'Great Grace Was Upon Them'
By Andrew Klynsmith

'For the grace of God has appeared for the salvation of all men, training us to renounce irreligion and worldly passions, and to live sober, upright, and godly lives in this world, awaiting our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all iniquity and to purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds.' (Titus 2:11-14)

Paul, in writing to the leader Titus, and so to the church in Crete, can speak of a time when the grace of God appeared, and also of an expectation that this grace's coming will be shown in the lives of those who receive it. In the book of Acts (11:19-24), Barnabas was sent to Antioch to investigate the reported conversion of Gentile proselytes to Christ. The result of the investigation was that '...he came and saw the grace of God, [and] he was glad...' Earlier in Acts, describing the life of the early church, it is said that 'great grace was upon them all' (Acts 4:32-33.) Grace is a dynamic reality that can be sensed by Christian people.

On the other hand there is no such thing as 'grace'; rather, grace is the action of God the Father, springing out from his love, to bring men and women into fullness of relationship with Himself. It is kindness and love in action. Grace comes to us through the Son - we hear of the 'grace of our Lord Jesus Christ', and of Jesus being full of grace and truth. The grace of God is communicated to us by the Holy Spirit who is called in Hebrews 10:29, 'the Spirit of grace.' And this action of God is action in which we can participate as the people of God.

The Old Testament has a number of Hebrew words for grace, the two most common being chen and chesed. The first has the sense of undeserved favour, and the second the sense of loving kindness or mercy or compassion. But the whole reality of grace must be understood against the backdrop of the whole of Old Testament history, which is the account of the dealings of the Holy One with a sinful human race. Grace is then seen as God's determination to not cast off and reject His creation, but rather to redeem it and reconcile it to Himself. Grace is linked often with mercy, for it is the action of God in a situation where the recipients of His grace are completely unable to do anything about their situation themselves. This is what comes to the foreground when we see the New Testament use of the Greek word for grace, charis - the action of God for the redemption of the world.

Grace is not simply an attitude of forgiveness or pity in God towards us. Such a view of grace seriously underestimates the greatness of grace. A view of grace as pity also seriously underestimates the seriousness of sin:

The feeble gospel preaches "God is ready to forgive"; the mighty Gospel preaches "God has redeemed." Our message is not, "God cares" but "God has acted!" Grace is God's forgiveness in a moral way, forgiveness which is not simply an amnesty towards unchanged sinners, but a restoration and a recreation of sinners. For this reason we can never understand grace apart from the action of God in the Cross of Christ. There is no grace of God outside the Cross. The grace we see in the Old Testament is God's action which anticipates the coming of Christ in the New Testament, and his death on the Cross as the appearing of grace in history. 'But a God who is merely or mainly sympathetic is not the Christian God. The Father of an infinite benediction is not the Father of an infinite grace....A being of infinite pity would not rise to the height of the Christian God. And a religion of far more sympathy than we have yet felt would not be the Christian religion. It is needless to dwell on the preciousness of sympathy. The man who needs none is something less than human; and the man who receives none remains so. But a sympathy which has no help in it mocks us with an enlargement of our own sensitive impotence, which means so much better than it can....we must have a sympathy that can not only help, but save, save to the uttermost, save for ever, and not only bless but redeem...a sympathy that has redeemed.' (P.T Forsyth)
 

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. He who believes in him is not condemned; he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

Paul spells out this action of grace in Romans 3:21-26:

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction; since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies him who has faith in Jesus.