Grace isn’t always popular.
When we read of God being “slow to anger,” I think we assume that this means that he’s slow to show his anger — like there’s a barely concealed rage hiding. At any second he is going to blow up, like Ned Flanders in this classic scene from The Simpsons, after much of the town rebuilt his devastated home.
As you might know, Ned proceeds to yell at all of his friends in an extremely hurtful manner — as if this has been building for years and the last straw has been drawn. It’s easy to see God’s grace in the same manner, as though he’s politely looking the other way as we fall while plastering on a forced smile when he really wants to throttle us for our stupidity.
Jon Acuff, of the great blog Stuff Christians Like, talks about our problem with grace and how Christians can fall into the trap of assuming that they can give “too much grace:”
Similar to how people will accuse politicians of being “soft on crime,” sometimes Christians accuse each other of being “soft on sin.” The idea is that there needs to be justice and consequences. People have to pay the cost of their actions and learn from their mistakes. When you’re “soft on sin,” you’re giving people too many second chances, you’re not holding people accountable the right way, you’re being too gracious.
So people accused me of giving evil a free pass. Have you ever heard that before? Has there ever been an issue your friend thought you weren’t mad enough about? Or a situation where you refused to let someone keep falling when everyone told you to abandon all hope? Have you ever been accused of being soft on sin?
For a while now, I’ve had a real problem with moralism and moralistic teaching masquerading as the message of Jesus. In short, moralism teaches that behavior modification is the primary message of the Bible. Worse, it implies that our own goodness will make us worth more to others and to God — something Jesus loudly refuted when dealing with the moralists of his day. If you’ve heard more sermons about avoiding “the world” than you have about Christ’s sacrifice, you have an idea of how grace can be stifled. Jon makes this clear:
We don’t get casual grace. We don’t get easy grace. We don’t get cheap or soft grace.
We get severe grace. We get unyielding grace. We get Christ on the cross with nails in his hands and blood on his body grace. We get severe grace.
And the reason we do is that God is not soft on sin. He is hard on sin. He is wrathful on sin. He is all knowing and all powerful on sin. He is fire and earthquakes and showers of sulfur on sin. His wrath is undeniable on sin. Which is why it took such tremendous grace to quench it.
That’s the problem with moralism: despite its assertion, it’s not a belief that has a strong view of sin. It thinks sin is weak and easily manageable. It thinks we can conquer sin provided we follow the right rules, reducing Jesus to an aide to our quest. It views grace with the same impatience described above, as if it’s a technicality.
Grace, on the other hand, is filled with patience. It knows the faults and shortcomings of everyone it encounters, yet gives as one doesn’t deserve. In the story of the Prodigal Son, the runaway son expected a father full of moralism when he returned — a man begrudgingly allowing his son back with significant conditions. What he saw was a father scrambling to embrace him, filled with grace.
(For more on Grace, check out the interview with Pastor Tullian Tchividjian at The White Horse Inn. Best quote: “A ‘yes, grace…but’ disposition is the kind of posture that keeps moralism swirling around in the church.”)
