The Grace Of God
THE GRACE OF GOD
EPHESIANS 2:8-10
Here is the heart of the gospel! You are saved by grace through faith. It is not of your own doing. This is really important!
While talking about the magnitude of God’s love in 2:4 and that God made us alive in (2:5), Paul declares in an emphatic parenthesis, “by grace you have been saved.” These words, which are repeated in 2:8, express the heart of the gospel. They are at the center of Paul’s theology.
The statement “by grace you have been saved” declares that the nature of God is to give freely because of his own love. God does not deal with people on the basis of their achievement but on the level of their deepest needs. He brings salvation as his gift to people and then he creates a disposition of trust and receptivity within them so that they may receive what he gives. Salvation is wholly God’s achievement. All attempts to help ourselves by misguided efforts at human achievement merely foster a false sense of security in our own merit (see 2:9). Because salvation is a pure gift of God, nothing is required of us but the willingness to receive what he has given. Where that willingness does not exist, God brings it into existence by his gracious disposition toward us. Even our faith itself is a gift of God. “It is the gift of God” at the end of 2:8 explains the word “faith”: “… through faith. And this [faith] is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”
The Christian is never a self-made person. Paul emphatically declares that we are God’s “workmanship,” using a term from which we derive the English word poem (2:10). Just as in Romans 1:20 the universe is described as God’s creative poem, the Christian is here presented as God’s redemptive poem. In each instance the poem points beyond itself to the master poet whose eternal power, deity and grace are displayed through his craftsmanship.
The work of new creation (see also 2:15; 4:24) in making a new people crowns the creative activity of God, and he created this new people so that we might do good works. Once we as Christians have experienced the grace of God, we find that we devote ourselves to good actions because those actions express the essence of God’s nature. Even then, all occasion for boasting is removed. The good works which Christians find to do are theirs because God has placed them for them to discover.
The grace of God, the gift of God and the good works of God are the elements which distinguish the new life in Christ from the realm of death in which Paul’s readers had previously lived.