Saved. Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J.
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God’s Grace
Read the following passages and take notes on how justification and the salvation of sinners are given by God’s freely offered grace.
PASSAGE | NOTES |
Romans 3:24 | |
Romans 6:23 | |
Ephesians 2:4-7 | |
2 Thessalonians 2:16 | |
2 Timothy 1:8-9 |
Consider
Why Is Saving Grace Undeserved?
The most basic reason that God’s saving grace is undeserved by people is that each individual person (and humanity as a whole) is sinful. The Old Testament saw this reality of the sinful nature of humanity, as does the New Testament.
Ancient Pagan Texts
The reality of humanity being prone to sin was recognized even in ancient pagan literature. “Never has a sinless child been born to its mother, / … a sinless worker has not existed from of old” (James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament with Supplement, Third Edition, 1969).
Akkadian prayers of different kinds express the same idea:
• “Who is there who has not sinned against his god? Who that has kept the commandment forever? All humans who exist are sinful.”
• “Mankind, as many as there are, Which one of them comprehends his faults? Who has not transgressed and who has not committed sin? Which one understands the way of the god?”
• “Whoever was there so on his guard that he did not sin? Whoever was so careful that he did not incur guilt?”
(The above quotes in English and their original sources are from Robin C. Cover, “Sin, Sinners,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, Vol. 6, ed. David Noel Freedman [New York: Doubleday, 1992], pp. 32-33.)
Investigate
“Only” Human
Look up the following passages and note what Scripture says about the nature of humanity.
PASSAGE | NOTES |
Genesis 6:5 | |
Proverbs 20:9 | |
Ecclesiastes 7:20 | |
Isaiah 53:6 | |
Isaiah 64:6 | |
Romans 3:9 | |
Romans 3:22b-24 | |
1 John 1:8 |
Study
The Enormity of Sin and the Infinity of the Savior
Contemporary culture has difficulty treating sin against God as a serious concern. People understand frequently enough that they are sinners, since often enough their sinful behavior gets them into a variety of serious problems: important relationships are ruptured due to various forms of infidelity; arrests and convictions are the result for those sins that society still recognizes as criminal, such as theft, perjury, or murder; and/or physical ailments and even death can result from certain sins of drunkenness, drug abuse, sexual excess, gluttony, and so on. Reality has a way of indicating to sinners that their behavior is not good for them.
Still, many modern people have a difficulty in understanding that sin is an offense against God. Some people think that God is so big that sins by puny humans cannot really affect him. Some think that humans are so small that he will not notice their sins. Others presume that he is all merciful and automatically forgives everyone, like an indulgent grandfather might do. Still others believe that since everyone is committing the same kinds of sins, particularly the sins of the flesh, God cannot condemn so many people and that he will just ignore the common sins and sinners — like a mob of gatecrashers busting into heaven. None of these ideas fit the understanding of sin that God has revealed in Scripture.
A more accurate picture flows from a common understanding of offenses: the seriousness of the offense is determined not by the person perpetrating it but by the person who is offended. For instance, fighting with my brother was wrong; hitting my parents or grandparents would have been be a far worse offense because of their greater status in the family, even though I would have been doing the very same bad action against any one of them. In civil society, a barroom brawl will land a person in the county jail for a short while; however, even threatening to strike the president of the United States will land a person in federal prison because of his status under the law.
We must apply this principle to God. Precisely because Almighty God is infinite, truly eternal, and all good, the sins we commit against him acquire an infinite and eternal quality of greater evil, not unlike the way that hitting the president acquires a federal quality to the offense and its punishment. Each person must consider his or her sins in light of the infinite God whom we offend. Humans, by their very nature, are finite, time-limited creatures incapable by nature of ever accomplishing a way to make up for an infinite, eternal sin. Furthermore, humans, even when they want to be good, still find that they have a wounded human nature that is incapable of accomplishing the good they may want to do.
Consider
We can examine ourselves and realize that by nature we are incapable of ever paying the infinite and eternal debt for sin. Further, like St. Paul, people realize how difficult it is for them to do the moral good even when they truly want to avoid sin and act morally. For centuries, sinners have been able to relate very personally to St. Paul’s response to the dreadful human dilemma of serving God with the mind but sinning with the flesh.
Stop here and read Romans 7:14-23 in your own Bible.
Two Steps to Recovery
Paul here expresses the powerlessness experienced by those recovering from addictions to alcohol, drugs, sexual and lustful urges, gambling, gluttony, or other compulsive behaviors.
The first step to recovery for addicts is the profound realization that they are powerless over the object of their addiction. Every sinner needs to arrive at the same point as Paul or the addicts: each sinner is powerless over sin, and if left to its own logic and dynamic, sin is a destructive force that will lead a person to spiritual, emotional, social, and eventually to physical death.
The second step to recovery is acknowledging that nothing within creation and no sin is more powerful than God, and that only he can free an addict from addiction and only he can free any sinful human being from sin. God’s merciful grace infinitely exceeds human sin because he has sent his own infinite, divine Son to become flesh and dwell among us.
The Christian contemplates this reality, that God the Son, who is infinite due to his divine nature, truly became flesh, so that as a true human being he can represent all of humanity. Yet he did so without ever having sinned like the rest of humanity.
Investigate
Jesus’ Characteristics
Look