By Which – The Place Of Grace In Salvation (Part 1)
Passage: Ephesians 1:6
“…to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.”
The “By which” mentioned in the verse is a reference to the grace mentioned in the first phrase. It is that grace that is the instrument “by which” He made us accepted. It points to the tool that God used, if we can describe it as such, to make His children acceptable in His sight.
Theoretically speaking, there were any number of ways that could have worked salvation. He is, after all, God and is absolutely entitled and capable of doing things in any way He sees fit. He might have made salvation a works affair, as so many human religions seem to want to make it. He could have made it a matter of balancing up the books at the end of life and checking the tally balance and seeing which column won out and determining destiny based on that finding.
He might have made it a syncretistic thing. A co-operative venture where He did His part, and we did ours. He might even have set it up where He did most of the work, and we only had minor responsibilities. He could have made it so that salvation hinged on the quality of our co-operation with Him over time, or any number of criteria of that sort.
He might also have based our ultimate destiny on what we meant to do, our intentions and what our hearts wanted to do, even if we were unable to actually do it. He could have based salvation on what He, in His infinite and absolute grasp of all possibilities concerning what we would have done in different circumstances or if things had gone differently than they did, in fact, go!
I am certain that there are any number of other possibilities that might have been how God could have, might have, or maybe, would have set things up. But the fact of the matter is, He didn’t set things up to work in any of those other ways. He set things up to work on the basis of His grace.
Salvation is centered on the concept of the grace of God. It is all about God’s grace. It starts with grace, ends with grace, and is about grace all the way through from beginning to end. There is never a point in salvation where our relationship with God is not overwhelmingly about the grace of God, almost to the exclusion of all else! This might be overstatement, but it is not far off the mark if it is!
Grace is the antithesis of works. Actually, theologically, it is the antithesis, not so much of works, but of the idea of merit. Merit concerns the concept of earning favor with God. Theologically, a good deed, more properly a righteous deed, earns merit from God. God is just and because He is just, He will recognize righteous actions and the merit that they earn will be counted to the benefit of the doer. No righteous action will go unrecognized and unrewarded. That would be unjust, and thus, be a violation of God’s character.
This sets us up for a contradiction, if the human conception of how God goes about justifying men is correct, or if God used any of the schemes we mentioned earlier. The obvious problem is that the issue of human merit would become a thorny and problematic issue. Just as we can say that no man (with the exception of Christ) has been sufficiently good to entirely satisfy God, so also we could argue that no man, on the face of it, has been entirely without merit either. Now, we recognize that is an argument from foolishness, but it is a logical point nonetheless.
We will continue this discussion tomorrow…