Grace: By Grace Alone

6 · Boice extends the pattern of human resistance to include God's omniscience

If you think about it, there's hardly anything about God that human beings want to face. I have sometimes taken those points and added to it the matter of the omniscience of God. And I pointed out, although we're not going to be talking about omniscience, and people don't like that either, because it means that God knows us as we are and nobody wants to be known that well by anybody. We spend a lot of time covering up who we are. That might be the number one occupation of the human race.

7 · Edwards's treatise on human enmity toward God illustrates how each divine attribute provokes human hatred, with immutability functioning as the attribute that locks all others in place eternally

You know, Jonathan Edwards wrote a treatise on one occasion called Men Are Naturally God's Enemies. And in the treatise he explored those various aspects of God to show, as he said, that men and women actually hate God because of who God is. They hate him for his sovereignty because they want to be sovereign themselves. They hate him for his holiness because they're not holy, and they hate him for his omniscience because God knows the depths of their hearts. And then he added one more thing. He said they also hate him because he's immutable. Now, immutable means that God doesn't change. And you say, well, why should that bother us? And the answer is because God doesn't change in any of his other attributes. He's not only sovereign, he's always going to be sovereign. That wouldn't be so bad to us if we could somehow think that the time would come when God would no longer rule. You know, like the chairman of the board, he can't last forever. Maybe the day is coming when he'll retire and I can become the chairman of the board. Or it wouldn't bother us so much to have a holy God if that idea of holiness, his standards, would somehow change over time. Sure, what I want to do today tells me is sin. But, you know, maybe by next week he'll change his mind. Or perhaps he could get God to forget things. After all, he's omniscient now, but he's getting older all the time. Maybe he's going to become senile and the time will come when he'll no longer remember what I've done. Well, I could Live with that, you see. But the problem, Jonathan Edwards says, is that God is not only sovereign, he's always going to be sovereign. He's not only holy, he's always going to be holy. Not only omniscient, but he's always going to be omniscient. And there's nothing that you and I can do about it. We have to come to terms with the God who was there.

8 · The Alpine climber story illustrates humanity's fundamental posture toward God—we want rescue on our terms, not God's

Many years ago now, I heard a story of a man who was climbing a mountain in the Alps and making his way up a very steep ascent of rock, and suddenly he slipped. He lost his foothold. He began to slide down, and he was certain he was going to be killed, because as he was sliding down, he knew he was coming to a cliff that dropped over about a thousand feet to the valley floor below. And just as he went over the edge, he was frantically throwing his arms around to try and catch something. He did manage to catch onto a little branch was growing there, and he had stopped his fall. He was panting, he caught his breath, and then he began to try to get back up onto the edge of the rock. And he couldn't do it. And so he hadn't fallen. He was still hanging on the branch. But he realized time would come when his grip would weaken and he'd have to let go. And when he let go, he would fall and be killed. Now, he hadn't been very religious up to this point in his life, but he decided that if there was ever a time to get religious, it certainly was now. And so he looked up to heaven and he called out as loudly as he could, is there anybody up there who can help me? Very surprised, a voice came back, said, yes, I am here. I can help you, but you've got to trust me. And to show that you trust me, you have to let go of that branch. It was a very long pause, and then he said, is there anybody else up there who can help me?

9 · Boice pivots from diagnosis to remedy: we need God to be gracious, and grace is introduced through Romans 3 as the first major theological development of the doctrine in the New Testament

Well, that's a good story for what mankind is all about. We don't mind the idea of God as long as it's God according to our likeness. We can make God over into our own image, to be a paternal grandfather or somebody that digs you out of the hole when you get into trouble or pat you on the back or indulges your sin, but we don't mind a God like that. But the problem is, God is not like that. God is sovereign, God is holy, God is omniscient, God is immutable. And there's nothing that we can do about it we have to take him as he is. And furthermore, that's the very kind of God we need. Now, tonight we're going to look at the grace of God because we need a God who's gracious too. If God isn't gracious, we're in trouble. We're in trouble anyway. But it's the grace of God that gets us out of trouble. And we're going to look at the grace of God on the basis of those two great paragraphs that end the third chapter of Romans. Grace is all through the Bible. Of course, it's there in the Old Testament. One of the great words for grace in the Old Testament is the word chesed. A little hard to translate that word. Sometimes it's translated mercy, other times it's translated kindness. Sometimes they call it loving kindness. I heard Walt Kaiser talking about it this past week. He said, yes, it's one of the things most comprehensive and yet difficult terms to translate easily. But he suggested that it should be translated by grace because grace involves everything else. And certainly it's grace that we have here in the New Testament. It is interesting, however, that the word grace itself is not developed theologically in the New Testament before this great paragraph in Romans. It doesn't even occur very much early on. It's not in Matthew or Mark, it's there once in Luke, it's about three times in John. You find it in Acts 11 times, but not in theological passages. And as a matter of fact, in Romans, you have only found it twice earlier. And that's in the first chapter, and that's only as a passing reference. One example is verse seven, grace and peace to you from God our Father and from Lord Jesus Christ. So it's really here in these two paragraphs for the very first time, that the doctrine is developed at any length. And significantly, it is developed in the context of our redemption and justification.

10 · Boice diagnoses the contemporary church's problem with grace: not resistance or fear but boredom

I said earlier that we have trouble with these various attributes of God. And I tried to indicate that we have trouble for different reasons. We have trouble with sovereignty because we are in rebellion against it. We have trouble with holiness because we are not holy. And also we have difficulty understanding it. The trouble with grace is that it just seems boring to so many people. That's a strange phenomenon. An idea, a concept, a biblical doctrine, and an attribute of God that literally thrilled our forefathers, like John Newton, for example, who wrote that hymn, Amazing Grace. How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. And today in the church, it's sort of become boring grace instead. J.I. packer wrote about it and knowing God some years ago, he said, that's really an amazing thing. In the average church today, if you strike up a conversation with somebody, there are all kinds of things you can get them to talk about. You can talk about the budget, they're interested in that. You can talk about the new wing, you can talk about the Sunday school, you can talk about individuals in the church. And after that, it often shifts to sports or something else of monumental importance. But he said, try to get your average churchgoer to talk about grace. They won't contradict you. They know that's a biblical term, that's interesting, it interests you and so forth, but they have nothing to contribute. It's just a boring topic to them. And he begins to suggest some of the reasons. Well, it's a sad thing because it certainly thrilled our forefathers and our mothers in the faith, and it certainly thrilled the Apostle Paul.

11 · Boice provides a comprehensive Reformed definition of justification incorporating the three 'alones' of the Reformation, then quotes Luther extensively to establish justification's centrality

Here we have it in the context of this great statement of what God has done for us in salvation, the chief idea being our justification by the grace of God. You know, we have a definition for justification that's comprehensive and it's worth listening to. Justification is an act of God by which he declares sinners to be righteous by grace alone, because of Christ alone, through faith alone. That puts all the elements together, and it's the kind of thing we have right here in these chapters. Justification is an act of God by which he declares sinners to be righteous by grace alone, because of Christ alone, through faith alone. That's the doctrine that the Reformers saw as absolutely central to Christianity. Luther, you know, called it the doctrine by which the Church stands or falls. Luther said, when the article of justification has fallen, everything has fallen. This is the chief article from which all the other doctrines have flowed. It alone begets, nourishes, builds, preserves, and defends the Church of God. And without it, the church of God cannot exist for a single hour. He called it the Master and Prince, the Lord, the Ruler and the Judge over all kinds of doctrines.

12 · Boice exposes the Roman Catholic misunderstanding of justification through etymological analysis—the Latin derivation misleads by suggesting God makes people intrinsically righteous rather than declaring them righteous

And yet, sadly, justification has been badly misunderstood. It was at the time of the Reformation, and in a certain sense, the great discovery of the Reformation was a discovery of what it means to be justified freely by the grace of God alone. You know, sometimes when you approach biblical terms or theological terms, you can be helped by etymology. That is to say, you break it down and you begin to study what the various parts of the word mean. But when you do that with justification, you run into trouble. And the reason for that is that justification is a Latin derivative. And the meaning of the Latin words is not what the Greek meant. The original language of the New Testament. You take that word justification and break it down, it falls easily into two parts. If you know any Latin, it's obvious. Justice is the first part. It means right or righteous. And the second part, facio, faquere, it's the verb meaning to make or to do. Now, we have it in various words. We talk about manufacturing, for example. That's to make something by hand. We talk about a factory. It's where things are made. That's the meaning of facio faecere. And if you put that together, justice and to make or do the word means to make just. That is to actually become just or righteous. Now, that was the view in the Middle Ages, and it is still the view of the Roman Catholic Church. The argument being this way, God cannot declare righteous people who are not righteous. And so salvation consists of God actually making individuals intrinsically righteous. We're not, of course, anybody who examines his or her heart knows that. And so you need the Church to help, and in particular, you need the sacraments to help. So you confess your sin and you go to Mass, and before you die, you have final unction, and you do all of those things. And if you haven't quite made it by that point, well, then there's always purgatory to carry on until finally you actually have become just. And when you become just, God says, well, that person now is just. They're justified. It sort of wraps justification and sanctification altogether. That's the sort of thing Luther inherited and what he worked with. Luther said, you know, when he left the university where he was studying law, his father wanted him to be a lawyer and went into the monastery at Erfurt, that he did it to save his soul. He was troubled by thoughts of the wrath of God. He knew that God was just. He knew that he was a sinner. And so he recognized, rightly, with deep insight, that something had to be done about that. And in the monastery, he practiced all of those exercises that were prescribed by the church of his day. He confessed his sin over and over again. He fasted, he tried to subdue his body, and so forth. And when he would go to confession, he would confess so long he wore out the confessors. He finally said to him, for heaven's sake, Martin, go back and don't come to me again until you have something worth confessing. And Luther would say, all right. You know, he's very obedient. He'd walk down the hall. He'd turn around and come right back. He'd say, my very repentance needed repenting. I didn't do it well enough. He'd do it all over again. He said, as he wrote years later to a friend, if I'd kept at that any longer, I certainly would have killed myself by my many fastings and watchings. Had no peace of mind. He discovered what anybody who takes sin seriously is going to find that you're a sinner through and through. David said, in sin, my mother conceived me. There was never a moment that I wasn't a sinner. There's never a part of my being. There's never a thought I have. There's never an act I do that's not riddled with sin from beginning to end. And the more you examine it, the more of a sinner you discover you've become.

13 · The narrative of Luther's discovery climaxes with Staupitz directing him to the Bible, where he found that justification is God's declaration, not transformation

Luther, in great distress, turned to his father in the monastery, a man named John Staupitz. And Staupitz said to him, luther, you're not getting anywhere this way. It has to be by the grace of God. You'll find that in the Bible. And he set him to work studying the Bible. And as Luther studied the Bible, he discovered that that idea of righteousness that he thought he had understood and justification that he inherited from the Church actually was a wrong one. Because if he was trying to establish his own righteousness, he was never going to get there. And what he discovered in the Bible is that there is a righteousness from God apart from anything we do. A perfect righteousness that comes from God is God's gift. It's his gracious bestowal of salvation to us through the work of Christ. And as he looked at the words and wrestled with them, he realized that the Greek word that underlay the translation justificare, which conveyed the wrong idea, did not mean to make righteous as if we actually become intrinsically righteous. But rather it referred to a declaration of the judge. That's what a judge does in a court, where he says not guilty on the one hand or guilty on the other. That's justification. And Luther said that made all the difference in the world.

14 · Boice addresses the theological problem: how can God declare sinners righteous and remain just? The answer is Christ's imputed righteousness—a double transfer where our sin goes to Christ and His righteousness comes to us, confirmed by Paul's use of Old Testament examples

Justification is the exact opposite of condemnation. When a judge condemns somebody, he doesn't make the guilty party intrinsically guilty. The person already is guilty. And so all the judge actually does is declare that. That's the case. We've examined it. This is the way it is. I make my pronouncement. And in the same way, when God declares somebody to be just, he doesn't make them intrinsically just, he merely declares that they are just. If you say at that point, well, how can that be? I mean, we've just said we're sinners. How can God just declare that we are just? That's exactly the problem that Paul raises here. How can he be both just, that is doing the right thing as the judge, and also be the justifier of the ungodly? And the answer is, it's on the basis of the righteousness of Christ. You see, left to ourselves, we don't have a chance. But God has sent Jesus Christ to do what we can't do. Jesus Christ, the innocent one, took our sin upon himself and died in our place. And God takes the righteousness of Christ, a perfect righteousness, and reckons it to us. It's a two way transaction. It's exactly what Paul begins to spell out further in the fourth chapter when he refers to Abraham, who is credited with righteousness on the one hand, and David, whose transgressions were not credited to him on the other. In other words, he draws it from the Old Testament. It's there, he says, it's now happened to Jesus Christ. So Jesus is punished in our place, our righteousness is given to us and God says justified on the basis of the work of Jesus Christ.

15 · Boice contrasts the Roman Catholic system's conditional good news (purgatory) with the Reformation gospel's unconditional good news (grace alone)

Now that's good news. That's the gospel you say, is the gospel a purgatory good news? You know that if you live long enough and go through all the sacraments and do it just right, and then maybe if you die, you've got a thousand or 22,000 years in purgatory to work off the bounds and eventually get to heaven. Yes, I guess that's good news. That's better news than going to hell. I don't think it's very good news. And the gospel that we have here in Romans and throughout the scripture is very, very, very, very good news because it has to do entirely with the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

16 · Kipling's 'Recessional' serves as a warning about national pride leading to spiritual amnesia

Now the sad thing is that we're in danger of forgetting all of that. You know, when they had the great jubilee honoring Queen Victoria in the early part of the 19th century, they asked Rudyard Kipling, the great poet of the day, to write a poem about it. And he did. It was called Recessional and it has in it as a first stanza words that go like this. God of our fathers known of old, Lord of our fathers far flung battle line. Beneath whose awesome hand we hold dominion over palm and pine. Lord God of hosts, be with us yet lest we forget, lest we forget that was a great poem, and it was a great moment. The British people in that day were glorying in their empire. All the great ships had come, come back from all over the world, all the British dominions. And they were saying how wonderful Great Britain is, just as today the United States. We say how wonderful the United States is. And Kipling said, don't forget, it comes from God. Don't forget.

17 · Boice applies Kipling's warning to the contemporary church, pivoting from historical illustration to present diagnosis

Now, I would say to the church today, the Protestant church above all, that we have this wonderful heritage which is the heritage of the Reformation, but we are in great danger of forgetting it.

18 · Boice catalogs the doctrinal amnesia behind the loss of grace: forgotten doctrines of sin, judgment, and divine freedom

If we say that justification is an act of God by which he declares sinners to be righteous by grace alone, because of Christ alone, received through faith alone, we are in danger of forgetting every one of those points. Grace we forget because we somehow think it's owed to us. You know, when Packer examined that and said, why has amazing grace become borrowing grace? He gave a number of reasons. He says, we've forgotten the biblical doctrine of sin. We don't really think we're very bad. We've forgotten the biblical doctrine of judgment. We don't think God actually is going to punish transgressions. We've forgotten the biblical doctrine of God's freedom, because we think that somehow God owes us a chance or salvation when, as a matter of fact, he doesn't owe us anything at all.

19 · Boice identifies resistance to election as evidence of forgotten grace—people want fairness (justice) rather than grace

That's the explanation of why so many in the evangelical church today. Can I give a figure? 99% of people and the evangelical church today have trouble with the doctrine of election. Election cuts right at the heart of human pride. You can't do anything to earn your salvation. It comes purely from God, and it absolutely flows from his choice and his choice alone. People get their backs up on that. They say, I don't like that God ought to be fair to everybody. But as soon as you say ought fair, then you're bringing in justice. Justice is not mercy. We're saved by mercy. We're saved by grace. We're not saved by works. God doesn't owe us anything.

20 · Boice contrasts Paul's unembarrassed teaching on election with modern resistance, using Ephesians 1's trinitarian structure to show how thoroughly God-centered salvation is

I've thought about it because I run up against it so often, this kind of opposition. And it strikes me as very significant that when the apostle Paul speaks about election, he does so without any sense of embarrassment or difficulty at all. It's there in the first chapter of Ephesians, for example, a very complete statement of the electing grace of God in salvation. I think there's a wonderful outline there. It's the era. And I don't mean the Equal Rights Amendment talks about the work of God the Father. That's election, talks about the work of Jesus Christ, that's redemption, talks about the work of the Holy Spirit. That's application era. And it all has to do with God. We don't even come into it to the second chapter where he begins to talk about faith. And at that point he explains, even faith is a gift of God. You know, it's hard to teach Ephesians today because right off you turn off everybody. I sometimes wish Ephesians was written backwards. If you could start with chapter six in spiritual warfare, everybody would be with you. For some reason, Christians love demons. They just think that's great if you can stamp on a demon or throw him out of the house or pray him down, boy. That's wonderful stuff. We sort of eat that up. It's pareti right to the core. And then you can talk about the practical things in four and five. And then you can get to the doctrine of the church. And eventually you could perhaps get to election. But Paul just starts in with election. Why? Obviously, because that's where it starts. This is the most natural thing in the world. We're saved. It's because of God's doing, it's not because of us.

21 · Boice shows that Romans 9's election teaching emerges organically from chapter 8's security of salvation to address the question of Israel's unbelief

And I noticed the same thing in Romans. Probably the fullest and most thoughtful discussion of the subject of election in all of the New Testament, probably the whole Bible, is in the ninth chapter of Romans, where Paul not only explains it, he deals with reprobation, which is the other side of it. And he tries to explain, I think, in a brilliant and satisfying way why God actually does pass by some. I mentioned it earlier, but I notice he brings that in not because he says, now, you know, I'm unfolding Christian doctrine and I've laid down all the simple things. Now we're going to come to something that's really difficult. I want you to listen very carefully. I want to explain election. That's not it at all. Why does it come in? It comes in because at the end of the eighth chapter, he's explained that our salvation is a permanent thing and we're secure in Jesus Christ. Nothing is ever going to separate us from the love of God and Jesus Christ our Lord. But anybody reading that would say, paul, what about the Jews? You've already acknowledged that not all of the Jews are converted. Yet God entered into a special relationship with them. He had a covenant with Israel. All the Jews are not saved. If all the Jews are not saved, doesn't that mean God has broken his covenant with them? And if God has broken his covenant with them. How can we believe that God is going to keep his covenant with us? And so he brings in the subject of election to explain it. He says it's true. God had a covenant with Israel, but he never promised to save every single individual Jew. It's always been by election, because not all Israel are the true Israel. Not all the natural children of Abraham are the spiritual seed. And so he begins to unfold it. He says it was always that way. It's that way today. Some Jews are saved, I'm one, we're 7,000 in the days of Elijah and so forth. One day God's going to work in a great way with the Jews again. That's what the 11th chapter says. But it is all by the electing grace of God.

22 · Boice diagnoses the second forgotten 'alone'—Christ alone

And yet we live in an age where people have trouble with that. They don't really believe it because they don't really believe they're sinners. Or if they are, they think that somehow God owes them a choice. How about the second element in that definition of justification? Justification is an act of God by which he declares sinners to be righteous by grace alone, because of Christ alone. Are we in danger of forgetting Jesus Christ? Yes, we are. You say, how can that be? At least in the evangelical church, for heaven's sake? I mean, if anybody talks about Jesus Jesus all the time, it's evangelicals. We even have little bracelets. What would Jesus do? Right? And it's not Jesus the Savior so much as it's Jesus the example, Jesus the Helper. It's not the Jesus of the cross. This is something the alliance of Confessing Evangelicals has been very concerned about. We held a meeting in 1994 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, produced a document that was addressing this. And one paragraph in that talks about what actually has been happening. It says, unwarranted confidence in human ability is a product of fallen human nature. And this false confidence now fills the evangelical world. From the self esteem gospel to the health and wealth gospel, from those who have transformed the gospel into a product to be sold and sinners into consumers who want to buy to others who treat Christian faith as being true simply because it works. The Cambridge Declaration adds, as evangelical faith has become secularized, its interests have been blurred with those of the culture. The result is a loss of absolute values, permissive individualism, and a substitution of wholeness for holiness, recovery for repentance, intuition for truth, feeling for belief, chance for providence, and immediate gratification for enduring hope. Christ and his cross have moved from the center of Our vision. I hear lots of good things in evangelical churches, but again and again I come away saying it's good, but it is not the gospel and therefore it's not Christ, it's not Christ of the cross, it's not grace. And the message that's proclaimed is not justification.

23 · Boice diagnoses the third forgotten 'alone'—faith alone

So we're in danger of forgetting grace, we're in danger of forgetting Christ. How about faith, a third element? Certainly we're not in danger of forgetting that. Well, no, in a certain sense, not. But what we do with faith is perhaps even worse. We just minimalize it. So it's not the life transforming orientation that you find in the Scriptures. The kind of thing that has a person going in one direction and they turn around radically and go in another direction in order to follow Jesus Christ. We've sort of reduced it to nothing but bare intellectual assent to a few truths that are thrown out. Perhaps on a Sunday morning if you'll come forward and sign the card and that sort of thing. Well, you must have faith and you're saved.

24 · Boice explains the first element of faith—notitia (content/knowledge)—and critiques medieval 'implicit faith' where ignorance was covered by trusting the church

You know, in classical theology, faith was always described as having three elements. First element, they used Latin words for it was notitia. That's what it sounds like. It's notification, notice, notice board, that type of thing. It has to do with content. You always have to have content. You can't believe if you don't know what it is you would believe. And yet that's the sort of thing they wrestled with at the time of the Reformation. And the reason was people were woefully ignorant of the Gospel. Now there's some excuse for it, perhaps in that time they didn't have printing presses prior to the great resurgence of knowledge at the time of the Reformation, partially with the Renaissance and all of that. The Bibles were not circulated, the priests were ignorant, they should not have been, but they were. The people didn't know what it was they were to believe. And so the question was, if you're going to be a Christian, you have to have faith. How do you do that if you don't really know what you should believe? And there grew up in the medieval church this idea of implicit faith. And what that meant is that of course you don't know what you should believe, but the church knows what you should believe. And so you just have to have implicit faith in the church. Sometimes we have something similar to that. There was a man who was being examined by the elders for membership in a local church. And they asked him what he believed. And his response was, I believe what the church believes. And they Weren't satisfied with that, of course, so they pressed it a little bit. They said, well, what does the Church believe? And he said, the Church believes what I believe. And they thought they'd try once more. So they combined them. They said, tell us now, what does the church and you believe? He said, we believe the same thing. Well, that's the sort of thing that Calvin wrestled with. And he pointed out that it's not faith if it's simply pious ignorance, but. But rather it has to take hold of the mind and the heart before we actually believe in the biblical sense.

25 · Boice explains the second element of faith—assensus (assent)—distinguishing understanding from agreement with truth

But then the Reformers and the other classical theologians that followed them said it's not merely knowledge because the devils have that, it also involves something else, and that they call a census. Now, that, again, is much what it sounds like in English. It's a scent. It's agreement with that sort of thing. It's saying, not only do I understand it, but it's true. That's a major step forward. When I was in university, I studied English literature. I had some brilliant teachers and I had in particular, one brilliant tutor, a man that I credit more than anybody else with teaching me how to write. He used to explain the English poetry, because we did a lot of work with poetry, and as you well know, there's an awful lot of biblical imagery concepts in English poetry. And he would come to passages that refer to the blood of the Lamb and all of that, and he'd explain it eloquently, what that meant. It was an atonement and a blood atonement and a transfer of guilt and all of those things. He got really excited about that, but he didn't believe it. He understood it. He hadn't assented to the truth. So the second element of faith involves that matter of assent.

26 · Boice completes the tripartite definition of faith with fiducia (trust/commitment), connecting belief to discipleship

But even then, that's not the whole of faith, because the third word that they used was fiducia, and that really means trust or commitment. Because having understood that Jesus is the Son of God and the Savior, and having believed that, we then, in order to exercise full biblical faith, have to trust and commit ourselves to him. And that's where the whole life of discipleship comes in. Because you can't be a believer in Jesus Christ without being a follower of Jesus Christ. But we strip that all down. We've made it so simplistic today that we actually forget the great biblical doctrine. Well, that's Romans 3, this act of God by which he declares sinners to be righteous, and it is by grace, because we don't deserve a bit of it.

27 · Boice shifts from Romans 3 to Romans 5:20-21 to show grace operative not just in justification but in sanctification

But now let me just turn ahead slightly because the next great discussion of grace on the book of Romans comes in chapter five, particularly at the end. I turn here because at this point, Paul's moving on from the matter of salvation itself, our justification in Jesus Christ, to the living of the Christian life He's describing in the fifth chapter, verse 12. And following that great contrast between our union with Adam, so that we fell in Adam and are punished for Adam's sin, and our mystical union now by grace with Jesus Christ, so we're accounted righteous in him. He shows how the sin of Adam brought sin and damnation on the race, but how the righteousness of Jesus Christ brought salvation and eternal life. And he gets to the end of that and he begins to talk about grace. And it goes like this. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. There's a wonderful contrast there between sin increasing and grace increasing. We know all about sin increasing. All we have to do is pick up the newspaper to see that sin increases. It's about us all the time. We see it in our own lives as well. But he says where sin increased, grace increased all the more. And he's writing here to Christian people. And the contrast there is one that doesn't come across well in most of our translations. In the NIV from which I've just read, the word is increased both times. But in the Greek, it's two entirely different words. The first word is based upon the word polus. It has to do with much or many. And in this particular verbal form, it's referring to numerical increase. So here's 10 sins, and then there are 20 sins, and then there are 100 sins, and then there are 500 sins and so forth. That's the idea. But when he talks about grace increasing, quite a different word. It has to do with the stream overflowing and the idea there is superabundance. Very hard to translate that. Adequate. Some of the versions actually play around with different kinds of words. One person has paraphrased it this way. They said where sin reached a high water mark, grace overflooded it entirely and drowned the whole world. Now that's kind of the idea.

28 · Boice applies the superabundance of grace to the Christian life, addressing fears about exhausting grace through sin

I say, he's talking about the Christian life at this point. And you say, perhaps as Christians, you say, look, I understand that I'm saved by grace. I'm justified by grace. Could it perhaps be the case that if I sin, there's going to be a little less grace to go around. Or can I fall from grace? Will God no longer be gracious to me if I fail to live up to what I've done? Listen, of course you fail to live up to what you've done. You do it all the time. And what this says is that where sin increases even in you justified sinner, that you are the grace of God infinitely overflows that. Can I put it in this, can sin and you do sin. But you are not an infinite being. You can't sin infinitely. You're limited by your body. You're limited by your time, you're limited by your opportunity. You'd be far worse if you had more opportunities and lived longer. But you're limited. You can't sin infinitely. But grace is infinite and the grace of God is always there for the benefit of his people.

29 · Boice anticipates the objection about continuing in sin, validates it as logical if the gospel is understood, then shows Paul's answer: believers have died to sin and cannot return to it

You say, well, then that sounds like, if grace is always there regardless of whether I sin, why don't I go on sinning, that grace may abound. There's a sense in which, if you've never asked that question, you've never understood the gospel. That's the most logical question of all. If we're saved entirely by grace, if we're talking about the grace of God here tonight, and salvation is utterly by the grace of God because God is graceful, what difference does it make whether I live a holy life? I'm going to be saved anyway if he's going to be gracious to me. It's a logical question. But the way Paul handles it in chapter six, following on that great statement of overflowing grace is by a flat denial, shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means. He says, we died to sin. You know what that means, we died to sin. He means you can't go back to it. That's part of your past. You can't go back there at all. If you can't go back to it, the only thing you can do is go forward. And so he says, get on with it simply because God is a gracious, gracious God.

30 · Boice critiques contemporary sanctification approaches—formulas and experiences—showing neither appears in Romans

You know, we have different approaches to sanctification in the church today. And I would say the big choice is two. It's either between sanctification as a formula. There are certain things you ought to do. You ought to read your Bible and pray and go to church and get active for God, those things, all of which are good, or there are blocks of the church that say, no, it's not that. That's too mechanical. What you need is an experience of God's grace, a second work of blessing. You need to speak in tongues, something of that nature. Now, I'm not against second works of grace as long as you have third works of grace, fourth works of grace, fifth grace. All life ought to be grace. And I'm not against formulas if they are helpful. But you can go through the formulas and not grow in grace. And you can have lots of experiences and still be quite, quite a dirty sinner. And I notice as I read Paul's letter to the Romans, that he doesn't recommend either of those approaches. You don't find experiences put forward. You don't have formulas put forward. What he says is simply need to understand what has happened when God saved you. Because his command, shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means follows what he's just said in chapter. And the point of chapter five is that we were in Adam, but God by his grace has taken us out of Adam and has joined us to Jesus Christ. Now that we're in Jesus Christ, we can't go back to being in Adam. If we can't go back to being in Adam, we might as well get on with living for Jesus Christ. Because that's really the only alternative you have if you're a true Christian. You say, can I sin? Yes, you do sin, but you're sinning contrary to what you are. The only thing that makes sense is to start living righteously, because that's what you're called to be as a Christian.

31 · The adult/child analogy illustrates the logic of sanctification grounded in identity rather than ability

Let me give an illustration of it. You take an adult and you ask the question of this adult, can this adult become a child? Again, we know the answer to that. It's no. Of course, an adult can't go back to being a child. You can't reverse the aging process. But now let me ask this. Can an adult act childish? The answer, of course, is yes. Adults do act childish. Now, what do you say to an adult who's acting childish? Well, you know the answer to that because women say it to men all the time. What do women say to men when they're acting badly? They say to them, for heaven's sake, just grow up, right? That's what Paul's saying. Can a Christian sin? Of course a Christian can sin, but what do you say to a Christian who's sinning? Stop sinning, right? Just grow up and start acting like a Christian. And the reason he says it is because of the matchless amazing grace of God.

32 · The John Newton narrative provides the sermon's climactic illustration—a life of extreme sin transformed by grace

You know, I mentioned at the beginning that great hymn, Amazing Grace by John Newton. It's hard to talk about grace without talking about Newton, because he learned it and demonstrated it in his life in an amazing way. Most of you know the story, I'm sure. Newton lost his mother at a young age, though she had been a godly woman and had taught him Bible verses. But he was sent off to live with relatives that really didn't love him. He had a hard childhood and eventually ran away and went to sea and joined the British Navy, although he was too young to do it, got in trouble, he led a profligate life. Finally, he jumped ship. He ended up on the coast of Africa, where he got involved in the slave trade. And he suffered terribly as a person involved in that. He worked for a time with a man who operated a slave operation. They would capture black people in the inner part of the continent, bring them to the coast, ship them off on ships to the New World and so forth. And he worked for this man. But he would go off on slaving expeditions. And when he did, Newton would fall under the control of the slave trade. African wife who hated all white men and took out her hatred on Newton. And he describes how he got sick. It was a point at which he was forced to eat his food off the dusty floor like a dog. Eventually, he managed to break away from that. He made his way to the coast. He lit a bonfire. It attracted a ship coming by, and the ship stopped because they thought, here's somebody that must have ivory to sell. He didn't. But when they found out that he had learned navigation in the British Navy, they said, well, come on board. We could use another navigator. Now. He got in trouble even then, had a terrible life. But he got back into the trade where they were shipping slaves back and forth over the water, especially to the New World, used to go down into the hold and commit fornication with the slaves. He said he just did it to sin his fill. But then the time came that he was on his way back on one of these ships, and they got into a terrible storm in the North Sea. They thought they were going to sink. The water was pouring in. Newton was sent down into the hold to man the pumps to try to keep the water out long enough until they could outlast the storm and survive. And while water was coming in and he was pumping and he was sure that ship was going to go down, and he was going to go down with it, and he was absolutely terrified down there in the hold of the ship. Verses that he had learned as a child at his mother's knee years and years and years before came back to his mind. And God used that word implanted into his heart as a child to bring about his conversion. And he turned from his sin and he trusted Christ when he got out of the slave trade. Later he became a preacher, even preached before the Queen. He was one of the best known preachers of his day. But, you know, he got old, his old age. He got to the point where he couldn't remember things very well and he had to stop preaching because he would be repeating himself over and over again. But they still knew him, they respected him. And people would go by to visit him from time to time. And when they did, Newton would frequently say something like this. He would say, I am an old man. My mind is almost gone. I can't remember much. But he said, I remember two things. I am a great sinner and Jesus Christ is a great savior. That's the man who wrote Amazing grace. How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me I once was lost but now I'm found Was blind but now I see.

33 · Boice drives home the application: appreciating grace requires seeing yourself as Newton saw himself—a great sinner before a great Savior

You have to see that about yourself to appreciate the amazing grace of our amazing God.

34 · The closing prayer rehearses the sermon's core themes—human unworthiness, divine grace, wonder at salvation—and issues a final charge to evangelism

Let's pray. Our Father, we're thankful for your grace toward us. It's something beyond our wildest imagination or expectation how you can be gracious to people like us who deserve anything but grace. All we deserve is justice and condemnation. But you've broken through that to save your people. And we stand in awe of Father, because we've tasted of that grace. Those who are believers give us an overwhelming sense of the wonder of our salvation. So much so that we'll be bold in telling other people about it and not rest until that great gospel is made widely known and many people, all whom Jesus Christ will call are brought into his kingdom where we pray in the name of our Savior, even Jesus the Lord. Amen.