In Galatians 1:10-24, Paul is accused of promoting grace because he is a people pleaser. Furthermore, the Judaizers said he was given this inadequate gospel by someone else. Paul counters he received the gospel he preaches directly from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Why do people resist the notion of grace?
This mindset distrusts anything that is too tolerant and not sufficiently difficult and demanding. The underlying assumption is the more demanding the duty, the more painful the process, the higher the price of piety, the more likely it is to be of God. Grace is rejected as too lax on the duty of obedience, too easy and non-sacrificial…all gain and no pain. Grace is thought to encourage laziness and complacency with freedom in Christ appearing to be the freedom to sin without conscience and consequence. For those who reject grace the way to live our lives is to try harder…give extra…and sacrifice more. For anything to be accomplished there must be some sense of guilt, duty, and obligation. Guilt, duty, and obligation are powerful motivators but what motivation is there in grace?
Many Christians live their lives as though they held to the Book of Mormon Scripture…
2 Nephi 25:23
"For we labor diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do."
Legalistic Christians agree in practice with the Latter-Day Saints. Our duty is to do all we can, and trust that grace will make up the deficit afterward. The question is how can one ever know if they have done all they can do? Christians who live out their faith with this philosophy always seem to lack assurance about their salvation as well as their sanctification.
Humanity is religious by nature, and we develop religions that reward us for being religious. Let me give you a couple of examples:
In Hinduism there are three paths to religious realization: the path of works, or karma (by performing sacrificial and ritual acts), the path of knowledge, (by meditation) and the path of devotion to a particular god or gods. One’s rebirth is determined by the accumulated merit and demerit that result from all the actions, or karma, that the soul has committed in its past life or lives. All Hindus believe that karma accrues in this way; they also believe, however, that it can be counteracted by various atonements and rituals.
In Buddhism you have the Four Noble Truths: (1) Life is suffering. (2) All suffering is caused by ignorance of the nature of reality and the craving, attachment, and grasping that result from such ignorance. (3) Suffering can be ended by overcoming ignorance and attachment. (4) The path to the suppression of suffering is the Eightfold Path, which consists of right views, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right-mindedness, and right contemplation.
All human-caused religions focus on self-enhancement by meriting reward or advancement. Grace in human-caused systems is not only a foreign concept, but also most often a hostile concept. Paul argues since the gospel is not performance based it could not have come from the minds of men.
The grace gospel is not a feel good about yourself message. It says you are helpless and hopeless apart from the unmerited intervention of God. Your karma is caca. The only righteousness men are ever able to achieve is dung heap righteousness. As most people never get to the end of themselves to find their beginning with God, they find it impossible to believe or accept this teaching.
Transitioning from Saul the Pharisee to Paul the Apostle of Grace
To get His point across that grace is essential to salvation and sanctification what does God do? He coopts the biggest overachieving arrogant self-righteous blowhard He can find and crushes him. This man, Saul, becomes Paul, the Apostle of Grace.
No one understood self-righteous merit more than Saul and no one understood unmerited favor more than Paul. Only God could save a man like Saul and only God would save a man like Saul. Jesus Christ was revealed to Saul for Jesus Christ to be revealed by Paul and then most importantly to be revealed in Paul.
In the plan of God, the impossibly legalistic and proud Saul was crushed to make way for a new creation named Paul who would be given the impossible task of reaching the Gentiles by preaching this gospel of free grace.
As is so often the case, God chose the unexpected to do the inexplicable. Often our journey of faith begins with a jolt. Paul’s hopes, dreams, and ambitions were destroyed in a flash of light on the road to Damascus. We should draw comfort in knowing God has a plan and a time for his plan to unfold. How much of our lives could be summarized by the simple statement, but God had other plans? However, notice that God transitions the legalistic Saul into the gracious Paul slowly.
Now in our day, Paul would have appeared at every crusade and revival within a thousand miles, before he had a chance to figure out what hit him. But that is not what God did with Paul, instead he isolated him. Paul needed time to think and work through the implications of this recent revelation and transformation. My own opinion is that this was necessary, in part, so that Paul would not make the mistake of the Judaizers in attempting to introduce legalism into Christianity. Paul had to unlearn law as a way of life before he could learn grace as a way of life. He had to put off the old to put on the new. He needed to be grounded and well-established in this new faith to properly defend it and demonstrate it.
I often think of this whenever some high-profile celebrity becomes a Christian and while that convert is still wet behind the ears, we put them up on a public platform. When we do this, we do a great disservice to that person and to the cause of Christ. That person needs time, like Paul needed time, to grow and mature in both grace and knowledge. Our plan for high profile converts is active promotion, but God’s plan is isolation and instruction.
The Lessons of Helplessness
It often takes a desert experience to strip us of the one thing that plagues us all our lives...stubborn self-reliance. The desert times of life are often where we hear God speak to us in ways the sounds of the hustle and bustle of our daily lives drown out. The desert has a way of making you aware of your helplessness. The desert causes one to realize that you are at the mercy of God, vulnerable to the elements. Only God's grace can sustain you when you are in the desert. And in these desert times of life God gets something He may only rarely get when you are experiencing the hustle and bustle of your busy life. He gets your full attention.
Those whom God chooses for leadership at some point must learn the lessons of helplessness. Good leaders emerge from humble servants. My most teachable moments typically come after I have been humbled in some way. God is not interested in self-made men and self-made women. The desert is the place where the self is unmade and then remade in the image of Christ. Why does God find this to be necessary? It is necessary because we are all impossible people…impossibly stubborn…impossibly set in our own ways…and God must reveal our helplessness to convince us of the necessity of His grace. His grace is not something I only need after all I can do; I need His grace before I venture to do anything.