What about Grace? Grace was that unconditional part of
God’s love that gives us the opportunity to return to Him and keep the
conditional part of His love, by the debt that was paid by His Son since it
is not in man to be capable of earning his own salvation.
I. God made man and gave him the command to choose to obey or die.
II. Man chose to disobey.
III. Man was barred from Eden and sent into the world.
IV. God’s plan to bring man back into a working relationship.
V. God’s mercy involved in bringing man back to Himself.
a. God gave “The Law” to show man that he is not capable of
keeping it perfectly (and thus cannot earn the right to God’s favor).
God wanted obedience from man, and “The Law” was the “boy leader whose
office it was to to take the children to school”, teaching what God wanted
and expected of man in order to please Him.
b. Once man understood his inability to save himself, then God
finished His plan by sacrificing Jesus, so that all who joined themselves to
Him would be saved vicariously through Him.
His Grace was the unmerited gift of His Love for man; the
gift of Christ for Forgiveness, and only through His blood.
(1) To “earn” salvation would be to fulfill the law, not in “being
a good person and doing good things that makes one feel good about himself”,
even though the law requires just such action on the part of man as part of
fulfilling the law. But the obedience must come from the heart since God
wants man’s obedience to be done because he wants to please God. And to
please God, man must keep His commandments.
(2) The commandments Christ gave — He told the deciples to go into
all the world, teaching them and baptizing them “into Christ”; He told them
that the two greatest commandments were to “Love the Lord God with all you
heart, all your might, and to love each other even as He loved us”.
Everything we do hinges upon this, even being baptized!
We are hard put by “the world” who wants to say that
Grace was the gift of God to allow people to be saved unconditionally — that
would even include the demons since they believe and tremble. The grace that
God proffered (offered for acceptance) to us, was that, in spite of our
sinful nature and inability to “earn” our salvation by our own merit, He
allowed us the condition by which we could return to a working relationship
in Him through His Son, Jesus.
Grace is not the “saving” element.
Grace is extended to all men.
The “saving” element is Christ’s blood.
Yet Christ’s blood cannot be except by the Grace of
God.
Consider this then:
Grace is that effort of God to justify man and get him to return to a
working relationship with Him in spite of man’s inability to earn salvation
(fulfill the law) for himself. If man sinned in ONE POINT of the Law, he was
guilty of the whole Law. It is still man’s choice to return, and the only
way he can return is to be “in Christ” through obedience by baptism, and by
observing all that He taught us in His teachings and by His exemplary life
to the best of our ability and perserverence.
His Grace was the unmerited gift of His Love for man; the
gift of Christ for Forgiveness, and only through His blood.
