God’s grace embraces us in the same manner as parents’ attachment to their children instinctively causes them to scoop even their misbehaving little ones up into their arms.
I am sure he meant it well, but two centuries ago, when Robert Robinson (or perhaps an editor) penned “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” he was working with a misleading concept of grace. “Oh, to grace how great a debtor, Daily I’m constrained to be. Let that grace now like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee.”
The biblical writers did not find God’s favor to them constraining or binding. God’s grace piles upon us no debts. The only obligation in grace is God’s commitment to His own promise to be our faithful God no matter what, for that is His very nature, simply who He is (2 Timothy 2:13). God’s grace embraces us in the same manner as parents’ attachment to their children instinctively causes them to scoop even their misbehaving little ones up into their arms.
God’s Law creates obligations and debts. We have treated some of those obligations with disdain, others with indifference, still others with a best effort to conform, but often in ways we ourselves find unsatisfactory. We feel the weight of failure to do what we know should come naturally. Luther states that because of our Creator’s divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness from our side, we have an obligation, a debt, to be the person God created us to be.
Adam and Eve brought nothing to the table with which they could bargain or negotiate with God for the shape of their humanity and the rich benefits of Eden. Our little embryos owe their existence not only to earthly parents but to their heavenly progenitor, who fashioned us and planned our destiny before we were able to ask God for life and breath. That obligation to enjoy His gift of being human was not a burden until the human attempt (also our attempt) to live apart from fearing, loving, and trusting God above all else alienated us from our Creator.
The good news is God is consistently gracious and calls us back to trusting in Him when we stray with His Law, so we may receive from His Gospel His grace. Our Creator is unfettered in pouring out His love upon us. His fatherly and godly mercy and goodness created us, and this same parental generosity and compassion frees us to be His children because all our indebtedness has been seized from us by Jesus Christ as He invaded our tomb-framed life and claimed our sin as His own. Coming as Jesus of Nazareth, He has put a claim on our debts, the debt of the wages of sin, death itself, onto His own account. He deposited our wage in His tomb, and that bank has now closed its doors forever. Its records are not accessible from the throne of grace.
Our Creator constrained Himself with His choice of us before the foundation of the world that brought Him to the cross and out of the tomb with a promise. God is utterly reliable. Faithfulness is His middle name. He has delivered His promises to His people in their baptisms, in the Word of promise of new life in Christ shared from the pulpit, in Christian conversation, in absolution, and at His Supper table. God’s pledge to us in the means of grace make His grace the abiding presence that permeates our lives.
Our Creator constrained Himself with His choice of us before the foundation of the world that brought Him to the cross and out of the tomb with a promise.
The bond Jesus’ grace produces is more like a magnet attracting our whole being than it is like a chain around our neck or handcuffs or shackles around our ankles. As trusting people, whose confidence and reliance on His promise that we are His forever, we are drawn to Him and, therefore, to His design for our lives. We delight in His unconditional love. We recognize that His love invites and enables our love, not only toward the one who is gracious to us but also to other people, some of whom may be anything but gracious to us. But being gracious to the ungracious and ungrateful is the kind of model our gracious God gives us as the pattern of the humanity for which He designed us. Plainly said, God’s good grace does lead to the good works Robinson knew it produces. But those good works spring from the human spirit that the Holy Spirit fills with joy and delight at receiving His gracious love. His grace returns us to the normal human shape for which God created us.
Paul recalled for Titus (3:3-7) how false gods and misshapen goals for life can constrain and fetter us. We fall into both foolishness and disobedience, led astray and enslaved to passions and pleasures as well as fears and false hopes. We spend our time nursing grudges, envious of others, sometimes wishing we could imitate their evil, sometimes begrudging them the good gifts God has given them. We sense we have become hateful and deserve the malice of others, and, in return, we have contempt for the people around us who are worthy of God’s love as His human creatures.
Into that world of ours Christ came, Paul writes, not invited by any attractive performance on our side. Instead, He came to haul us into His territory without condition or compulsion by sharing with us His death and resurrection in a scrubbing that washed away all the filth and grime we have accumulated and by bringing us out of the baptismal bath sparkling fresh and smelling good. The Holy Spirit has made us new, refitting us for living out the human life of love and mercy for which God designed us out of His gracious nature.
Thus, Paul confesses, we have been re-created as righteous children of God solely based on God’s grace, His unconditional and unexplainable favor. Hearing that promise, we rest secure on this promise of life everlasting in a hope that is not a guess about the future. Our security rests in the Word of the utterly reliable Creator, whose very being is His faithfulness, as Paul told Timothy (2 Timothy 2:13). For when we fail to be faithful to Him, He still remains faithful to us since that faithfulness embodies who He is, and He cannot deny His own essence.
Therefore, with the Ephesians, we rejoice in the fact that God’s grace has rescued us from His wrath and condemnation. He has delivered us from the constraints and fetters built into us in our inheritance from the doubt and defiance of God that has plagued all the descendants of Adam and Eve. He graciously, freely, unconditionally, gives us this gift of His mercy and lovingkindness by creating and cultivating our trust in Christ, our deliverer. There is no way in the world we could somehow have made up for our sin. Not our works but His sacrifice and His resurrection have provided new life for us, a restoration of our righteousness, our status as children of God. This new life He graciously planned for us beforehand (as Paul said at the beginning of his words for the Ephesians, before the foundation of the world) as our way of life. That is grace: His decision, the divine attitude, the concrete breaking of all sinful constraints and fetters, that we have gotten to know and trust through hearing, reading, and receiving the promise of new life in our Savior Jesus without any “ifs, ands, or buts” about it.
