God's Grace Never Runs Out

God has put enough into the world to make faith in him a most reasonable thing.  But he has left enough out to make it impossible to live by sheer reason or observation alone.     --Ravi Zacharias, Christian apologist and author

I am working on a project on grace.  My fear is that it will be so heavily optimistic that it seems to grant license to sin; or, at the other extreme, that it will be pedantic--boring, pedagogical, pretentious, showing off great knowledge of words but missing the point entirely.  While being an absolute joy to write, I fear it will be unreadable.

I have chosen a great theme: grace is one of everybody's favorite attributes of God, one that we all strive to emulate as much as humanly possible.  I also have great source material:  the Christian Bible is the story of God's love and mercy throughout the history of man, from the creation to the fall to the redemptive work of His only Son, who paid the ultimate price for my salvation.

But not everyone who hears about grace lives in it daily.  We all sin and fall short.  Some of us try to repent, but the world is a very unforgiving place.  So we try to love God where we are, whether that's in a job we hate, or a loveless marriage, or in an environment of open hostility toward Christ and His followers.  We read about persecuted Christians in Syria and Iraq, who give up their lives rather than denounce their faith or pay a religious tax imposed by followers of the Qur'an.

How do you preach grace in those places?  How do those people receive the message of God's grace available to them?  The world is not always sunshine and lollipops.  God knows how hard it is to follow Him.  And for those who reject the message of Christ, what about them?  The Bible says we should love them, to show grace to them whenever possible.  When something tragic happens, our hearts go out to them, because we know they are humans, ones who love and who are loved, ones who were also created in God's image, whether they accepted it or not.

Jesus said, "Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man.  People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark.  Then the flood came and destroyed them all.  It was the same in the days of Lot.  People were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building.  But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all." (Luke 17:26-27).  Some people don't heed the warnings of God's wrath.  Noah preached for 120 years as he was building the ark, but no one believed him.  Lot begged his sons-in-law to come out of Sodom and Gomorrah, but they did not listen.  It is easy to think of those who died in those stories as victims.  But if God sent people to warn them, did they not have any personal responsibility for what happened to them?

The prophet Jeremiah gave a message of disaster, and then of comfort, in chapter 16 of his book.

Then the word of the Lord came to me:  You must not marry and have sons or daughters in this place. For this is what the Lord says about the sons and daughters born in this land and about the women who are their mothers and the men who are their fathers: they will die of deadly diseases.  They will not be mourned or buried but will be like refuse lying on the ground.  They will perish by sword and by famine, and their dead bodies will become food for the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. --Jeremiah 16:1-4

This sounds harsh, doesn't it?  But in context, God's message was that there were consequences for the decisions the people of Israel had made.  They had left their God, and did not follow the moral law, instead following after the pagan idols of other nations.  They were no longer a people separated to God, to show His blessings to a fallen world.  They were fallen themselves.  We can see signs of this even today.  Not to sound too ancient, but America was founded by religious people who wanted to get away from persecution.  They wanted to be free to worship as they pleased.  When our forebears became like other nations, great revivals brought us back to God.  We followed moral teachings from the Bible, and did not worry about sexually transmitted diseases or HIV/AIDs.  There was a time when it was taboo to produce a child out of wedlock.  Today, almost half of children born in our country are being raised by single parents.  The culture has changed, and whether we like it or not, the occurrence of disease and death related to moral decay is on the rise.

Jeremiah goes on:

And do not enter a house where there is feasting and sit down to eat and drink.  For this is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel says: Before your eyes and in your days I will bring and end to the sounds of joy and gladness and to the voices of bride and bridegroom in this place.  When you tell these people all this and they ask you, "Why has the Lord decreed such a great disaster against us?  What wrong have we done? What sin have we committed against the Lord our God?"  Then say to them, "It is because your fathers forsook me, declares the Lord, and followed other gods and worshiped them.  They forsook me and did not keep my law.  But you have behaved more wickedly than your fathers.  See how each of you is following the stubbornness of his evil heart instead of obeying me.  So I will throw you out of this land into a land neither you nor your fathers have known, and there you will serve other gods day and night, for I will show you no favor. --Jeremiah 16:8-13

I think that those who lived in this country a century ago would not recognize this place now.  Where we were a land of plenty, now we have to protect our natural resources.  In some places we must ration water; in other places we must have food shipped in, because the land is no longer self-sustaining.  Where we once had freedoms, we now have regulations.  We have gotten used to the new normal; we have defined deviancy down.  (Google it: read the government report written by a US Senator almost a quarter-century ago entitled "How we've become accustomed to alarming levels of crime and destructive behavior".)

But Jeremiah gives hope.  Although he predicts that the people of Israel will be taken into exile in Babylon to the north, he also predicts their return.  "However, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when men will no longer say, 'As surely as the Lord lives who brought the Israelites out of Egypt', but they will say, 'As surely as the Lord lives, who brought the Israelites out of the land of the north and out of all the countries where he had banished them.'  For I will restore them to the land I gave their forefathers."  The return from Babylonian exile would be as great a feat of God's power and mercy as their deliverance from Egyptian bondage in the time of Moses.

You see, God does not lose His power when disaster strikes.  He does not become weak in time of war.  He is still God, and He is still gracious. He still wants what's best for us, even when we disobey Him.  He still shows His mercy, even to those who are persecuted for His names sake.  If some must lose their lives, God will at the very least allow it to be used to teach the next generation.

Oh Lord, my strength and my fortress, my refuge in time of distress, to you the nations will come from the ends of the earth and say, "Our fathers possessed nothing but false gods, worthless idols that did them no good.  Do men make their own gods?  Yes, but they are not God!  Therefore I will teach them--this time I will teach them my power and might.  Then they will know that my name is the Lord."  --Jeremiah 16:19-21

Sometimes people have to come to the end of their rope before they look to God.  Some people have to be driven to their knees before they look up.  God is there, waiting patiently for us to return to Him.  To those who are faithful to the end, who lose their lives for His sake, He promises a crown of Glory.