But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Ephesians 2: 4-10. Italics supplied.
Previous Series Posts:
God is Grace – Grace Series Part I of III
Our Creator God: Grace is Life – Grace Series Part II of III
To Recap: Grace Definition and Types of Grace
This is our third and concluding post on Grace, “perhaps the most important and mind-blowing concept in the history of God” (from the first line of this Grace Series, Part I). We began Part I with Contributor John Miller‘s definition of Grace as “the godliness of God,” and we expanded that definition further in Part II, referring primarily to the Abrahamic and Biblical concept of a Creator God, where “Grace is God’s creation, preservation (or sustaining), and continued Transformation (or improving) of His creation, especially those creatures made in His image.” We elaborated on the nature and importance of the Creator, creation, and creature concepts.
Here in Part III, we will also build on an earlier Circling Series on God to emphasize that God is our Personal God. As our Father, He created a life of love, where Grace involves that personal relationship with God via His love (meant to be shared with fellow humans and other creatures). During life and by the end of time, this relationship provides unmerited mercy, forgiveness, purposefulness, goodness, happiness, joy, and even salvation. Grace moves only in one direction and that is from God, yet we’re intended to spread such grace ourselves to fellow human beings and our world generally out of thanks. As a result, “the godliness of the God of Love” becomes the imago Dei-ness of man and woman.
The unmerited Grace as Love lavishly given by God to man eventually moves the human heart to a joyful duty of obedience. By early modernity around the time of the Reformation, Western thought leaders had realized that all of our human rights proceed from this duty to the Creator (to treat our fellow man as God treats us). Duty is always in tandem with and precedes rights, a concept totally lost on our selfish “rights-filled” American public dialogue today. We give freedom to our fellow man because God offers it to us in our natural world in this life. God designed humanity and the world to flourish this way, to do “on earth as it is in heaven.” We’ve seen this history of prosperity in spades, yet the Orwellian and unlimited State continues to grow unchecked in America, especially since the 1960s.
Because Grace is such an all-encompassing worldview concept, theologians, philosophers, and regular people have described many categories of Grace over thousands of years. In Grace I and II we referenced several Grace categories, including: universal, common, uncommon, special, saving, motivating, actual, habitual, charismatic, sanctifying, and unmerited. A key theme running through all concepts of Grace is there are two fundamental pathways God uses to interact with the natural world: (1) Grace given to all of life and humanity that happens in the physical, intellectual, moral, creative, societal, and religious realms, and (2) Grace given specifically to individuals or creatures as unique, individual beings. Grace Series Part II concentrates on Number 1 and this post (Grace III) on Number 2.
While there are these two distinct ways God operates, God can also act in ways that impact Numbers 1 and 2 at the same time. Indeed, if you are a Christian, you believe that the life of Jesus both sustains, improves, and saves all of humanity, while at the same time offering each of us a personal relationship. Indeed, Jesus said this was the primary reason for His life on earth. We access this relationship through faith.
Before getting into more specifics here about the Grace of our Personal God, we should note again (as in Series I and II) that, perhaps obviously, not all religions or worldviews have the concept of Grace. Some worldviews have no concept of God or the supernatural. Others have a concept of God and the supernatural but do not see an active relationship or interaction between the supernatural and the natural. In direct contrast to creation story worldviews, there are other widely-held worldviews where the world has always existed and was not created by an outside force, so any divine influence could only involve the existence of the laws of nature or science. Such schemes may emphasize various dimensions or realms of, let’s say, circular life (e.g., Hindu’s Samsara). Then there are god or gods who exist within the universe’s being and influence it, but do not control everything (ancient Western pagan gods). Finally, of course, there are worldviews that do not claim to know the answers to any metaphysical issues like the nature of truth, time, human nature, or even morality. If God exists, God is totally silent or does not give us definitive answers we can trust.
In each of our prior Grace posts, we presented our “Ten Worldview Concepts”, and tried to explain how its depiction of Christian worldview is useful in thinking about all worldviews. We developed this diagram from an earlier worldview schematic that placed most major worldviews on a map or spreadsheet, where we used the word Grace and Miracles interchangeably (often done in theology, philosophy, literature, or conversation).
Of course, Grace as the “godliness of God” would occupy and influence all three circles in the diagram—The Supernatural, The Natural, and Human Relations—though we place the word Grace first in The Natural circle to emphasize (as described in detail in Grace I) that, as far as we are concerned today, Grace is God after creation continuously entering our natural world. Always and often, God comes to us in Grace (whether we like it or not), but we must be open to it. In a sense, therefore, “the godliness of God” (our baseline definition of Grace) becomes “the constant action of God in this world” for the benefit of humanity and all human individuals. (By the way, to Orthodox Christians, The Supernatural circle would also include more granularity than God alone, such as heaven and hell.)
In the video at top, Contributor Eric Metaxas gives us his definition of miracles as a Christian to say Grace or miracles are how God reveals Himself to humanity. He wrote his 2014 book, Miracles, to show the reality of miracles or gracious revelation in the daily lives of people today, including only people he knew.
Given this definition of Grace, the creation and continuous state of the universe are miracles, as well as life on earth and the miracle of birth. Man has always been in awe of the continuous regeneration of life in all its power, beauty, and glory, and science has only magnified this by observing in formerly unimaginable detail how God via His creation operates. Most important today, we note the many ways God intervenes or reaches out with Grace or miracles in care and love for each of us.
Such divine-human interaction occurs in wonderfully good ways, but also in extremely challenging and often painful ways. Depending on what side of the fence you’re on when Grace happens, you may find yourself full of gratefulness or full of woe. At any time, we can speak to God or pray and be heard either in the privacy of our home, a car, a church, or a political gathering. God responds now or later; often abruptly; often subtly or even subconsciously.
Sadly, “modern life” has robbed us of an appreciation for life’s miracles and its enchanting nature, insisting on a suffocating, mundane, reductionist, and false view (from a theist’s perspective).
We fully recognize there are many merited challenges to the Christian and Abrahamic worldviews (as we note here and throughout our published content and posts, particularly in our Grace Pillar playlist). Nonetheless, we should stress that at least the personal, powerful, good, living, and loving God of the Christian faith “practices what He preaches” in experiencing evil, pain, and suffering with us, and that our own flawed humanity causes perhaps the majority of our difficulty.
We do not understand all the reasons why our Creator God designed the world as it is (could He have designed a world where pain and suffering is less intense?), but we know from Grace that our Creator God is a personal God of Love. If Christianity is true, this is our one certainty about God whose existence is far beyond our human ability to comprehend.
Most (but not all) ancients recognized human pretense or arrogance for what it is, calling it hubris. We mortals are not in a good negotiating position. Only modern man believes in growing chorus that he can be god, an extremely dangerous fantasy that wracks America and the West today.
Providence: God and You
Studying worldview as an academic discipline involves taking into account the primacy of human nature, feelings, emotions, the heart, passions, the subconscious, and even romance—but “taking into account” at its core means “thinking” about life or applying human reason to our lives. It means continuously making ongoing judgements about reality using basic logic, often lobbed into the category of Truth. When people do this together, it only happens through mutually understood communication or language. (This is why our four-part series on Truth ended with discussing language.)
Of course, what language does is offer structure to human thought; as a result, worldview as an academic discipline engages in heavy-duty, structural word association. Worldview analysis forces us to organize our thinking systematically. It’s unavoidable if you’re going to talk about your worldview, mental schema, guiding principles, or a menu of several useful worldviews. The importance of this observation is to recognize that when we’re thinking about “perhaps the most important and mind-blowing concept in the history of God” (Grace), then we’ve really stepped into an octopus’s garden of word association.
When thinking just beyond Grace in the Judeo-Christian worldview, perhaps the first concept one must address is the idea of God’s providence. If you want to read a famous and fascinating treatment of this issue when the development of Christian theology was in its early stages, read Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy (523 AD). Here’s another more recent definition of providence:
The doctrine that God is continually involved with all created things in such a way that he (1) keeps them existing and maintaining the properties with which he created them; (2) cooperates with created things in every action, directing their distinctive properties to cause them to act as they do; and (3) directs them to fulfill his purposes. Systematic Theology (2020) by Wayne Grudem, page 1521.
God’s providence as well as God’s love are perhaps the major themes throughout the Bible’s Old and New Testaments. There are too many examples of this to count, but it begins in the beginning when God says “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3), and it doesn’t stop through Revelation pulling back the veil. Grace not only precedes creation but also on every page of the Bible and in judgments throughout history. So (and this is critical), you will notice that inherent in Grace and providence there is always an element of judgement on God’s part and an element of free will left for human beings. Together this forms the parameters of The Shane Principle we’ve written about in these pages before. (We’ll only note here that “Shane” is another proper name for John, meaning “God is gracious.”)
A primary example of Grace applied to one person from the Bible is Paul’s conversion on the Road to Damascus. In typical Biblical fashion, the account is extraordinarily short, appearing in Acts 9. It’s illustrated on the Vatican’s walls in the featured photo at top. Christians believe that God’s acts of providence in Jesus’ resurrection and Paul’s conversion has transformed the world in communicating God’s will to humanity and translating it systematically through Paul’s 12 letters.
While doubters have always existed concerning the Bible’s presentation of facts and the authorship of some of its books, there are few doubts that Jesus and Saul lived, Saul somehow “miraculously” converted to Paul, and then wrote some large version of his epistles that beyond the Gospels are the foundation of Christian thinking. As the God of Grace, God is without question to Jews, Christians, and Muslims across the world the Creator, Sustainer, Ruler, Father, and Judge of human life. (Father here is a metaphor, recognizing that God is beyond sex. Of course, Jesus referred to God as Father. The word Parent here might be a good substitute.)
Finally, we offer the famous quote from Ephesians at top with perhaps Paul’s most pointed comments on Grace. Though we lack a detailed conversion account from him, the obvious transformation of a man, the extent of his travels and his personal influence on others, and the treasure trove of his writings are all priceless gifts to humanity. They clearly reveal the extraordinary impact of God’s Grace.
A key question for us almost 2,000 years later is: did the Bible close out God’s action in the world with John’s account in Revelation sometime around 100 A.D., or does it continue to this day? We offer Eric Metaxas’ answer to this question in the video above.
Yes, God remains the key force in most lives, perhaps the fundamental reason humanity remains religious (believing in the supernatural) around the world. It’s likely why the secularization thesis, at present, appears dead. (Interestingly, we should also note that Metaxas and the Bible are quite clear that the supernatural world, if any, also includes dark or evil elements of which humanity has little understanding. We should be somewhat cautious as we engage the supernatural world. In other words, while Ghostbusters is a fun movie, the real Zuulie would be no laughing matter.)
Our PC Contributors offer several accounts of Grace in their lives in the Grace Pillar playlist introduced earlier (46 short videos also linked here)—from visions to unexplainable healings to extraordinary sightings or experiences. It’s often said there are no coincidences in life. While scientists are beginning to admit they’re seeing evidence of God almost everywhere they look, we can also see God is all over our everyday lives. Providence and Grace do happen to you.
Finally, we should note that the Grace Pillar clips also describe key, reasonable problems that Christian theology and non-believers raise, problems that Christians and similar theists who believe in God’s Grace and providence must address as best they can. With the realization that no one can explain Truth, God, and Grace fully to the satisfaction of all, we turn now to some of these issues before a final summary.
Humanity’s Moral Nature
Using God-given reason (a CJC or Classical Judeo-Christian presupposition) raises timeless human issues about Grace, like the nature of God’s providence mentioned above, free will versus social determinacy or chance, the nature of humanity and morality (see the “Human Relations” circle in the “Ten Worldview Concepts” diagram above), the nature of prayer or meditation, the nature of evil, pain, and suffering, the Creator’s nature and design of the universe and world, and such well-known and critical basic questions as “Why do bad things happen to good people?”
All of these questions are raised in the Grace Pillar playlist introduced above. Human beings all over the world ask the same questions with each passing age. In truth, 100% completely satisfying answers to theists or atheists alike do not exist, and we cannot move on without faith placed somewhere. It could be that human reason is flawed or Truth is beyond our purview, but this must be a subject of future posts. Again, spending time with our PC video library might help you reach your own conclusions.
PC Contributor Jay Ford, who is a scholar of Buddhism and Hinduism, offers his comments in the clip featured above addressing how worldviews in the East view human nature. Questions concerning human nature are elements of the “Human Being” pillar in the Ten Concepts diagram. He explains that belief about fundamental human nature varies widely across the globe, and this has a direct impact on one’s morality and worldview. It influences nearly everything we believe and is foundational to worldview.
The primary point here, however, is not that belief varies, but that humanity everywhere senses the power of “good and evil,” creating moral judgment in the minds of men and women. Where does this undeniable moral feeling originate? Clearly, good human beings feel a sense of purpose, meaning, right and wrong, and fairness, and they deeply seek help, guidance, damage control, repair, forgiveness, and mercy with increasing intensity during their lives. This has been universal across time. It’s why many seek “salvation,” and why many look for a world to come.
Our moral nature is fundamental to Grace, as well.
Power, Mercy, and Salvation
At times, even atheists live in fear of God’s judgement. Let’s consider again the two fundamental types of God’s Grace. Common Grace offers evidence of God to all who will consider it. While it’s critical in sustaining life and in many other ways, it does not offer Saving Grace to individual persons. In the clip below on Unmerited Grace, Hugh Whelchel describes the beauty of Unmerited Grace (often held in tandem with the orthodox doctrine of “Original Sin”). It’s a powerful video considering Hugh had been diagnosed with ALS. Hugh was a deeply faithful man and never wavered during the course of his trial.
We would like to highlight that the Old Testament exhibits Common and Saving Grace to all of humanity even before the life of Jesus and Paul’s conversion. We offered the video shown below at the end of our two prior posts on Grace for good reason. While the story of the Syrian General Naaman and the Prophet Elisha told in 2 Kings is much less well known than Noah and the ark, Moses and the Red Sea’s parting, or Jonah and the whale, it contains most of the key elements of Grace commonly experienced today at the deeply personal level. It clearly indicates the God of the Jews was the God of all humanity long before our key protagonist of Grace, St. Paul, “officially” turned Judaism and Christianity over to Gentiles and the rest of the world. The Old Testament’s account of God, covenants with Israel, and the prophets predicted He would do so as Israel’s history unfolded.
Namaan’s story goes something like this: a very important, powerful, successful, and well-known non-Jew/pagan in the pre-Christ ancient world wants to cure his leprosy. He asks others for help and is turned to the God of the Jews. He seeks the counsel of the Jewish prophet Elisha, and Elisha receives counsel from God on Naaman’s behalf. A radically simple solution regarding faith is communicated to Naaman, and his initial anger turns to acceptance and faithful obedience at the extreme risk of humility before his fellow Syrians. He is cured and converts to the God of the Jews with thanks. This is Unmerited Grace. No one knows about salvation until his or her time has come.
While we all know there are no guarantees, like Hugh Whelchel, we can be certain we will face similar challenges of free will and faith, and we need to be ready when and if a similar moment presents itself. Recognition and appreciation of our common humanity on this point is a distinct sign of maturity, humility, and love.
It’s Simple Really: Grace is Love
We end our presentation of Grace where it’s most apparent in human history: the moment of the Resurrection itself. If true, this was and remains THE moment of both Common and Saving Grace for all humanity. God needs only an instant to move life to death and back again. God is “I Am,” true and necessary reality or being. All other “gods,” whether allegedly supernatural, natural, or human, are false idols. To worship anything other than God violates the First Commandment and then some.
The three titles of our Grace Series are purposely shaped like mathematical or geometric proofs to highlight the central themes or progression of Grace in human time and space: God is Grace, Grace is Life, Life is Love. “Is” there refers to being and to truth and the reality of being. The logic of these titles via deductive, transitive reasoning equals the Bible’s theme: God is Love.
Of course, this is the central tenet of Christian orthodoxy, and the point to which the entire history of the West and the world points. It’s not necessarily always a totally pleasurable thing, and it often manifests the exact opposite, just as Naaman, Christ, and Paul experienced.
But it is always a true, good, and beautiful experience, and a cause afterward for the celebration of joy in our lives. Imagine the astonishment of the final scene in the Gospels depicted below. “It is by grace that you have been saved, by faith.”
It is just as possible and common now as it was then. Like the disciples, we hope we can all carry that with us today and into the future with assurance, gratitude, and grace.
Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6
