The freeness of grace means God bestows his favor on us without cost. Christ paid the entire price, fulfilling all the law to the utmost, including its penalties and curses which he suffered and did not deserve. (Heb 4:15) Salvation comes to us, as the prophet said, without money and without price. (Isa 55:1)
By fixing its eye on the freeness of grace, a fairly large proportion of the church has tilted into a settled opinion that there cannot be anything obligatory about the Christian life. Nothing is to be enforceable. To urge upon Christians any sort of necessity is to add human merit to God’s grace, thereby obliterating both as Paul described: “And if by grace, then it is no longer of works; otherwise grace is no longer grace. But if it is of works, it is no longer grace; otherwise work is no longer work.” (Rom 11:6)
Making this practical is a prickly problem
But does this teaching reflect the full-orbed doctrine of the New Testament?
My collar gets all itchy and tight when this is applied without qualifications in certain… ah… situations. Let’s suppose, since this was the example that prompted this article, that an unmarried woman who is living with a man wants to join the church. What to do? The answer chosen in this particular situation sounded reasonable enough. Every person in the congregation has sins which he or she is refusing to deal with, yet those people are members in good standing and nobody is making any fuss over those sins. Such things as unjust anger, lust, greed and materialism are getting a pass. How, then, do we justify telling this one person that this one sin, the sin of fornication, is beyond the pale and it is where we must draw the line? Unable to come up with an answer that didn’t seem to be adding human works to divine grace, the church leaders punted. “Let her join,” they said. And it all worked out in the end when the lady married the man some time later. “See? God took care of it when we trusted his grace. This lady understood grace better than any of us.” (Seriously, no kidding, that’s what he said.)
Even pricklier than that?
But the devil is just the sort of fellow to toss a big lump of uncleanness into the punch bowl. I’ve seen him at work, and he fights dirty. In the first church I pastored, for example, a deacon who served as the youth minister was arrested for sexually molesting a young girl. I and one of the deacons investigated the charges (interviewed the victim and her mother) and found them credible. We confronted the guy, and his attitude was sassy and arrogant and exuded a smug catch-me-if-you-can. We then went to the sheriff with our information and learned that the incident we’d heard about was by no means this guy’s first. To shorten the story by several stages, we kicked him out of the church. It was the right thing to do.
I’m thinking that our friends who allowed the fornicator to join would be pragmatic and worldly-wise enough to agree that leaving an unrepentant child molester in the church is both evil and stupid. And yet, based on the principles espoused in the fornication example, how would they pick out the sin of child molesting and say that all these other sins must be ignored in the name of grace but this one sin is the place where the line has to be drawn?
See the problem? If you accept the fornicator, then why not the molester? And if you accept the molester, then what about the guy who beats children? Kills them? Or in some cases among savages, even cannibalizes them? If we establish it as a necessary consequent of the freeness of grace that there can be no lines, then by the great horn spoon, there can be no lines.
Time to drop the A-bomb
Antinomianism is the view that there is no law for Christians. Antinomianism says that if grace is free, then nothing must be held as obligatory or enforceable upon Christians.
The problem is that antinomianism is correct about the freeness of grace and mistaken about its implications. There are many things God’s grace does which come across all technical sounding — atonement, forensic justification, and some guys talk about the impetration, and so on. These refer to aspects of how God’s grace puts us right in our standing with him. If grace stopped right there, we’d probably describe the whole deal by a word the antinomian teachers love to hate, amnesty. And yet if the antinomian view is correct, then amnesty is pretty much all there is to it because the operative concept in their view is that the freeness of grace necessarily infers the annihilation of law.
What else does God’s grace do?
God’s grace changes people. By his Spirit who comes to live in us, we become new people. A new nature lives in us, a nature that no is longer willing to continue in sin. The fornicator who becomes a Christian has a God-given desire to stop fornicating. The child molester who becomes a Christian is more than just forgiven. He is given a holy desire to abandon that sin and live his life in purity before God. He knows he ought to do this, that it’s the right thing to do, and by the Spirit of God, he wants to do so.
God’s grace doesn’t mean that the lines between right and wrong are obliterated, nor does it mean that the church is forbidden to require its people to get on the right side. It is a misconstruction of the biblical teaching to shrug off serious sin issues as if standards cannot coexist with grace. In a true teaching of grace, not only do standards exist, but the grace of God moves us to walk worthy of the vocation to which we’re called (1 Thess 2:11-12) and empowers us to make a credible go of it. And this, by the way, doesn’t imply that Christians attain to perfection in this life. But it means real standards of righteousness continue to exist, and the redeemed life changes in a serious way to move toward them.
Don’t ever accept a view of grace in which “Go and sin no more” is considered a betrayal of the cross. Because it isn’t.
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