God of Grace

(I wrote this when I was an infallible freshman. Therefore all its contents are true.)

I’ve always thought of grace as a New Testament idea. I thought that grace was introduced in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. I knew that many of the things that God did for the Israelites was gracious, and that they rarely deserved that graciousness, but I never really saw any of it as comparable to the saving grace that He did through Jesus. Indeed, the grace of Jesus is unique to any other gracious act in the history of everything.

But where is this God of grace in the Old Testament? If God doesn’t change, then why does the OT God seem different from the NT One? God’s attitude towards Israel is pretty much summed up in Psalm 1: “For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.” God makes clear in the Old Testament that He will bless those who keep His laws, and He will do the opposite with those that do not; basically, He will keep His end of the covenant (bless them in the Promised Land) if they keep their end of it (trust and obey the Lord). So where is grace?

As I was reading Exodus for my OT class (so probably reading it in depth for the first time) I noticed something I never had before. I noticed that there wasn’t a “law” or any established rules for the Hebrews to follow while they were in Egypt. They didn’t really have a part in the bargain to uphold. Yet God delivers them, by no merit of their own, but by grace. Deuteronomy 7:6-8 says that it was not for their greatness that God chose them, but because He loves them and was keeping His promise that He made with their forefathers (whom He likewise chose out of love for them and their future descendents) that He brought them out of Egypt with a mighty hand and redeemed them from the house of slavery. God saved this people by His grace.

God has always been all about grace. That’s how He does. Salvation has always been His plan.

And how is He to save those who don’t deserve to be saved if not by grace? Even now He is being gracious. But how do we respond to it?

God gives them the law after He has delivered them and showed His love. This is how they are to live now. Faithfulness to God, in light of how he has been faithful to us, is the way we should respond to His grace. God is gracious yesterday, today and tomorrow. Therefore we should be faithful to God still, in light of our new covenant with Him. In this way we are justified by faith.
It’s a two way stream. He is gracious, so we have faith. We have faith, so He is gracious. God initiated His grace an infinity years ago, and now the faith-grace, grace-faith deal continues in the form of a relationship.

People often complain that the Lord is unfair in how He chooses to bestow His grace. How can God choose to be gracious to some and not to others? Well,

Ask and you shall receive.