Passive Grace and Active Grace, Part I

Those of you who have been with us from the beginning will notice that we have now come to what I call a juncture in our exploration of the role of the grace of God in our Christian walk. More specifically, we have come to a point where we now shift gears from considering what I would call a passive mode of grace to an active mode of grace.

I will explain further what these two forms of grace mean. But let us recap briefly what we have covered so far for those who have joined us recently.

We began by looking at the critical need for God to deal with man by grace. We defined grace from the Scriptures as undeserved, unconditional, and unmerited help or favour. By this is meant grace excludes completely any form of work by the receiver. In other words, as we pointed out, one cannot say he has received a blessing by the grace of God and at the same point out to some contribution, even the slightest of his own effort, which he also put out to obtain the blessing. And this is as plain as the Scriptures define grace.

We read in Romans 4:4, "Now to him who works, the wages are not counted as grace but as debt." And Romans 11:6 says the same: "And if by grace, then it is no longer of works; otherwise grace is no longer grace. But if it is of works, it is no longer grace; otherwise work is no longer work." This Scriptural definition of grace has formed the basis of our exploration of the role of the grace of God in our Christian walk.

In our discussion we have seen that the critical need for God to deal with man by grace is based on the fact that every human being is born in a state of spiritual death. How could a spiritually dead being be expected to do anything spiritually to help or rescue himself? And so, spiritually dead in sin, one simply drifts with the current of the world and the devil.

This condition is described quite plainly in Ephesians 2:1-3: “And you ... were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.”

This was the condition which Paul described in his personal testimony in Romans 7. Paul referred to it as the body of this death, which controlled his behaviour and drove him to do what was evil, even against his will and knowledge of what was the good thing to do. And so, if such a helpless condition characterized every man born upon the earth, how can one be saved or delivered from the body of this death? Can stringent moral laws and regulations do? This was done with the Law of Moses being imposed on the children of Israel for centuries, but the record shows the people of Israel, like Paul testified of himself in Romans 7, just kept on transgressing the Law. How then can man be helped out this wretched state of spiritual death? - Grace and grace alone.

And, praise be to God, this grace came to mankind from God in the person of our Blessed Saviour Jesus Christ. John describes this to us plainly. We read in John 1:14, 16, and 17 as follows: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. And of His fullness we have all received, and grace for grace. For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”

This is a brief description of the view the Scriptures give us about the grace of God and humanity's critical need of the grace of God to be saved from the Fall. It is marvellous. And it will always amaze us that God, after the fall of humanity into sin and enmity against Him, would manifest and extend such infinite love towards us in this great plan of salvation by grace.

With this brief overview of grace as a background, in the next two sections of this review we will go into a description of the two aspects of grace - passive grace and active grace.