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God’s grace is scandalous
Ephesians 2:8-9
May 17, 2009
The problem with God’s grace is that it’s scandalous. It just absolutely does not make sense. Let me attempt to illustrate that.
Simon Wiesenthal tells a haunting story and with it, asks an even more haunting question. He tells his story and asks his question in his famous book, The Sunflower. Simon Wiesenthal was an Austrian Jew imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. As the book opens, Wiesenthal is part of a work detail being taken from the Concentration Camp to do cleanup work in a makeshift field hospital near the Eastern Front. As they’re marched from the prison camp to the hospital, they come across a cemetery for German soldiers. On each grave is a sunflower.
Wiesenthal writes, “I envied the dead soldiers. Each had a sunflower to connect him with the living world, and butterflies to visit his grave. For me there would be no sunflower. I would be buried in a mass grave, where corpses would be piled on top of me. No sunflower would ever bring light into my darkness, and no butterflies would dance above my dreadful tomb.” But while working at this field hospital a nurse orders Wiesenthal to follow her. He’s taken into a room where a lone SS soldier lay dying. The SS soldier is a twenty-two year old German named Karl Seidl. Karl has asked the nurse to "bring him a Jew." He wants to make his dying confession and he wants to make it to a Jew. The SS soldier is wrapped in bandages covering his entire face, with only holes for his mouth, nose and ears. For the next several hours Simon Wiesenthal sits alone in silence with Karl as the dying SS soldier tells his story.
Karl was an only child from a Christian home. His parents had raised him in the church and had not been supportive of Hitler. But at fifteen, against his parents’ wishes, Karl joined the Hitler Youth. At eighteen Karl joined the infamous SS troops. Now Karl wants to confess the atrocities he has participated in. Most horrifically he tells of being part of a group of SS soldiers who drove with whips three hundred Jews into a house where they had placed gasoline canisters in the attic. After setting the house on fire, Karl saw a mother and father, with the father holding their six year old son in his arms. To escape the flames this family jumped from the window. Karl shot them all.
But Karl has now been mortally wounded in battle and wants to make his final confession. During those several hours that Simon the Jew sat with Karl the Nazi, Simon never spoke. At Karl's request Simon held the dying man's hand. Simon brushed away the flies and gave Karl a drink of water, but he never spoke. During the long ordeal Simon never doubted Karl's sincerity or that he was truly sorry for his crimes. At last Karl said, “I am left here with my guilt. In the last hours of my life you are here with me. I do not know who you are, I only know that you are a Jew and that is enough. I know that what I have told you is terrible. In the long nights while I have been waiting for death, time and time again I have longed to talk about it to a Jew and beg forgiveness from him. Only I didn't know if there were any Jews left. I know that what I am asking is almost too much for you, but without your answer I cannot die in peace.” And with that, Simon Wiesenthal made up his mind and left the room in silence. That night Karl Seidl died. He left his possessions to Simon, but Simon refused them.
Miraculously, Simon Wiesenthal survived the Holocaust though 89 members of his family did not. But Simon Wiesenthal couldn’t forget Karl Seidl. After the war Simon visited Karl's mother to check out Karl's story. It was just as Karl had said. Karl's mother assured Simon that her son was "a good boy" and could never have done anything bad. Again, this time out of kindness, Simon remained silent. In The Sunflower, Simon Wiesenthal concludes his story with this question, “Ought I to have forgiven him? Was my silence at the bedside of the dying Nazi right or wrong?”
With that question Simon Wiesenthal uncovers our problem with grace. Grace is scandalous. It’s hard to accept, hard to believe, and hard to receive. Grace shocks us in what it offers. It is truly not of this world. It frightens us with what it does for sinners. Grace teaches us that God does for others what we would never do for them. While we would save the not-so-bad, God starts with murderers, perverts and then works downward from there. Grace is a gift that costs everything to the giver and nothing to the receiver. It’s given to those who don’t deserve it, barely recognize it, and hardly appreciate it. That’s why God alone gets the glory in our salvation. Jesus did all the work when He died on the cross. In the end grace means that no one is too bad to be saved. God specializes in saving really bad people. That’s why God’s grace is scandalous.
Friend, do you have some things in your background that you’d be ashamed to talk about in public? Fear not. God knows all about it, and His grace is greater than your sin.
Grace also means that some people may be too good to be saved. That is, they may have such a high opinion of themselves that they think they don’t need God’s grace. God’s grace cannot help you until you are desperate enough to receive it. French philosopher Blaise Pascal, said “To make a man a saint, grace is absolutely necessary and whoever doubts it, does not know what a saint is….” One phrase hangs in the mind: “Grace is absolutely necessary.” If you doubt that, you don’t know what a saint is, and I might add, you don’t know what grace is either.
Christianity is supremely a religion of grace. We sing about grace, we write poems about grace, we name our churches and our children after grace. Our own church’s name is Grace. Yet, for all that, grace is not well understood and often not really believed. We use the word a great deal but really don’t know what it means. Most of us rarely think about God's grace at all. For every discussion we have about grace, we have a dozen about the church budget or the church programs or more likely, whether or not we'll live to see the Brewers win another World Series. If you ask us, we certainly believe in grace, but outside of the worship services, the word grace is very rarely on our lips.
Our problem is that grace is scandalous. It’s hard to accept, hard to believe and very hard to receive. We all have a bit of skepticism when a telemarketer tells us, "I'm not trying to sell you anything. I just want to offer you a free trip to Hawaii." Automatically we wonder, "What's the catch?" because we’ve all been taught "there's no free lunch." But with God, there is no catch. My Bible is open to Ephesians 2:8-9 (p. 827). Salvation is by grace through faith totally apart from good works. To get a grip on this text, you must understand five key concepts: saved; grace; faith; gift (as opposed to works); and boast (or, glory).
1. To be saved by grace means that the Lord Jesus Christ has rescued us from God's wrath and judgment. Judgment…wrath…those words sound archaic. Isn’t that medieval theology? God’s wrath and judgment are not PC today. To put this in perspective, let me retell a familiar fairy tale with a contemporary PC perspective:
Once upon a time, in a far away country, there lived a little girl called Red Riding Hood. One day her mother asked her to take a basket of fruit to her grandmother, who had been ill and lived alone in a cottage in the forest. It happened that a wolf was lurking in the bushes and overheard the conversation. He decided to take a short-cut to the grandmother's house and get the goodies for himself. The wolf killed the grandmother, then dressed in her nightgown and jumped into bed to await the little girl.
When she arrived, he made several nasty suggestions and then tried to grab her. But by this time, the child was very frightened and ran screaming from the cottage. A woodcutter, working nearby, heard her cries and rushed to the rescue. He killed the wolf with his ax, thereby saving Red Riding Hood's life. All the townspeople hurried to the scene and proclaimed the woodcutter a hero.
But at the court inquest, several facts emerged: *The wolf had never been advised of his rights. *The woodcutter had made no warning swings before striking the fatal blow. *The ACLU stressed the point that, although the act of eating Grandma may have been in bad taste, the wolf was only "doing his thing" and thus didn't deserve the death penalty. *His lawyer argued that the killing of the grandmother was really self-defense since she was over thirty and, therefore, couldn't be taken seriously because the wolf was trying to make love, not war.
On the basis of these considerations, it was decided there was no valid basis for charges against the wolf. Moreover, the woodcutter was indicted for unaggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Several nights later, the woodcutter's cottage was burned to the ground. One year from the date of "The Incident at Grandma's," her cottage was made a shrine for the wolf who had bled and died there. All the village officials spoke at the dedication, but it was Little Red Riding Hood who gave the most touching tribute. She said that, while she had been selfishly grateful for the woodcutter's intervention, she realized in retrospect that he had overreacted. As she knelt and placed a wreath in honor of the brave wolf, there wasn't a dry eye in the whole forest.
While that rendition may be PC, it doesn’t fly in the courts of Heaven. Look back at Eph. 2:1-3. So why do we need God’s grace? Because everyone of us is by nature spiritually dead and separated from God. Biblical theology demands that we begin at this basic starting point. When God looks down from heaven, the whole world looks like a cemetery to Him. All He sees are dead people. Above every corpse is a three-word epitaph: “DEAD THROUGH SIN.”
In what sense are human beings “dead” even though they are alive? Because of sin we’re separated from God. We’re unable to know God personally and we can’t do anything about our condition. To make matters worse, we’re dead and we don’t even know it.
Consider this scene. You are at a party with lots of laughter and plenty of frivolity. Next to you is a renowned doctor. Pointing to a man in the middle of the celebration, he says, “That man does not know it but he has an incurable disease. He’ll be dead within a week.” What would you think of him then? And what do you make of his antics at the party? He’s a dead man and doesn’t even know it.
To be dead is a hopeless condition. You can’t say to a dead man, “Walter, get up!” and expect him to do anything. You can’t talk the dead back to life. When God looks down from heaven, He sees our world as a vast graveyard filled with the living dead. Unbelievers appear to be alive. They laugh, they talk, they plan, they fight, they marry, they dream of the future, and one day they die. But they are dead even while they are alive.
This is the human condition apart from God. It’s true of all people without exception. Apart from God’s grace, we’re all born dead. Which is why, when God wants to save someone, He first finds a dead person.
The point is that if we’re not under God's wrath, then Jesus didn't need to go to the cross and we don't need to be saved. By going to the cross, Jesus paid the penalty that we are under because of our sin. Paul here says, "For by grace you have been saved." Either you’ve been saved or you haven't. There is no middle ground. Either Jesus has rescued you from God's wrath or you are not saved. The next word to understand is, grace.2. Salvation by grace alone means that we did and can do absolutely nothing to earn or merit salvation. Two cows were grazing alongside a highway when a tank-truck of milk on its way to the distributor happened to pass. On one side of the truck in big red letters was a sign that read, "Pasteurized, homogenized, standardized, Vitamin A added." One cow turned to the other and remarked, "Makes you feel sort of inadequate, doesn’t it?" That's us – we’re all inadequate! We're inadequate to please God. Please first, understand this: You are inadequate! Me, too! We’re all inadequate together! But God’s grace is more than adequate.
Simply defined, grace is God’s unmerited favor. If you did anything to earn it or deserve it, it’s not grace. If God owes it to you because you're a pretty good person or you've tried to do the best you can, it’s not grace. If God gives it to you because He foresaw that you would believe in Him of your own free will, it’s not grace. Grace means that you get the opposite of what you deserve. You deserve God's wrath because you’ve sinned against Him. Instead, He saves you by His grace. Grace cuts directly against the grain of human thinking because it is not fair. We value fairness. If someone does wrong, he should get what he has coming. If someone does right, he should be rewarded. But if someone does wrong and gets rewarded in spite of it, we protest, "That's not fair!"
Take a guy who’s a thief. He’s stolen from hardworking people. He’s hurt his victims or even killed them. But he shrugs it off and continues his life of crime. Finally, he’s apprehended and convicted. On death row, he hears that God will forgive all of his sins if he will trust in Christ, even though he does not deserve it and he cannot make up for what he has done. At first, he can't believe it. It sounds too good to be true. But then he does believe it. He trusts Christ to save him from eternal judgment. He dies and goes to spend eternity with God in heaven. That's not fair!
Or, take the case of a guy who is very religious. He prays several times a day, fasts twice a week. He gives 10% of his income to charitable causes. He doesn't swindle people out of money. He treats others fairly. He’s been faithful in his marriage. He thinks doing all of these things will commend him to God. But, he dies and goes to hell. We cry out, "That's not fair!"
But, I didn't make up these stories, they’re Jesus’ stories. The thief was hanging next to Jesus on the cross. Jesus paid his debt and the thief went to heaven that very day (Luke 23:39-43). The religious man was the Pharisee in Jesus' parable who thought himself to be righteous (Luke 18:9-14). He wasn’t justified from his sins, because he was trusting in his own good works to save him.
If God were fair, we'd all go to hell because we all have sinned. God didn’t compromise His righteousness or justice to forgive us. His justice demands that the penalty be paid. Jesus paid the penalty on the cross for all that trust in Him. In that way, as Romans 3:26 states, God can be both just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
Someone has rightly described G-R-A-C-E as, "God's Riches At Christ's Expense." We naturally resist God's grace because it robs us of all our pride. But there is no other way of salvation. It is by grace alone. As A. W. Tozer said, “Grace is the good pleasure of God that inclines Him to bestow benefits on the undeserving.” But we also need to understand, faith.3. Salvation by faith alone means that we receive salvation by trusting in what Jesus did for us on the Cross. Many misunderstand the nature of saving faith. Some have a sort of general, vague faith in God, whoever He may be. That’s kind of like positive thinking. "I believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows! I believe in the basic goodness of people and the goodness of God. Everything will turn out for the good in the end." But that’s not saving faith.
Some think that faith is mere assent to certain facts. In other words, they think that making a decision to accept Christ constitutes saving faith, even if there’s no repentance and no subsequent obedience to Christ as Lord. That kind of mere assent to the facts of the gospel is not saving faith. To understand saving faith, you need to understand that saving faith includes knowledge, assent and trust.
a) There must be knowledge. There is content that must be understood. Some say, "It doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you are sincere." That's like saying, "It doesn't matter what medicine you take, as long as you're sincere." It matters greatly that you take the right medicine in the right dose, or you could die! To be saved, you must know something about God. That He’s righteous, holy, just and loving. You must also know that you’ve sinned against God and stand guilty and condemned before Him. You must know that Jesus is the eternal Son of God, who took on human flesh, born of the Virgin, lived a perfect life and died on the cross as the substitute for sinners, paying on their behalf the penalty that God demands.
But God raised Him from the dead and He ascended into heaven. He will return bodily to judge the living and the dead, but also to save all that have trusted in Him. These are basic facts, revealed in the Bible, that you must know to be saved.
b) There must be assent. But, also, you must give assent to these facts, or agree that they are true. A student could know all of these facts well enough to pass an exam, but not affirm that they’re true. Saving faith includes intellectually assenting to the truth of the gospel.
c) There must be trust. Yet, if that is all that saving faith entails, then Satan and his demons are saved. They know all of these things and they know that they’re true. The third essential element in saving faith is personal trust, or commitment.
For example, you might be an expert on aircraft. You know a certain plane is well constructed and mechanically sound. You may also agree that the plane will fly. You've watched it fly many times. You affirm it’s a good plane. But knowing these facts and agreeing to them will not get you anywhere. To get to a destination, you must commit yourself to get on board the plane.
Saving faith then is personally trusting Jesus Christ, committing your eternal destiny to what He did for you on the cross. Just as you entrust your life totally to the pilot when you get on board a plane, so you entrust your eternal destiny totally to Jesus and His death as your substitute on the cross. You trust God's promise that He will justify the one who has faith in Jesus (Rom. 3:26). And, implicit in "getting on board" with Christ is that you can't keep one foot on the "terminal" of sin, and the other on board with Christ. You must commit yourself to follow Him as your Lord.
Paul has shown that salvation-being rescued from God's wrath-is by grace alone through faith alone in what Jesus did for us on the cross. Also…4. Salvation by grace is God's free gift to us. "It is the gift of God, not as a result of works." Paul goes to great pains to show that the entire process of salvation comes to us apart from anything in us or anything that we do. If we could do anything, then salvation would not be a gift by God's grace. Yet, all of it is the gift of God, even the faith that lays hold of God’s grace. Even our faith is not of us. It too is part of God’s gift.
As Martin Luther said, our situation is so hopeless that salvation must come from “another place.” That’s why the Reformers talked about “alien righteousness.” That means a righteousness that comes from outside ourselves. We’re not saved by what we do but by what Jesus Christ has done for us. Here’s Luther on faith: “God creates faith in the human heart the same way that He created the world. He found nothing and created something.” Thus, every part of our salvation is a work of God from first to last.
Paul adds that God's gift is "not as a result of works." It’s completely free, stemming from God's grace alone. Some churches muddy what Scripture clearly teaches, instead teaching that we’re saved by grace through faith, but not by grace through faith alone. Rather, we must cooperate by adding our works. But the tense of the Greek participle shows that salvation has happened in the past with continuing results. It's a done deal!
Sadly, when the last pope died, the present pope urged the faithful to pray him into heaven. If even the pope can't be certain about being saved, how much less the rank and file of the church! Under that system, you can never be sure that you have enough works to merit heaven. But the Reformers rightly argued that we are saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.
A student in a youth ministry class at Hannibal-LaGrange College in Missouri learned this lesson from his professor. This student had left work early so he could have some uninterrupted study time right before the final in his Youth Issues class. When he got to class, everyone was doing some last minute studying. The teacher came in and said he’d review with them for just a little bit before the test. They went through the review, most of it right on the study guide, but there were some things the teacher was reviewing that this student had never heard of. When questioned about it, the teacher said that this material was in the book and they were responsible for everything in the book. The class couldn’t really argue with that. Finally, it was time to take the test. The professor instructed the class to leave the exam booklets face down on the desk until everyone had one and then he’d tell them to start.
When the students turned the exam booklets over, every answer was already filled in! The bottom of the last page said the following: “This is the end of the Final Exam. All the answers on your test are correct. You will receive an ‘A’ on the final exam. The reason you passed the test is because the creator of the test took it for you. All the work you did in preparation for this test did not help you get the A. You have just experienced…Grace.” The teacher then went around the room and asked each student individually, “What is your grade? Do you deserve the grade you are receiving? How much did all your studying for this exam help you achieve your final grade?”
This student, writing about this experience, says, “Now I am not a crier by any stretch of the imagination, but I had to fight back tears when answering those questions and thinking about how the creator has passed the test for me.” Afterward his teacher had this to say: “I have tried to teach you all semester that you are a recipient of grace.” The teacher went on to say he’d never done this kind of final before and probably would never do it again, but because of the content of many of their class discussions, he felt like they needed to experience grace. Not just talk about it, but experience it. All of us need to experience grace, not just know about it intellectually.
Many of us grew up in homes where love was conditional. We were not conscious of it, but that is how we experienced life as a child. Our parents’ acceptance was performance-based. If we did well, we experienced our parents’ approval. If not, we experienced their disapproval. And so, at a level at which we are not even aware, all our lives we’ve been trying to measure up to our parents’ expectations. And the sad thing is that we never can and so many of us have this deep sense of unworthiness. Do you want to know something interesting? It’s some of the finest people in the church who have this sense of unworthiness. And it’s robbed us of our joy. We’ve tried to do the right thing all our lives and all it has gotten us is that we are standing on the outside looking in at the joy others seem to have.
All our lives we have been taught about salvation by faith, but we’ve not associated it with that deep unhappiness that many of us feel. Here is the good news: You do not have to measure up. You do not have to be at the top of your class. You are accepted. You are loved. Salvation, wholeness, healing of the inner person by God is not performance-based. In fact, in order to experience God’s grace, you and I have got to somehow forget everything we’ve ever learned about being good.
That sounds radical, doesn’t it? But that is what Luther saw half a millennium ago. We are saved not by our performance, but by our faith in an omnipotent and all-loving God. Salvation is a gift for me to receive, not a reward for me to earn. But there is a final point that Paul makes…5. Salvation by grace gives all of the glory to God alone. Paul concludes verse 9, "so that no one may boast." Or, as he puts it in 1 Corinthians 1:31 after arguing that salvation rests on God's choosing us, "Let him who boasts boast in the Lord." If any part of salvation, including the faith that saves, comes from us, then we have some grounds for boasting. No, Paul says, if salvation is totally of the Lord, then He gets all the glory!
Conclusion: If, as Paul here proclaims, salvation is by God's grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone for God's glory alone, then there’s hope for every sinner. Salvation does not depend on you, but rather on God, who is mighty to save.
Friend, flee for refuge to Christ and these wonderful verses apply to you: "By grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast."
That’s why God alone gets the glory in your salvation. Jesus did all the work when He died on the cross. In the end grace means that no one is too bad to be saved. Are there any truly bad people here today? I have some good news for you. God specializes in saving really bad people. Do you have some things in your background that you would be ashamed to talk about in public? Fear not. God knows all about it and His grace is greater than your sin.
Which brings me to my final point, how do you find God’s grace? Just ask for it. That’s all. It’s really that simple. The more you feel your need for grace, the better candidate you are to receive it. Hold out your empty hands and ask God for His grace. You will not be turned away. It’s never too late. Though your sins be as scarlet, God says they will be white as snow.
This is the miracle, the wonder, the scandal, the shock of God’s grace. It truly is “out of this world” for no one in this world would have thought of something like this. Here is good news for sinners. Free Grace! Free Grace! Free Grace! Shout it, sing it, tell it, share it. And above all else, believe it, for in believing, you will be saved. That’s why God’s grace is scandalous.
My friend, when we get to heaven, there will be no contest to see who was the most deserving of God’s grace. After all, we were all dead to start with. There will only be one contest in heaven. When we look back and see what we were before, when we see the pit from which He rescued us, when we recall how confused we were, when we remember how God reached out and dragged us into His family, and how He held us in his hand, and when we see Jesus who loved us and gave Himself for us, the only contest will be to see which of us will sing the loudest, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.” And all God’s grace redeemed people said, “Amen.”
