I have been contemplating God and His grace. Most people think He was very exact with the law He gave Moses and was completely lacking in grace because of what we see as the harshness of the penalties. As a result, we think His grace is new thing introduced only through Christ, but we are mistaken. God’s grace has always been there even in the Mosaic law. For we must realize that the law was given not only as a teacher but also as a method of approaching God. In the law God allowed things that were not His real desire, but He had to allow them because of man’s weakness, and as Jesus said, due to the hardness of our hearts. This is why He allowed such things as divorce, polygamy, and slavery. They were never His wish or plan for us, but He had to meet us where we were, and thus His grace even in the time before Christ. But His grace had its limits. These limits were exceeded time and time again by the Israelites, and as such God would send punishments to them: war, famine, the destruction of their kingdom, and finally captivity.

And so too does God’s grace through Christ have its limits. The greatest limit is calling on His grace and doing nothing. Remember that Christ himself said that not all who cry out Lord, Lord will be saved. That is the real point of the parable of the minas in Luke’s Gospel. The man with one mina was condemned although he had done nothing wrong, but neither did he do anything right. Martin Luther was a great man who did a great thing pointing out to Christians that redemption was impossible to earn and was only a gracious gift from God. However, he was wrong in calling James’s letter an epistle of straw. For James showed the limit of God’s grace. For as Deitrich Bonhoeffer pointed out we cannot look for cheap grace. For true grace comes only through obedience. For as James said, what good does it see someone suffering and tell them to accept God’s grace and then do nothing alleviate their suffering. Action must be taken with faith for true belief. Evan an agnostic such as Jordan Peterson recognizes this when he says true belief would result in change of ones behavior.

The very letters of Paul that Luther so rested his views also spoke of obedience, for he said “Should we continue in sin so that grace may abound? God forbid!” Yes, our own righteousness will never be enough for us to obtain heaven on our own, we can only enter God’s rest as His gracious gift. However, that fact does not allow us to bury the mina He gave us.

#GodsGrace, #LimitsToGrace, #BuryingTheMina