63. The Nature of Grace

The Nature of Grace

Chapter VIII

We now have before us an outline of the outstanding facts about what sin is and does. We have seen the inescapable reaction of a holy God toward sin, and the threatened heart-rupture in His love for both the sinless and the sinful. We have seen the necessity in such a Being as reason demands God should be, that both justice and mercy shall find a way to act both in full freedom and in mutual harmony in the presence of sin. And we have seen that God has provided Himself a living Way on the principle of substitution, in that He Himself did the work of a Substitute in the Person of His own Son.

Now we are to learn that this union of justice and mercy through the death of God in His Son on the cross, is His love becoming grace, and grace making available a salvation from sin that never otherwise could have been possible. It is this harmonious union of justice and mercy, acting together to save those who deserve the very opposite, that constitutes grace. In order, however, to come into any adequate appreciation of such a salvation, we need to look more deeply into the “pit from which we were digged.” A medical remedy that saves from otherwise inevitable death, is esteemed far above one that merely hastens relief from an ailment that would have passed away anyway with a little more time. So we must first take our stand before the cross and see for ourselves the full and final uncovering of sin, that we may grasp, as far as our sin-marred capacities will permit, what that awful thing really is that God-in-Christ died to save us from. Only thus can we get any clear vision of the meaning of grace. As we stand before the cross, we are first of all face to face with the central and most tremendous reality in the Being of an infinite God. That cross penetrates to the innermost heart of Deity, and radiates to the outermost circumference of His illimitable love. A by-gone eternity knew no other future than the cross, and a coming eternity shall know no other past. All the converging rays of previous history, and all the diverging rays of subsequent history, focus on the cross. It enshrines the one eternal and unfathomable moral fact for which all time was projected and all history made. It stands at the moral center of the universe. As we approach the cross, therefore, it must be with bared heads and unsandalled feet, for we are in the presence chamber of the awful yet glorious majesty of a holy God; we are gazing on the infinite suffering of a broken-hearted Deity; we are confronted by the most unspeakable tragedy the eternities will ever behold. We are watching the creature murder his Creator!