Now To Him (eBook)

Chapter 2

The Kingdom of Grace

GOD COURTING THE AFFECTION OF HIS WORLD

Neil Bennetts

I am father to two beautiful girls, Lizzy and Sarah. Although this is not without challenges, I love being a father to my daughters. And this stage in their lives is especially wonderful. They are at that age where they are mature enough to have great fun and conversations with, and still innocent enough not to be causing me too much stress. I am sure that will change over time, and like any father, I am aware that probably at some point they will do things which I won’t approve of, and that may cause me some pain. But I reckon that they could do anything – absolutely anything – and I will not love them any less. I reckon that if they turn up at our back door after adventures that lead them to awful places in the company of awful people, I will still be desperate to embrace them.

Of course, I do hope that I will be an important voice in their lives, and that I will be able to instil good values and theology in them. I hope they will do well in their studies and get good jobs. I hope they will find good husbands and raise great families. Of course I have such dreams and aspirations for them. But however much they may depart from the good and true way of life that I dream for them, I think that in me – for them – it will always be grace that will win the day.

Maybe I haven’t been hurt enough yet by them, or disappointed enough by what they get involved with at this stage, but I don’t think that I will be able to catch the glint in Lizzy’s eyes and not find that I have grace there for her. I don’t think I will ever be able to see that little frown on Sarah’s forehead and not want to shower her with all the love in the world, whatever her world looks like at the time, or the journey that has taken her there.

Despite the fact that at some time or another it will probably cause me to lay aside any sense of logic, predictability or reason, I believe that in me – for them – grace will always triumph.

Of course I am wise enough in the ways of the world to know that, unfortunately, every father is not like that, and I’m really thankful to God that it comes naturally for me. I hope I will always be this way. I can’t really imagine that I won’t be. But whereas I may most easily operate in grace where my daughters are concerned, I am also equally aware that, more generally than not, I am most comfortable operating in life – whether work or ministry or home life – with something that is more regimented, more organized, more rational, more predictable and more deserving than grace seems to require of me. I prefer a defined set of inputs, designed to give a predictable result. Grace is generally just a little bit too messy for me.

Defined inputs, with a predictable outcome. That’s my comfort zone. That’s my love language. And although you may laugh at me (and many people do – a lot of the time, as it happens), I reckon that many of us would prefer to operate in this sort of way. For many of us, operating with a set of rules and regulations with predefined causes and effects is actually easier than operating with anything more messy, like grace. It’s far easier to have rules for life that you can plug into and know what the outcome will be. It’s less demanding on our time. It’s less demanding on our prayer life or our faith. And it’s far less risky.

The trouble is, it seems that God above all seems to view life through a lens of grace, and if you are like me, that challenges such preferences. In fact, it turns them upside down. But the truth of the matter is that we are part of a Kingdom of Grace, where grace – the unmerited, undeserved, unabating, unrationed, unrelenting, irrational favour of God – will win the day.

And it is with this grace that God has courted, continues to court, and will continue to court for the rest of eternity, the affections of His world.

Courting the affection of His world: The biblical narrative of grace

Grace weaves its way through the whole of the Bible because grace has always been in the nature of God, and that nature never changes. In Genesis the place of intimacy and closeness with God that we were created to enjoy gave way, through sin, to a place of separation from God. Very quickly God’s people moved from paradise to desert, from joyful sonship to arrogant self-interest, from blessed togetherness and harmony to insecurity, corruption and murder.15 A flood and a righteous man called Noah became key parts of God’s plan for restoration. Noah was saved, by grace, from the flood, and his descendants repopulated the earth, but very soon, grace became a distant memory and God’s people slipped back into the ways of idolatry. The result was that the people whom God had created for worship and community were scattered to the far corners of the world in confusion and disgrace and separation from their Creator.16

God then called Abraham to be His servant, His means of grace to once again restore our relationship with Him. Through Abraham, God’s intention was to restore all people to Himself once more. Abraham was chosen to lead the people of God, a holy nation who would be God’s people here on earth, to worship Him and serve Him. Abraham was chosen that all people on the earth would be blessed through the people of God,17 but the people of God lost their way again and went on another journey away from the things of God and ended up in slavery in Egypt.

Moses was another person who was chosen to be the means by which God showed His grace again. Moses led the people of God out of slavery. He was the one to whom the law was given on Mount Sinai, and to whom God showed His grace.18 We probably know the story, how God’s people rebelled again against God’s initiatives of grace. We know how the people that God chose to be His instruments of grace on earth became rebellious and self-absorbed and arrogant once more.

So by the time Jesus came to earth, we find the people of God in a total mess, entrenched in their religious ways, with their true purpose in life pretty much abandoned. As the people of God, they had been chosen by grace to be instruments of that grace to all the people of the earth, chosen by God to reveal the ways and purposes of God to all people, chosen by God to live in closeness to Him. Although repeatedly subject to God’s onslaught of grace, their continual disobedience had led them to become a people separate from the God they should have been close to, and detached from the world they were intended to reach.

And as so often happens in such circumstances, when relationship breaks down, more and more process and procedure and religion takes its place. The people of God constructed religious, social and ethnic barriers in life that they used to determine people’s worth and standing not only before fellow men, but before God Himself. Never in the history of man had there ever been a stronger sense that in terms of God and His Kingdom, you were either on the inside or the outside. Even in the temple itself – the place where there should have been more evidence and understanding of community and purpose than anywhere else – there was a sign that hung on the wall at the entrance to the inner courts that effectively barred Gentiles from entering.

The disease of un-grace had made its way right to the spiritual heart of God’s people.

It was into this environment that Jesus came and spoke His own grace-message.

A fresh announcement of grace: Jesus’ message of grace to a world living with un-grace

In Matthew 5, when Jesus spoke on the mountain in the words that we know as the Sermon on the Mount, He spoke them to a large crowd of people from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan.

The ten Greek cities that made up the Decapolis were under Roman occupation, and the Romans had rebuilt those cities one by one, building temples within them that were designed for the worship of the emperor. Their citizens were largely non-Jewish. They were the ceremonially unclean, the unholy. In all likelihood they had never read the Jewish Scriptures, had no idea who Jesus really was, and did not understand the concept of a Messiah. Many of them, as they yielded to the pressure of the occupying Romans and their requirement for worshipping their emperor, would have been idolaters.

They were on the outside.

And on this day, on a mountainside in Galilee, they stood alongside the Jews.

The Jews were on the inside.

They were on the inside because they had been born to the right parents at the right time in the right place. They were the “right’r’us”. They were descendants of Abraham. The chosen ones. The ones who knew about God, and read the Scriptures and were allowed to go to the temple to worship. They would have had a concept of the Messiah. They may even have heard about Jesus reading the scroll in the synagogue in Nazareth, where He declared Himself as such.19

So on that day, on a mountain in Galilee, those on the inside gathered alongside those on the outside and they waited to hear what Jesus would say. They had followed him around for a while now. They had seen people healed. A paralytic dropped through the roof of a house where Jesus taught had got up and walked. A man with leprosy had been cleansed....