THE GLORY OF HIS GRACE, AND THE RICHES OF HIS GRACE
THE GLORY OF HIS GRACE, AND THE RICHES OF HIS GRACE
Grace is God’s favour to man according to His own heart and counsel. It has therefore to meet man in his need, and also to express God in His greatness. These two things, man’s need and God’s greatness, are maintained in grace. Without the former, man would be unreached and undelivered; and without the latter, God the Giver would not be known. If the need of man were the sole measure of the grace of God, then man [p. 418] only would be thought of, the work of Christ would be simply for man, and the power of God expended merely in rescuing man and securing his relief. Man would be the object and end of it all, and not God. If a man expended all his money in benefiting his country, what should we think if there were no memorial of the benefactor, nor any distinction conferred on him? “He by his wisdom delivered the city; yet no man remembered that same poor man”, Ecclesiastes 9: 15. Now this is just the snare that Israel fell into in the land, and the one of which they had been forewarned in Deuteronomy 8: 11 etc. They appropriated all the blessings which God had given them, and used them for their own enjoyment, and forgot God who gave them. Whenever the heart drops into its own thoughts, which is always the case when we are walking in our own strength, and not in the power of Christ, it will reduce grace to man’s level, making his benefit the exclusive object, as Jacob did at Shalem in Genesis 33, when he called his altar El-elohe-Israel. He did not give up grace in its bearing on himself; but he showed how little God was the object in his heart, in that he confined it all exclusively to himself. When he reached Bethel, it was otherwise, and his altar bore quite another name, El-Bethel; for God was his object here.
It will be said that the soul’s need must necessarily occupy it first. This is quite true. But he who is most relieved is most drawn to the One who has relieved him, The repentant thief, as the consequence of his faith, prays that the Lord would remember him in His kingdom. The relieved demoniac prayed Jesus that he might be with Him. The two disciples of John who followed the Lamb of God in John 1 asked Him, “Where dwellest thou?” The heart which is truly and deeply sensible of the relief vouchsafed to it always cleaves to the Blesser, and not merely to the blessing. It is quite true that the relief is the first thing needed, but the more intensely I have felt the need of relief, and the greatness of the [p. 419] favour conferred on me, the more am I attached to the Deliverer. He that is forgiven much, the same loveth much. It is not that the forgiven one rejoices in forgiveness merely, but he loves the One who has forgiven him.
If the only object of grace were to relieve man, then man could be relieved without nearness to God, and this is really the effect of confining the heart exclusively to the fact of relief.
Man is relieved from judgment, and he pursues his course as a man on earth with the sense of relief; but Christ, the Man in heaven, is not his object, nor is his aim to represent Him here. The grace of God could never have limited itself to man’s need, seeing that the greatest thing God can confer is nearness to Himself; and though Christ in grace had necessarily to descend to the depths where man was, He could never have answered to the mind of God in its purpose as to man, without making the prodigal acquainted with his Father’s joy in His own sphere. There is the glory of the grace as well as the riches of the grace. The “riches of his grace” reaches down to the need of the sinner; “in whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins”; the “glory of his grace” is all that He can do for the forgiven one according to His good pleasure. The full purpose of grace is to bring man near to God. “Old things are passed away; behold all things are become new. And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ”. If grace were only to relieve man of the misery which sin has brought in, he might be a vastly improved man, and a happy man; but then God would not and could not form any part of his happiness. He might feel indebted to Him for His mercy, but if grace effected nothing more than this he would not be brought to God, and though there might be joy in the sense of forgiveness, there would be no joy in God, no separation from man in the flesh, and no known power in the Holy Spirit. The beginning of grace is with our need, the finish of [p. 420] it with God. When a rope is extended to a drowning man, he grasps it, and his need is met; but that is not all. The rope is intended to bring him to the spot from which it was extended; and when he reaches that spot, he is in the same security, the same sphere as the one who had extended the rope to him. We are not perfected in grace unless we joy in God, unless God is known as our Father. The “little children” in 1 John 2 know the Father. The one who has learned to make merry in the presence of God has passed fully and distinctly from man’s side to God’s side; Christ is all and in all; until he has reached this point he has not the enjoyment of a child. No doubt he was born of God before, but he has not walked in his true state till now. “If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit”.
Scripture carefully sets forth how God provides for man’s side in everything, but this is not fully enjoyed by the believer unless he understands God’s side. For though grace, like the rope, reaches to where man is, and is first occupied with the sinner’s need, still I cannot truly or fully understand the value of the beginning of grace, where the rope has reached me, until I have got to the spot or the hand from which the rope came.
The grace comes to man from God, and it leads back to God; and no one understands clearly or even effectively the riches of the grace until he knows the glory of the grace; for when he has reached the latter, he has reached the full efficacy of it. What so confirmatory to the prodigal that he is fully rescued from the far country, that old things are passed away, as the fact that he is a favoured guest in the greatest festivity in heaven! He is perfectly assured of the riches of the grace, when he is in all the lustre and beauty of the glory of the grace. How could the “far country” or the famine or the consequences of his own evil or unworthiness appear in such a scene? and yet they could and will appear anywhere else. So that really one cannot be perfectly freed from all one’s own side and its consequences, until one is fully and festively on God’s side.
But there is another thing. No believer can understand how God orders for him on the earth, who does not first know how He has provided for him in heaven; so that here again the glory of the grace, God’s side, must be known before one can see and comprehend in its true light, the ordering of God for us here. Where is the believer who understands the Lord here as the good Samaritan, who knows the full story of His grace to him as such (see Luke 10), who has not learned the glory of His grace in the Father’s house?
The parable of the prodigal son sets forth God’s side; he is kissed, clothed, and feasted in the Father’s house. Here on earth oil and wine are poured into his wounds, he is set on His own beast, brought to an inn, and taken care of. Who really and heartily would put up with an inn here on earth, unless he had first known that he had the brightest home outside of it? A man might he resigned to an inn because he had nothing better, but no one could be happily or cheerfully satisfied with it, except on his journey homeward; and because he knows he has a bright home elsewhere. Souls lose every way when the full tale of grace is not unfolded, when the beginning of it only is told, and not the end.
The effort of Satan is, and ever has been, to keep man at a distance from God. We find all through Scripture that his aim is to disconnect the favours of God from God Himself, in order to induce man to enjoy himself apart from God. But God’s desire or purpose is that we should find our joy in His presence. In Job’s case the great thing that was proved to Satan was that Job’s heart would hold on to God when deprived of every favour.
The reason there is greater opposition to the finish of the grace than to the beginning of it is evident. For if the finish of it is known, the heart being fully and entirely brought to God, there is no place for man;
[p. 422] old things must pass away and all things become new, because all are of God. It is easier for souls to accept relief than to be so sensibly indebted to the Saviour as to be bound in heart to Him. All Israel benefited by David’s slaying Goliath, but Jonathan “loved him as his own soul”, and stripped himself for his deliverer. Ministers of the word find it easier for their own consciences to confine their preachings and teachings to man’s need. We cannot present truth beyond our own experience with a good conscience. A servant has no real power in presenting God’s side to souls, unless he be there in measure and purpose himself. He cannot go beyond his light, but when he has refused the light in order that he may retain the world, he excuses his own state by designating it as ‘too high’, and unfit for souls. There is on our side the natural opposition of the flesh in every man to God’s side; and the minister, in order to be popular, or to save his own conscience, at first does not see what would so entirely set aside man, but if at length he refuses it, then “his right eye shall be utterly darkened” (Zechariah 11: 17), and he opposes it, like “all they which are in Asia” who turned away from Paul. The man who is most for God will be most sustained by God; but the minister, in preaching or teaching, who will most command the ear of men, and allow himself most of the world, is the one who confines himself to that which merely meets man’s need, and which the natural conscience will accept. So that broadly, popularity and a low order of truth, which will awaken sentiments of merely natural religion, always go together; and the riches of the grace are really not known, because the glory of the grace has been neglected or refused.