Grace Is What God Is Like
Grace Is What God Is Like
Grace is God’s goodness, the kindness of God’s heart, the good will, the cordial benevolence. It is what God is like. God is like that all the time. You’ll never run into a stratum in God that is hard. You’ll always find God gracious, at all times and toward all peoples forever. You’ll never run into any meanness in God, never any resentment or rancor or ill will, for there is none there. God has no ill will toward any being. God is a God of utter kindness and cordiality and good will and benevolence. And yet all of these work in perfect harmony with God’s justice and God’s judgment. I believe in hell and I believe in judgment. But I also believe that there are those whom God must reject because of their impenitence, yet there will be grace. God will still feel gracious toward all of His universe. He is God and He can’t do anything else.
Grace is infinite, but I don’t want you to strain to understand infinitude. I had the temerity to preach on infinitude a few times, and I got along all right—at least I got along all right. Let’s try to measure it against ourselves, not against God. God never measures anything in Himself against anything else in Himself. That is, God never measures His grace against His justice or His mercy against His love. God is all one. But God measures His grace against our sin. “Grace … Hath abounded unto many,” says Romans 5:15, “according to the riches of his grace” (Ephesians 1:7). And, says Romans 5 again, “But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound” (5:20). God says “much more,” but God has no degrees. Man has degrees.
One of the worst things you can do is to give people IQ tests. When I was in the army I had an IQ test and I rated very high, and I have had a lifetime of trying to keep from remembering that and keeping humble before God. I think how I rated up in the top four percent in all of the army, and of course, you know what that does to a person. You have to keep humbling yourself, and God has to keep chastening you to keep you down.
But there’s nothing in God that can compare itself with anything else in God. What God is, God is! When Scripture says grace “increased all the more,” it means not that grace increases more than anything else in God but more than anything in us. No matter how much sin a man has done, literally and truly grace abounds unto that man.
Old John Bunyan wrote his life story and called it—I think it was one of the finest titles ever given to a book—Grace Abounding Toward the Chief of Sinners. Bunyan honestly believed that he was the man who had the least right to the grace of God. Grace abounded! For us who stand under the disapproval of God, who by sin lie under sentence of God’s eternal, everlasting displeasure and banishment, grace is an incomprehensibly immense and overwhelming plenitude of kindness and goodness. If we could only remember it, we wouldn’t have to be played with and entertained so much. If we could only remember the grace of God toward us who have nothing but demerit, we would be overwhelmed by this incomprehensibly immense attribute, so vast, so huge, that nobody can ever grasp it or hope to understand it.
Would God have put up with us this long if He had only a limited amount of grace? If He had only a limited amount of anything, He wouldn’t be God. I shouldn’t use the word amount, because amount means “a measure,” and you can’t measure God in any direction. God dwells in no dimension and can be measured in no way. Measures belong to human beings. Measures belong to the stars.
Distance is the way heavenly bodies account for the space they occupy and their relation to other heavenly bodies. The moon is 250,000 miles away. The sun is 93 million miles away, and all that sort of thing. But God never accounts to anybody for anything He is. God’s immensity and His infinitude must mean that the grace of God must always be immeasurably full. We sing “Amazing Grace”—why, of course it’s amazing! How can we comprehend the fullness of the grace of God?