Why God’s Grace is More Amazing than Yours

You may have seen the story circulated on social media. An elderly woman accidentally breaks some dishes in a store. Embarrassed and ashamed, she begins gathering the broken pieces. While other customers observe, she frets over how she’ll pay for the merchandise. The store manager comes along and tells her not to worry. Insurance will cover the loss. He orders his staff to clean the mess. The woman goes free, filled with gratitude.

The story is intended to give us a picture of God’s grace toward us when we blow it. It warms our hearts, but as an illustration of grace, something is lacking.

John 8 tells about the woman famously caught in adultery. Religious leaders catch her in the act (although her partner in crime somehow escapes their grasp). They throw her at Jesus’s feet, reminding him the law stated such a woman should be stoned to death. Jesus shows her mercy, advising the accuser without fault to throw the first stone. You’re probably familiar with the passage. I heard a sermon on this where the speaker invented a backstory for this woman in which she was sexually abused as a child. This may have been accurate; we can’t possibly know.

This version immediately incites our compassion for her. It places us on the woman’s side, but as an illustration of grace, something is lacking.

In the Old Testament, God instructs the prophet Hosea to marry a prostitute and to cherish and pursue her no matter how often she returns to her former ways. God intended Hosea’s marriage as an illustration of his love for his people, Israel, despite their unfaithfulness to Him. In a popular Christian novel based on Hosea (also recently released as a movie), the prostitute is a sex-trafficking victim since childhood. This premise makes her a sympathetic character, a smart move for an author to make—any author who understands human nature and how a good story works. (It also doesn’t hurt that she made the character beautiful.)

This assertion causes us to root for the character and cheer when she finally submits to love, but as an illustration of grace, something is lacking.

What if the old woman in the store was a rebellious teen who deliberately broke the dishes and defiantly spat in the manager’s face, but he still let her off the hook? We wouldn’t love the story nearly so much, but it would be a more accurate illustration of God’s grace.

What if the woman caught in adultery had been a man who chose an affair out of boredom—but Jesus still let him off the hook? We probably wouldn’t tell the story much, but it would be a more accurate illustration of God’s grace.

What if Hosea’s wife came from a place of privilege? What if her character in the novel was a pimp instead? We’d hate that story, but it would be a more accurate illustration of God’s grace.

Before we mortals can root for those who receive mercy, we want to understand why they did what they did. It was an accident. They were victims. They were trying to fill the empty hole in their heart. Those scenarios make God’s grace so much more palatable to us. Our sense of justice is too strong to cheer for a defiant scoundrel.

Until, of course, that defiant scoundrel is us.

That sense of justice we all share exists because we were made in the image of God. He is a God of justice. He demanded it.

And then he provided it. That’s what Good Friday is all about: Jesus, taking the blow for the thief, for the adulterer, for the pimp, for you, for me. Though each of us is free to reject it, God’s grace came first. In case you’ve forgotten what we’re celebrating this weekend.

Happy Easter.

 

Why the Cross does NOT have the Final Word

At my desk at City Hall one day, I scanned Portage la Prairie’s Fees & Charges Schedule for 2018. It’s posted on the City website, should you ever need to know how much it’ll cost you to buy a pet license (free until the end of March), photocopy a tax bill, rent a mosquito fogger, have your water turned on, or buy a grave—among many other things. 

I perused the cemetery fees with great interest. Adult burial plots range from $870 to $970, not counting opening and closing. No matter how hard I studied the schedule, I could not find a fee for a grave that you want to rent temporarily. 

One of the popular songs on Christian radio for the past year has been, The Cross Has the Final Word, written by Cody Carnes and recorded by The Newsboys. Although I understand what the song is trying to say, I think it misses the mark. The intent of the key phrase is that the power of Jesus Christ and what he accomplished by dying on the cross trumps everything—sin, disease, war, religion, and death. 

But it wasn’t his cross that achieved all that. If the cross really had the final word, then Jesus Christ would be just another crucified Jew. We may never have heard of him. If an instrument of death has the final word, then death wins. If the cross has the final word, there is no hope for me. 

As a kid, I learned how Jesus’s followers buried his body in a rich man’s tomb, fulfilling a prophesy made centuries earlier. I always assumed this spoke to Jesus’s poverty, that he lived without enough means to buy a burial plot of his own. While that’s probably true, a more profound thought occurred to me a couple of years ago.

It wasn’t until our church started singing a song called Resurrecting (by Elevation Worship) that it finally dawned on me. It says, “The tomb where soldiers watched in vain was borrowed for three days.” The body of Jesus wasn’t placed in a borrowed tomb because he was poor, but because he would only need it for a little while! I wonder what our local funeral directors would say if I walked in and said I’d like to take care of some pre-arrangements, but I only needed my grave for three days.

The final word is not the cross of Good Friday. It is the resurrection of Sunday. It is Christ’s empty tomb that really has the final word. Which means it isn’t truly empty at all, because it’s filled with hope. A song written by two of the worship leaders at my church says, “The empty grave holds my hope each day.” I love that, because it speaks not only of life after death, but life right now, filled with hope and purpose every day. Who here doesn’t want that?

Titus 3:8 says, “God’s gift has restored our relationship with him and given us back our lives. And there’s more life to come—an eternity of life! You can count on this.” 

No matter how far from God you think you are, the truth is that you’re never more than one step from him. Easter is the perfect time to take that one step. The late Reverend Billy Graham said, “I’ve never met a man who accepted Jesus Christ and regretted it.”