Word of Salvation – Vol.52 No.29 – August 2007

 

By Grace Alone

A Sermon by Rev Martin Geluk

on Ephesians 2:1-5

(Sermon 1 of 2, on Grace Alone)

Scripture Reading:  Ephesians 2:1-10

 

Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We have come to the fourth ‘sola’. The word ‘sola’ is Latin for ‘alone’. We use this word when we speak of the five solas of the Reformation. So far we have had sermons on Scripture alone, Christ alone and faith alone, and now it is the turn of ‘by grace alone‘. And after grace alone there is still the fifth and last sola ‘to God’s glory alone‘.

Perhaps some may be wondering why there is not one ‘sola’ but five. If we say that a particular teaching alone is important, then why keep on adding other teachings that are also said to be important? The answer is that these five ‘solas’, these five ‘alone’ teachings of the Reformation, were not meant to exclude each other. ‘By Scripture alone’ means to say that God’s salvation is revealed only in the Bible and not in tradition or in some other writings. And ‘by Christ alone’ means to say that salvation is only through Christ and not through something or someone else. And ‘by faith alone’ means that we are made right with God only through faith and not by works as well.

Now the Reformers felt that they had to add that salvation is also ‘by grace alone’. To not say anything about grace when emphasising that salvation is ‘by faith alone’, could make you think that as long as you have faith you are okay. Good works cannot save you but if you have a strong faith then that will stand you in good stead. In peoples’ minds faith could be seen as the one good work that does save you. God will credit you with salvation if you showed that you have faith in Him. But we saw in the last sermon on ‘faith alone’ that you must not see faith as contributing to your salvation. Faith is something that we cannot produce in ourselves. Faith is a gift from God.

It is somewhat understandable that people think that faith is something they have to bring up themselves because the Bible calls on us to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ in order to be saved (Acts 16:31). That seems to suggest that believing is what you are capable of doing. But when you begin to understand more of the Bible’s teaching on human sinfulness then you realise that God first has to put faith in your heart and then you begin to believe with the faith that God has put in you. God gives you faith. He works it in you by His Spirit as you hear the teaching of His Word. The teaching ‘by grace alone’ should help us see that clearly.

1. Why the word ‘alone’ is so significant

The author of a book I have on the solas of the Reformation says he had some friends who converted to Roman Catholicism. These men then pleaded with Protestants to understand that the Roman Church also believes that justification is by faith in Christ. And this is true. Many think that Protestants trust Christ for their salvation and Roman Catholics trust their good works for their salvation. But that’s incorrect. The Roman Catholic Church does not teach and has never taught that people are justified only on the basis of their own good works, without any need of the saving activity of Christ. What Rome objects to, however, is the teaching ‘by faith alone‘ and ‘by grace alone‘ (Cf R C Sproul, commentary on Romans, pp 74-75).

The Roman Church teaches that the grace of justification is poured into the soul of a child at baptism. The child is then regarded as being in a state of grace and as the child grows up and matures he must keep himself pure from mortal sin. Grace is lost when a mortal sin is committed. Rome considers a mortal sin to be worse than other sins. It destroys the grace of justification put into the child through baptism. But when the person who committed a mortal sin does penance then justification is restored. Penance is where the person confesses his sins to the priest who then pronounces absolution. The person having received absolution is required to do works of satisfaction, which are good works. The Roman church then says that God rewards these good works by justifying that person again. In all this the person must also have faith in Jesus Christ. But it is not justification by Christ alone through faith alone. A person must also produce a righteousness within himself in order to be justified. To sum up: the Roman Church teaches that justification happens as a result of a combination of faith in Christ plus good works.

The Reformation said this is not how Scripture teaches salvation. A person is justified by Christ through faith alone and by grace alone. The word ‘alone’ became very significant here. The good works that a person does, and which the grace of God enables him to do, do not help a person to be declared just by God. God approves of good works but they do not help you earn salvation.

Now it’s not just Roman Catholicism that rejects the teaching ‘by grace alone’. So does Arminianism. It also teaches that Christ and faith and grace all play an important role. But Arminianism also rejects ‘by grace alone‘. The young people in our catechism classes will have heard of the word Arminianism but for the sake of everyone let us again say what it is. Arminianism regards the sovereign will of God to be limited by the will of man. How does it do that? Well, it says that God’s election of someone is based on God knowing in advance that this person at a certain time in his life will decide to repent and accept Christ. Because God knows that this is going to happen, He decides to elect that person. But this is making salvation dependent on man’s decision to believe and repent. It is really man, and not God, who determines who shall receive eternal life.

Calvinism, on the other hand, teaches that God has not a limited but an absolute sovereignty over all things. Man is absolutely dependent on God for every aspect of his salvation. God decided who will be saved before these people were born and God will cause them to hear the gospel about Christ and God will put faith and repentance in their hearts. Calvinism is convinced that Scripture teaches that every aspect of our being is tainted with sin. Our sinful nature blinds us to the truth about God. By ourselves we will never repent and believe. Man, therefore, is saved by God’s grace alone.

For a good understanding of why the Reformed understanding of Scripture rejects Arminianism and accepts Calvinism, we recommend that you study the Canons of Dort, one of Reformation Confessions and you can find it in our Book of Forms. But for our purposes right now, consider the question – why can’t we do anything towards our salvation? Why can’t our faith or good works that please God not help us in being made right with God? In other words, why is salvation by grace alone?

2. Grace is God showing us His favour by saving us

Grace is not an energy that God puts in our hearts and we then using that energy to do good works which God will reward. No, grace is primarily an attitude of mercy in God towards sinners. Grace is part of God’s being. It is His willingness to look upon us with favour and deliver us from the bondage to sin.

The whole concept of grace is hard to understand when you think you have a right to almost anything. Like when disaster strikes some people think they have a right to immediate assistance and complain if it takes a while before help arrives. Or when someone is robbed or meets with a nasty accident, then some will say that the victim did not deserve that because she is such a nice person. There exists in these attitudes an expectation that good is something you deserve, something you have a right to. In a similar way some people think that God is there to save them. They don’t see themselves as unworthy sinners but as decent people who deserve a break. They assume that it is God’s duty to forgive them. That’s what God is for, isn’t He? To love us and forgive us. To such people the idea of grace is hard to understand.

Ephesians 2:1-3 say something entirely different: “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of the sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.”

God reminds us here what Christians were like before they were saved through Christ. By describing what we were, God is helping us to understand the nature of grace. Basically there are three things wrong with anyone before God pulls that person out of the pit of sin. We were spiritually dead; we were defiant against God; and we were doomed. Let’s briefly look at each of these.

Adam’s fall into sin resulted in all of humanity being plunged into spiritual death. In spiritual death there is no fellowship with God. We’re all born with original sin, which causes us to do all kinds of other sins. We are corrupt and we are guilty. When you’re physically dead then there is no life in your body. Anyone who has seen a corpse knows that. Spiritually dead means that your spirit is a like a corpse towards God. There is no ability to respond to God. No desire to respond to God. No capacity to come to God. No inclination to come to God. No strength to obey God and no wanting to believe in God. The first three chapters of Romans clearly teach all this. And the same is said here in Ephesians 2:1, “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins.”

It’s not just speaking of criminals and very bad people. No, all unbelievers, all non-Christians are spiritually dead. Verse 2 says that the spiritually dead follow the ways of this world and of the devil. It says they live in these ways. It means they “walk” in these ways. It’s their life, their custom, it’s their thinking and behaviour.

Not only were you spiritually dead before you were a Christian, you were also defiant against God. You were actively rebellious against God and His commandments. Verse 3 describes this defiance against God as “gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts.” We were “by nature objects of wrath.” We weren’t just helpless victims of sin. No, we loved darkness and hated the light. We were unable and unwilling to please God. Our will was not free. It was held in bondage to sin. We were pleasing ourselves and not God. We were quite willing to walk on the road that leads to destruction.

And in addition to being spiritually dead and defiant we were also doomed. In our unsaved state we were under God’s curse. We were condemned.

We are saying all this to help you see that salvation is by grace alone. You can only see that when you realise what you are saved from. The church today needs to hear this again. There is a tendency today to focus more on people, on what they want, what they would like, and less on the holiness of God. I am reading again J I Packer’s book ‘Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God’, probably familiar to some of you. It was first published in 1961 but it is as relevant today as it was back then. Let me quote from it, and remember, I am doing this to help us understand the grace of God.

Packer says the gospel is also a message about sin. I quote,

“It tells us how we have fallen short of God’s standard; how we have become guilty, filthy, and helpless in sin, and now stand under the wrath of God. It tells us that the reason why we sin continually is that we are sinners by nature, and that nothing we do, or try to do, for ourselves can put us right, or bring us back into God’s favour. It shows us ourselves as God sees us, and teaches us to think of ourselves as God thinks of us. Thus it leads us to self-despair. And this is also a necessary step. Not till we have learned our need to get right with God, and our inability to do so by any effort of our own, can we come to know the Christ who saves us from sin.”

But, says Packer, there is a pitfall here. Notice how what he says next can prevent people from seeing the grace of God. I quote again:

“Everybody’s life includes things which cause dissatisfaction and shame. Everyone has had a bad conscience about some things in his past, matters in which he has fallen short of the standard which he has set for himself, or which was expected of him by others. The danger is that in our evangelism we should content ourselves with mentioning these things and making people feel uncomfortable about them, and then portraying Christ as the One who saves us from these elements of ourselves, without even raising the question of our relationship with God. But this is just the question that has to be raised when we speak about sin. For the very idea of sin in the Bible is of an offence against God, which disrupts a man’s relationship with God. Unless we see our shortcomings in the light of the law and holiness of God, we do not see them as sin at all. For sin is not a social concept; it is being disobedient against God. Though sin is committed by man, and many sins are against society, sin cannot be defined in terms of either man or society. We never know what sin really is till we have learned to think of it in terms of God, and to measure it, not by human standards, but by the yardstick of God’s total demand on our lives.

What we have to grasp, then, is that the bad conscience of the natural man is not at all the same thing as conviction of sin. It does not, therefore, follow that a man is convicted of sin when he is distressed about his weaknesses and the wrongs things he has done. It is not conviction of sin just to feel miserable about yourself and your failures and your inadequacy to meet life’s demands. Nor would it be saving faith if a man in that condition called on the Lord Jesus Christ just to soothe him, and cheer him up, and make him feel confident again. Nor should we think that we are preaching the gospel if all that we did was to present Christ in terms of man’s felt wants. Like, ‘Are you happy? Are you satisfied? Do you want peace of mind? Do you feel that you have failed? Are you fed up with yourself? Do you want a friend? Then come to Christ; he will meet your every need…’, as if the Lord Jesus Christ were to be thought of as a fairy godmother, or a super-psychiatrist. No; we have to go deeper than this. To preach sin means, not to make capital out of people’s felt frailties but to measure their lives by the holy law of God. To be convicted of sin means, not just to feel that one is an all-round flop, but to realise that one has offended God, and flouted His authority, and defied Him, and gone against Him, and put oneself in the wrong with Him. To preach Christ means to set Him forth as the One who through His cross sets men right with God again. To put faith in Christ means relying on Him, and Him alone, to restore us to God’s fellowship and favour.” (pp 59-61)

The quote from Packer was quite a lengthy one, but can you see that unless a person understands his sinful condition as God describes it, he will not appreciate grace for what it is?

3. But God made us alive even when we were dead

Verses 4 and 5 present us with a wonderful turn around. “But because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in transgression – it is by grace you have been saved.” We were everything that was said about us in verses 1-3. Dead in sin, enslaved to sin, active in sin, and under the wrath of God. The apostle Paul deliberately emphasised all the terrible effects of sin in order to make us see the grace of God. We had no hope to save ourselves. We had no means to get us out of the pit of sin. We were well and truly trapped in that pit. But God came to us and saved us. He took the initiative.

Notice the words, “But … God.” You first read verses 1-3 and take in all the terrible things about your sinful human nature. These verses hit you with our helplessness and hopelessness. We were dead. We were defiant. We were doomed. Then comes verse 4 – “But … God.”

But God, because of His great love for us, because He is rich in mercy, “made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions.” Now that, my fellow Christians, is grace.

Why did God love us? It was not because God was obligated to save us. Not at all! Rather, because God is rich in mercy. He loved us while we were sinners, while we were rebellious, while we were despicable in His sight. That’s how great God’s love is. Can you see that grace is entirely a free act in the being of God? We do not deserve to be saved and God was not obligated to save us. That’s what makes grace, grace.

Note that when Satan and his evil angels rebelled against God they were thrown into hell. God did not save them, did not provide a way out for their condemnation. God was not required to save them and He chose not to save them. In the days of Noah God warned the wicked that the Flood would destroy them. Noah preached to them and said, repent. None did. The entire population of the earth at that time perished in the Flood. God was not obligated to save them. He gave the opportunity through the preaching of Noah but when they rejected that then God punished them for their sins. What happened at the time of the Flood has repeated itself many times in history on a minor scale. But a judgment on a far greater scale will happen again at the coming of Christ. By that time God will have saved all those whom He will save and the unrepentant and unbelieving will be destroyed forever.

Note again that God is not required to save fallen humanity. No human being deserves salvation and God is not obligated to save. Were God required to save, then grace would not be grace. For grace to be grace, it must be freely given. If God was obligated to save, then He must save, and then we could complain if salvation did not come to all. Then we could say to God, why don’t you do what you are supposed to do! But then grace would not be grace any more. So when we sometimes struggle with God saying, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion” (Rom 9:15), then it is because we have lost sight of what grace is.

Can you now also see why there has to be preaching and teaching about sin, the wrath of God, and hell? Yes, these are the darker themes of the Bible’s truth. There may have been times in the church that the emphasis on these darker themes became morbid because preachers were always going on about them. Yet, the biblical teaching on man’s sinfulness needs to be clearly proclaimed if we are to understand the greatness of God’s grace. We only understand God’s love and mercy when we understand how unworthy we are to receive it.

Let us close with those wonderful words of verse 4, “But … God.” After hearing about how dead we were in our sins, these words are full of comfort, yes full of salvation. “But … God” because of His great love for us, because of His mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgression – “it is by grace you have been saved.”

“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.”

Amen.