The Downside of Grace

From the first "Let there be..." ¹ to the last "Amen" ², grace is the call of God, echoing throughout the ages and calling every living soul to its grasp ³. Without fail, we find the same theme in every life that answers that call; God unconditionally forgives and offers grace and hope where our sin had destroyed us and others.

I read a rather disturbing passage this morning. It's the story of a really messed up family. It tells of two depraved girls who raped their father ⁴. It's nauseating to think that this isn't just a tale of some imaginary creatures in a mystical book. The Bible is a history book as well as our only doctrinal authority. These were real girls with a selfish father ⁵ and whose mother had recently been destroyed because she couldn't find it within herself to walk away from filth without one final look ⁶. I wonder how much they had heard of the God that Abram/Abraham served and of the amazing promises that He had made. Even if they had heard, given their home town, I tend to think that their minds had become so saturated with the vileness of their friends that raping their father was a very small matter to them.

Of course, I wonder how much the culture we live in has influenced us to allow compromise to come crawling into our lives and we haven't even noticed. Those of us that have been Christians for a while like to think of ourselves as being right; as having reached some level of spiritual maturity. I wonder if we have become so accustomed to grace that we allow "small matters" to slip by. We fail to recognize the hideousness of sin in view of the vastness of God's holiness. We lose sight of the fact that God Himself came as a man and offered up His own body as a sacrifice for us. We forget that grace is truly an awesome thing in the purest sense of the word. We shrug it all off with, "Oh, well, even if it is wrong, God will forgive me." The downside of grace is that our selfish, sinful nature becomes accustomed, if not oblivious to it.


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1. Genesis 1:1
2. Revelation 22:20
3. Titus 2:11ff among many others
4. Genesis 19:30ff
5. Genesis 13:10-12
6. Genesis 19:26