Grace. John Newton called it amazing. He was right. But sometimes I forget why. What makes it amazing? It is almost like good health: I don’t, with awareness, appreciate it all the time, but when I finally get over that cold or the flu finally breaks THEN I see how great my good health is.
Saved from what? This is a book title but also a great question. Sin is deteriorating our world like time rots an apple. I realized yesterday that I forgot how bad, gross, grotesque, wrong, deadly, dark, painful, hurtful and harmful, haunting and horrifying, sick and unsavory sin is. One sin. Just one sin and the entire universe was thrown off kilter and everything suddenly had an expiration date. When I was younger I often thought of how many shin-kicks Adam would receive in Heaven: ‘I made it to Heaven, no thanks to your efforts, Adam’ Whack! Think of this. Each individual sins–goes against God’s way he ordered things or commanded them to be–many times in one day; each ‘little’ sin has the power to kill the universe; no wonder we are a mess!
All of society and humanity is not one big happy Brady bunch family chillin on earth like some continuous beach vacation. We are killing each other. Sin affects everyone and everything around you. You think you are keeping it to yourself; you think you are containing it so it only affects you? That’s like what I use to do when I was three: if I close my eyes no one can see me. Sorry, but you trying to be sovereign over your own sin isn’t working. It isn’t working for me either. We all see it. Adam and Eve tried hiding behind some trees after they sinned; they tried containing and running away from their disobedience, avoiding it like it didn’t happen. But sin literally killed everything.
Funerals are so hard because death, though normal, is unnatural. Sin did that. It made something beautiful into something gross. It pained what once was jubilant and happy; it distorted good; it high-jacks righteousness. We think, like many characters in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, that we can control sin like they thought they could control the ring. But it always ends up controlling us. We become ITS slave and sin OUR master.
What’s so amazing about grace? It saved us from all of this. We are no longer under that realm; there is something more real than that: Jesus Christ. From all of this he saved us to walk with him eternally in what the Garden of Eden was supposed to become. Only in Jesus can the consequence of sin be unplugged and powerless.
‘[Jesus] came to undo what Adam so disastrously did, and lead us back through the jungle to the garden. He crossed the ravine, the unbridgeable gulf between sinful man and holy God.’ [[Sinclair Ferguson]]
