More on "cheap grace" in the Christian culture

It is far too common in today's churches to hear the forgiveness of sins proclaimed with no focus on new life in Christ, absolution without the requirement of absolute devotion, freedom from sin without slavery to Christ's foreign righteousness.  It is the cheap grace that Bonhoeffer preached against, a grace that is not worth living or dying for because it has been stripped of its power.

The prophet Jeremiah confronted this problem in his day, as well.  The people of Jerusalem and Judah were wicked, and God sent Jeremiah to preach against them.  In Jeremiah's commission, Yahweh says, "behold, I have put my words in your moth...to pluck up and break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant" (Jer 1:9-10).  In the context of this sin that the Lord sent Jeremiah to confront, though, false prophets and priests proclaim a contrary message of easy absolution.  Twice in the opening chapters of Jeremiah, in 6:14 and 8:11, Yahweh gives Jeremiah these words against such false men of God:

"They have healed the wound of my people lightly,

saying, 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace."

And here we have it: a message of "cheap grace" in the 7th century BC.  God's righteousness is eternal, man's inability to live up to it is as old as Adam, and yet so is humanity's attempts to bestow free forgiveness upon itself.  We should not think that the cheap grace seen in some parts of Christianity today is anything new.  It is an ancient mockery of God's holiness and needs to be eradicated with as much zeal as God commissioned Jeremiah to display in ancient times.

The Debt of the Incarnation

The mystery of the incarnation is gigantic, all-encompassing, worthy of our whole life’s devotion to searching out its depths.  God undoubtedly had many purposes in sending his son to be born, minister, die, and be raised again.  Every secondary purpose was certainly for the primary goal of God’s glory.  And, the dearest outcome of Christ’s life to us must be our salvation from eternal condemnation through his death.  But I wonder if we focus as we should on his life. 

The very presence of God in him made Jesus a marked man from birth, doomed, from a human perspective, to death from the beginning.  From Herod’s attempt to kill him as an infant to his townspeople’s attempt to throw him off a cliff to his ultimate betrayal and crucifixion, people sought to kill Christ for declaring himself to be who he truly was: the Son of God and coming King.  God sent his son into the world to die.  In his sovereign plan, God knew that this would happen; Christ is the Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world. 

Although the Cross is the only way that we can imagine God fulfilling his infinite love for us while at the same time satisfying his unquenchable wrath, he most certainly could have worked things out a different way.  He could have created an entirely alternate world, with no need for the death of his son at all.  And yet God chose to send his Son among us as Immanuel, “God with us” (Mt 1:23).  He was tempted in every way as we are without sin (Heb 4:15).  He was fully man, yet the perfect man.  And this very same Jesus calls us to be perfect, as the Father is perfect (Mt 5:48). 

This is what I mean by the death of the incarnation: God knowingly, purposefully sent his son to die so that he could show himself to us in our own terms.  There is no greater revelation than the God man, the Word become flesh.  The prophets of the Old Testament received incredible revelations, but with the Incarnation God went beyond all of this by speaking to us “by his Son,” who “is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Heb 1:2-3).  And we are called to strive for perfection as we imitate God’s example through Christ (Eph 5:1).  When we do make a life of following Christ’s example as closely as possible, we spurn the God-given example in Jesus that cost our Father his very Son.  And, when we do make discipleship the one purpose of our lives, we do the one thing that we can do to honor Christ’s sacrifice.