Denver Seminary

The grace of God assaulted Alina's sense of justice. It made no sense to her that someone who perpetrated that kind of evil could be forgiven and pardoned of an eternity in hell. I've often wondered how I would have reacted to the gospel of grace had I been in her shoes. MAKING SENSE OF GRACE Yet it is God's grace that the apostle Paul uses to frame our salvation. Twice he reminds us in Ephesians 2:1–10, "It is by grace you have been saved." He speaks of "the incomparable riches of [God's] grace, expressed in His kindness to us in Christ Jesus." We cannot read Paul and imagine a gospel that is not saturated with the grace of God. Several years ago, I heard Stuart Briscoe describe grace like this: "Justice is getting what we deserve from God and mercy is not getting what we deserve. But grace is getting what we do not deserve." None of the workers hired after 6:00 a.m. deserved a full day's wage. But that's what they received, through an act of generosity. And so it is with God's grace. He gives us what we could not possibly earn and therefore do not deserve: eternal life. That's why Paul writes in Ephesians 2:4, "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 transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved." We can never appreciate grace unless we come face-to-face with the hopelessness of the human condition before God. Paul writes, "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins" (Eph. 2:1). Last time I checked, dead people can't do much to change their situation. It's hopeless. Dead in our transgressions and sins, we've earned what we deserved. According to Paul, we've received the wages we were promised: "For the wages of sin is death" (Rom. 6:23). We can only make sense of grace when we see that Christ's death satisfies God's justice. He died in our place so that we might have eternal life. He is God's grace gift of life to a hopeless humanity—undeserved, unexpected, and unbelievably generous favor poured out on us. And that leads us to a second criterion for making sense of God's grace. If it is not deserved and cannot be earned, the only way to experience grace is to receive it through faith. In Ephesians 2:8, Paul repeats his earlier affirmation—"It is by grace you have been saved" (2:5)—but he adds an important qualifier: "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works so that no one can boast." Faith turns what seems like a senseless, offensive, and unjust act of forgiveness into jaw-dropping, breath-taking, head-shaking grace. It turns "I could never believe in a God like that" into "That's exactly the kind of God I want to believe in." NEVER TOO LATE As I finished writing this article, the news came that my Uncle Clarence died at the age of 87. He was a 30-year Marine who served in Korea and Vietnam. He told me several times through the years that God could never forgive him for what he had done. At the age of 79, however, he came to faith and was baptized. He served the last years of his life organizing men to pray for the young boys in an Upward Bound basketball program. Clarence was like one of those workers whom the vineyard owner hired at 5:00 p.m. Yet he has now received the same gift of grace as those who have walked with Christ for many more years: eternal life. It's never too late to believe. Never. Mark Young, PhD PRESIDENT Dr. Mark Young was appointed President of Denver Seminary in 2009. As a theological educator and pastoral leader with over 30 years of global ministry experience, his life passion is to align all that he is and all that he does with the eternal purpose of God—that all people in all places worship Him alone. Mark and his wife, Priscilla, have been married for 34 years and have three grown children and four delightful grandchildren. 14 FALL 2015 BenGoode/iStock

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