The Scandal of Grace

Not long ago I sat in a restaurant and lis­tened to yet another variation on a familiar theme. Daniel confided that he had decided to leave his wife after fifteen years of mar­riage. He had met someone younger and pret­tier, he said, someone who "makes me feel alive, like I haven't felt in years."

Daniel, a Christian, knew well the per­sonal and moral consequences of what he was about to do. His decision to leave would inflict permanent damage on his wife and three children. Even so, he said, the force pulling him toward the younger woman was too strong to resist.

I listened to his story with sadness and grief. Then, during the dessert course, he dropped the bombshell, "The reason I wanted to see you tonight was to ask you a ques­tion. Do you think God can forgive some­thing as awful as I am about to do?"

Historian and art critic Robert Hughes tells of a convict sentenced to life imprisonment on a maximum security island off the coast of Australia. One day with no provocation he turned on a fellow prisoner he barely knew and beat him senseless. The murderer was shipped back to the mainland to stand trial, where he gave a straightforward, passionless account of the crime, showing no sign of remorse. "Why?" asked the bewildered judge. "What was your motive?"

The prisoner replied that he was sick of life on the island, a notoriously brutal place, and that he saw no reason to keep on liv­ing. "Yes, yes, I understand all that," said the judge. "I can see why you might drown yourself in the ocean. But why murder?"

"Well, it's like this," said the prisoner. "I'm a Catholic. If I commit suicide I'll go straight to hell. But if I murder I can come back here and confess to a priest before my execution. That way, God will forgive me."

Do we fully appreciate the scandal of un­conditional grace? How can I dissuade my friend Daniel from committing a terrible mistake if he knows forgiveness lies just around the corner? Or, worse, why not mur­der, like the Australian prisoner, if you know in advance you'll be forgiven?

The scandal of grace must have haunted the apostle Paul as he wrote the book of Romans. The first three chapters ring down condemnation on every class of human being, concluding, "There is no one righteous, not even one." The next two chapters unveil the miracle of a grace so boundless that, as Paul says, "where sin increased, grace in­creased all the more."

Paul's tone changes in chapter 6. I can almost see the apostle staring at the papyrus and scratching his head, thinking to himself, Wait a minute! What have I said? What's to keep a murderer, adulterer, or common sinner from exploiting God's lavish promise of "forgiveness in ad­vance"?

More than once in the next few chapters Paul returns to this logical predicament: "What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?" To such a devious question he has a pithy answer ("By no means!" or, as the King James Version has it, "God forbid!") and a lengthy one. What Paul keeps circling around in those dense, wonderful chapters (6-8) is, quite simply, the scandal of grace.

Here is what I told my friend Daniel, in a nutshell. "Can God forgive you? Of course. Read your Bible. David, Peter, Paul-God builds his church on the backs of people who murder, commit adultery, deny him, and persecute his followers. But because of Christ, forgiveness is now our problem, not God's. What we have to go through to commit sin distances us from God-we change in the very act of rebellion-and there is no guarantee we will come back. You ask me about forgiveness now, but will you even want it later, especially if it in­volves repentance?"

Several months after our conversation, Daniel made his choice. I have yet to see any evidence of repentance. Now he tends to ra­tionalize his decision as a way of escaping an unhappy marriage. He has rejected most of his Christian friends-"Too narrow­minded," he says-and looks instead for people who celebrate his newfound liberation.

To me, though, Daniel does not seem very liberated. The price of his "freedom" has meant turning his back on those who cared about him most. He also tells me God is not a part of his life right now. "Maybe later," he says.

God took a great risk by announcing for­giveness in advance. It occurs to me, though, that the scandal of grace involves a transfer of that risk to us. As George MacDonald put it, we are condemned not for the wicked things we've done, but for not leaving them.

Extracted from Philip Yancey’s Finding God in Unexpected Places.