the question that shows up several times in the New Testament, "What must I do to be saved." The Greek word from which we get justification is δικαιοσυνη, which can be translated either "justice" or "righteousness." To be justified is to be made righteous, to be made just. Specifically, the issue is how we, who are unjust and unrighteous, can be delivered from the consequences of that injustice and unrighteousness.
Now, before we can go any farther, we need to deal with a situation that is growing much more common in our world today, though it isn't really anything new. What I am saying, and what the church has said since the very beginning, is two things: First, we find ourselves in a situation where we need saving and that we need to be saved by someone outside of ourselves, since we are not capable of fixing our own problems. The second thing is that this salvation is indeed possible. In fact, it is so possible that it has been offered to us in Jesus Christ without price.
The fact of the matter is that there are people out there who will challenge both of those points. The first group of people tend to be, but are not always, militant atheists. Their position is to deny that human beings, in general, are in need of being saved at all. There is actually a long tradition, that stems from the Enlightenment, that human beings are basically good and not tragically flawed and fallen that, while it is true that human beings seem to be the cause of our problems, it is equally true that human beings are able to solve those problems in one way or another themselves. The problem might be that people are just not educated well enough, that they have simply not been taught the difference between right and wrong, or, given that they have, they might not know how to go about living appropriately in light of it. The basic conviction is that human beings are good enough, or at least, they'd better be, since we are all we have. A recent rallying cry for many people today is, "I don't need God to make me happy," or "I don't need God to make me a good person." According to such a view, which is increasingly common and outspoken, human beings simply do not need to be saved, or that their salvation must come from themselves.
Actually, it would be unfair to imply that such people do not think that people need to be saved. In point of fact, they do, often, think that people need to be saved, they need to be saved from religion and faith itself. In light of the fact that many Christians' lives are not marked by hope, joy and peace in the midst of turmoil, but rather with guilt and shame over not being good enough, it does not take much for someone to conclude that our faith is precisely the problem. So far is this from the Christian point of view that we need God to save us, that it says we need to be saved from God.
Another group of people that would disagree with the Christian message of salvation are those who believe that there is no such thing as absolute truth, justice, goodness, meaning, or anything like that, or if there were, we would have no way of knowing it. We might have a deep longing and desire for truth and meaning, but we cannot obtain it. We might desperately need saving, but there is no such salvation possible. Clearly, this deviates from the Christian position that salvation is not only possible, but near at hand if we will only receive it.
When we say that we are justified by grace, or that we are saved by grace, what exactly do we mean? I think that we might misunderstand what this means unless we spend some time and reflect a bit about how we are not justified. First of all, we are not justified by what we do. This is a theme that has been emphasized by countless writers, especially since Martin Luther. It is something that, if we take a moment and read the New Testament, especially certain letters of Paul, like Romans and Galatians, we will find all over the place. We are told over and over again that, when we are accepted in the eyes of God, it is not because of anything we have done. We are not saved because we have been really good people, nor because we have done more things right than wrong, nor because we are better than certain people we know. You are not loved by God because you come to church every Sunday, or at all. You are not saved because you give a lot of money to charitable causes. We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
Another thing that does not save us is our intentions. It does not matter if you have intended to do all kinds of good things, but just never managed to get it done. They used to say, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," but while that phrase emphasizes that our intentions are no good if they do not ultimately turn into actions, my point is that intending to good and doing everything you can toward that good end is not what saves us. It isn't by having pure intentions that makes us loved by God and we are not saved by them.
Thirdly, and this is something that cuts especially hard on people like me, we are not saved by our opinions or our convictions. This cuts against me because I am very interested in what people believe and why they believe it. Sometimes, I can get so caught up in it that it is almost as if I am more concerned with people thinking the right way and having the right opinions than I am about them being transformed by the power of the Gospel. A well-known Christian pastor wrote a book earlier this year and caught tremendous fire for doing so. There were many other Christian leaders who attacked this man, claiming that he had abandoned proper theology. The implication was that people simply could not be saved unless they had the right understanding of salvation. If someone was misled in the nature of salvation, it would make it impossible for them to be saved. The retort made by other leaders, with which I agree, was, "If we cannot be saved unless our theology is just right, who can be saved?" If God cannot save us in spite of our bad theology, we are all in a lot of trouble.
So you might be wondering, "If we aren't saved by what we do, or by what we intend to do, or by our opinions and convictions, how in the world can we be saved?" The answer is that we are saved by grace alone. In our text, we heard Paul declare that, independent of Christ, we are all, we must hear that all, people who lived according to the passions of our flesh and were, by nature, children of wrath like everyone else. After that serious declaration, what do we read? "But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ." The question we want to know the answer to is, "What is it about us, either as humanity as a whole, or as us as individuals, that makes God take us from being those who are dead in our sins to being alive in and with Christ?" And the answer is grace.
You may recall a few months ago, back in July, when I had the chance to preach a sermon where we asked the question, "What is Grace?" I suggested that grace is not, in fact, a what at all, but is a who. Grace is, in its fullest and most complete sense, Jesus Christ, and if Jesus Christ, then God. Grace is certainly unmerited favor, and it is true that we can do nothing to earn grace in any way, shape or form, but what it is, what it really is, is Jesus Christ.
We can see this at work on a smaller scale when we look at the advances of science. Once, most people believed that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun went around the earth. Copernicus suggested that the earth actually rotates and travels around the sun. The reason why the Copernican view of the universe was ultimately accepted was not because people just liked it better, because they didn't, as it forced us to realize that we are not the center of the universe, nor because the old way of thinking couldn't deal with what they saw, but because, after long scrutiny, it was felt that it was simply closer to what really is the case. The ultimate judge was not just one person or another, but the nature of the universe.
Likewise, Einstein's theories of Relativity overturned Newtonian mechanics, not because people liked it better, in fact, when Einstein first published his ideas, only about a half dozen people in the world knew what he was talking about. It was because, as helpful as Newton's way of thinking had been, it was felt that Einstein had gotten down to a deeper understanding of reality. At the end of the day, it was not a debate that solved the issue, but the nature of reality. There were debates about the merits of various theories, but at the end of the day, the answer to the question, "Why Einstein and not Newton," is "Reality itself."
But if we aren't used to this way of thinking, this kind of answer isn't very satisfying, is it? We aren't, in our day and age, used to appealing to ultimate things. We want to talk about reasons, we want to know why things are the way they are and not something else. To simply say, "That's the way it is," seems like it is avoiding the issue, but sometimes, it is the only answer there is and there is no probing behind it.
I think that sometimes we want to know the reasons why is not so we can have conceptual clarity, that we can connect the dots, but so that we can have some control over things. We want to be able to say, "Our scientific findings are what they are for this reason, and they can't be anything else because of this reason," but we can't do it. We can imagine the world being different than it is, but things are the way they are and not some other way.
The same kind of thing is true with our understanding of salvation by grace. We want to say, "Alright, God takes us who were dead in our sins and makes us alive in Christ. Why exactly does he do this?" At the end of the day, the only answer we have is the ultimate fact that God is who he is. Whether we like it or not, this is the only answer we have. When Moses was speaking with God when he saw the burning bush, he says to God, "If I come to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?'" God's response is, "I am who I am." I think part of the point is that God does not put himself in a box by saying that he is like certain things or unlike certain things, but simply that he is, that he exists, and that he is who he is and not anything else. God was not able to give an argument, that he could be understood in terms of something else. God does not say, "I am the good one, or the merciful one," though he is both good and merciful. God is who God is and there is no reason beyond the fact that he is.
This is the point. We are saved by grace, we are saved by God. Why are we saved? Because God loves us. Why does God love us? There is no reason beyond the fact that God is who God is. And God demonstrates who he is by coming among us in Jesus Christ. The only God who is is the God who meets us as Jesus Christ, who enters into our world of space and time, who shoulders our burdens, who heals us of our brokenness, who endures our scorn and hatred without vindictively retaliating, and offers us forgiveness long before we ever ask for it.
But the message of grace does not always seem like good news to us, does it? Do we not like to earn what we have? Do we not like to think that we have done something, anything to deserve what we receive? Are we prepared to receive the treasures of the gospel and of all the riches of God, what Paul calls "the immeasurable riches of" God's "grace in kindness" at absolutely no cost? We need to understand that when God offers salvation to us by grace alone, it does not mean that we could have earned it some other way, but he is offering us an easier way. Indeed, God is actually offering us a harder way, one that costs everything. You see, to say that we are saved by grace is to say that absolutely nothing short of God's almighty grace is sufficient to save us. We are people who are in need, unable to be who we ought to be, and in need of a savior. It is not as though God simply makes it so we do not have to give anything in return, it is that we have nothing to give. Our hands are empty and we simply cling to Christ, knowing that, if Christ does not save us, we are surely lost.
Just a few days before Jesus is crucified, he says this to the chief priests and the pharisees. "Have you never read in the scriptures: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord's doing, and it is amazing in our eyes...' The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls." If we have erected a hope that is independent of Christ, no matter how sound and sturdy it seems, it is and will be crushed by Christ and shown to be insufficient. Nothing that we create with our hands, or with our minds, or even with our lives, is capable of doing what grace can do. When we give ourselves to Jesus and trust entirely in him, our plans for self-righteousness are shattered. And if there comes a time after we have given ourselves to Christ and we somehow get it into our heads that we need grace plus something else, the moment it comes in contact with the cornerstone that is Christ, it too is shattered.
Make no mistake. Salvation by grace alone is not a "get out of hell free" card, it is not taking the easy way out. To be saved by grace is the single most costly, humbling, thing you can do. It is to say, "I have nothing to offer, my hands are empty; Lord, save, or I perish." It is to come before God, not with a list of good things you've done, not with a list of evil things you have avoided, not even with a list of the things you need to be forgiven for, but simply with the empty hands of faith. The life of one who is saved by grace is not necessarily any better than that of one who is not, though it should improve as you grow in grace; nor is it necessarily any worse than one who is not. This is a good rule of thumb to see if you are living a life that is fully consistent with one that has been marked by grace. If, at the end of the day, it were to turn out that there is no God, that Jesus Christ was simply a man and nothing more, your life should make absolutely no sense. Our lives should be so devoted to God, and because of that, to one another, that the things we do should be completely incomprehensible to those who do not believe in God. With that in mind, let us go live in ways that are so devoted to God in every way, that to the unbelieving world, it is simply unbelievable. Let us pray.
AMEN
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