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Abraham Kuyper, Bible, Common Grace, God, Grace, Jesus, salvation
30, “Forms of Grace”
I have come to chapter 30 in Common Grace by Kuyper
Grace is present at Creation. It was grace that God created. But when the first parents fell into sin, grace showed itself as saving grace. This grace does not show itself as a weakness in God or in any manner lessening his majesty. God acting to save us does not come at the expense of his justice. Rather than demonstrating a defect in His character, grace showing itself as salvation demonstrates a new depth of God.
Grace acts to deflect or limit sin. This is restraining grace. This is merely temporary.
Kuyper does not draw this conclusion from his observations, but it seems inherent here: Grace in its operation draws all things into conformity to the original pattern. Sin mars and destroys. We can feel a natural aversion to certain acts of sin. Peculiar sins shock as a diverting from the ways things ought to be.
Grace thus seems like a sort of moral and ontological gravity.
The connection between common and special grace is that without common there could be no special grace. If death came instantly at the first sin, or if sin overwhelmed the race, then who would be or live? If grace merely permitted life but also permitted all sort of sin to flourish, then where would the redeemed be?
The connection between these two rests upon a more basic force: grace seeks the majesty of God. It is best to think of grace is God acting not a severable force which acts.
A common error of those with an atheistic bent is to conceptualize of creation as somehow a wholly other thing. To think that the regularity of gravity disproves God is to demonstrate an error of logic. Gravity is the regularity of God’s acting in the physical creation. The strong nuclear force does nothing to disprove God. It merely disproves the thesis that God acts in an ad hoc manner.
Grace is Gd acting in the creation. The Accuser in Job 1 & 2 can only act with permission. When the Accuser acts it looks from our end as “natural.” The wind blows and knocks down a house. Raiders kill and still. Job has boils . If we were to test his body would it be a surprise when a disease is found?
When it comes to grace, it may show itself in any manner of limiting sin: a police force is an act of grace. But the master cause is God’s glory not my salvation.
This principle plays out on a broader stage. From one perspective, the Church is the linchpin of history. But all things have Christ as their aim.
Kuyper draws these strands together in an interesting manner, “Not common grace, but the ordained arrangement of particular grace dominates.” (266) Particular grace is in evidence in common grace, but it always has the glory of God as its aim.
When we think of peculiar or special grace, we must not close this off as something will only have meaning on Judgement Day. Willlard has an arresting image of this sort of theology: We can treat salvation as a sort of bar code pasted on our soul with no further effect upon our life. God scans the code on the Last Day, but the salvation as no day-to-day effect.
Kuyper goes to 1 Corinthians:
30 And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31 so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
1 Corinthians 1:30–31 (ESV) He is our salvation and our wisdom. Christ did not merely die for our salvation appended at the end of our life. He is the Lord of soul and body. He is the Lord of visible things. The recreation is of the visible world.
Our quotidian existence is not path which has no intersection with the Lord of the universe. The work of arts and science is not a matter apart from or independent of God. We must not segregate
God in our thinking to “religious” matters. He is Lord of all.
It is the work of grace to create us whole.
If grace only worked to give us salvation when we had departed nature, grace would be outside of nature. But God is the God of our soul and body.