Isaiah - Verse By Verse | Walking through Ephesians

Walking through Ephesians - Day 31

versebyverse | November 19, 2007 18:45

Thought: To me, God's grace is both mysterious and magnificent.

Question: What was the price of God's grace?

Scripture: Ephesians 2:8 (NIV): "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith--and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God--"

Why do we say God has been kind? what is so special about what God has done? Isn't it only proper that a Creator must rescue His creatures and go to whatever lengths required to do so? What's special about God's grace is that it cost a tremendous amount, much more than we can realize. The lengths God went to are exhausive and extreme. He virtually committed suicide to save us. This seems to even go against God's own virtuous morality. He crossed lines, lines of goodness and high propriety standards, in order to reach us. He exposed His own Life into evil, being swallowed up into evil's existance, ("He became sin for us..."), when God normally cannot even look at evil and certainly cannot abide its presence with Him. How could He? He utilized a certain separation that must exist between the members of The Trinity. While The Son became sin, The Father looked away. Can we know how devastating this was to The Godhead? How this tore them apart? Just as the veil in the Temple ripped apart in a triumphant moment of reconciliation of man to God, the very heart of God must have been ripping apart in agony as sin and evil, in its fullest realities, entered God! But the great news is that the ugliness of that moment did not last. The locking embrace of sin in Christ did not hold Him long at all. Sin had no rights over Him because He has ever been, and ever will be, Himself, sinless. Thus The Evil One could not hold sway over Jesus Christ. Our sins did not belong to His Divine Nature and so Satan had to release Him. Thus, though there is high cost, God's giving of Jesus was the kindest thing He could do: it was a total gift because we bore none of that cost. God Himself bore all the cost. This is grace: drowning the recipient in kindness and love while you suffer tremendously to do so. Our salvation is based on this kind of situation. We acquire salvation by faith, that is, by believing that God has indeed done all this for us. We accept the unreal lopsidedness of grace. Salvation is a free gift and so is the faith required to receive it. Faith believes Who God is. Do you know Who He is? When we identify God with His great grace, we know Him better than we ever have before, and we believe what He says. This is faith. Faith comes by hearing The Word. Christ is the Word, Christ is God. Faith comes by hearing God. Hearing means understanding. Understanding God is hearing Him. But we cannot know God unless He speaks to us. We cannot understand unless we have the written Logos: the chronicle of the pre-existant and then condescended Jesus Christ. This chronicle is The Bible. The Bible builds faith in God.

None of this great work, whether of grace or faith, is achieved by us. God has done it all. He has gifted us more than we know, and we owe Him more than we could ever repay. He has given Himself, His Son, His Word, His very broken heart. He has given everything.

Prayer: Father God, I bow very low as I think of the very great cost You paid to bring Your sweet kindness to me! Amen.