Grace, grace, grace. We're going to talk about that this morning. I'm going to start by giving you a theory that I have, all right? And we're going to think about the things that took place in Las Vegas for a moment. Here's my theory. My theory is that it's going to sound very strange when I tell it to you, okay? Here's my theory. The more that people in the church embrace Pelagianism, the more they embrace Pelagianism, the more violent the societies in which they find themselves become. Okay? And paradoxically, the more violent these societies become, the more strongly, not the less, everyone in them will of their own free will embrace Pelagianism as their basic worldview of human nature. I want to give you an anecdote from this week that shows half of this theory in action. On Monday, October the 1st, 2017, America saw its most deadly act of modern terrorism. Seems like I say that every six months. The death toll in Las Vegas shooting has now risen to 59, with over 525 more injured from bullets or being trampled underfoot by a crazy mob that's out of control. A friend of mine who's a very sweet person and who would claim to be a Christian wrote this. All mass shootings and terror attacks are terrible, but this seemed to hit me especially hard. Maybe it's because I'm a mom. Maybe because I knew people at the concert. Maybe because I've been to many country concerts and have seen this singer multiple times. For whatever reason, today I could not stop crying. I suppose this would have been on Monday. I don't know what answers to guns or mental states of mind would have prevented this, nor do I want to talk about it yet. I don't know why this evil person did what he did, but I still believe people are 99% good and we can't let fear and evil win. So my theory is seen right here. But I'm gonna finish the entry to prepare us for something later. As a Christian, we might hope that the gospel would go out at that moment. Instead, what was encouraged was simply a kind of new pay-it-forward program of niceness to one another in order to make the world a better place to live. Which, of course, is obviously not a bad thing. I'm not opposed to that in the slightest. You remember the pay-it-forward thing a few years back? This guy decided to pay for somebody's coffee in the line at Starbucks behind him, and then it just started this craze? Friend, that is anything but the gospel. So how does this exemplify my theory? Well, to answer that, we need to understand what Pelagianism is, okay? Pelagius was a contemporary of Augustine, preaching at the turn of the fifth century in Britain. The core of his teaching was that people are not inherently sinful. Or as my friend put it, people are 99% good. That is, for all intents and purposes, Pelagianism. For even Pelagius believed that people could sin, he just believed that it wasn't their natural bent. And even more, while he believed that grace was real, he didn't think it was necessary for salvation. It could help facilitate righteousness, but it wasn't necessary. I invite you to go on the internet and read R.C. Sproul's article that he wrote about 2001 called The Pelagian Captivity of the Church, if you want to learn more about that. So what is so strange to me is how in the face of such gross and escalating violence as we are seeing on display in our post-Christian, post-modern Western world, there is this staunch refusal to acknowledge that these events are nothing but the natural outcomes that any of us could be given over to were God to remove his hand from us. You may remember that soon after 9-11, the media made it all too clear that using words like evil or terrorism could not be tolerated. That same idea is latent when in the face of heinous wicked violence, people not only still say, but they actually resolve themselves and entrench themselves in this belief that everyone is basically good. It's unbelievable. So we're seeing that the worse people show themselves to be, the less inclined we are of ourselves to believe that all people are like that. Do you see what I'm saying? This is insane. It seems backwards, and from a biblical perspective, it's exactly what it is. You would think that as outward wickedness increases, people's view of depravity would rise. But it doesn't. It goes the opposite direction. I think it's because no one wants to face the fact that what these wicked people are displaying to the whole world is nothing but a piece of ourselves. I'm not like that, right? It's a basic refusal to admit that I am a sinner. That's what's going on. There simply isn't a person who has been born that wants of themselves to admit this. There isn't one of us. Why? Because it brings condemnation and it necessitates that there's a judge who judges sin. I'll give you another anecdote. This one just happened yesterday. A different friend, we went to the same college and seminary. He responded to this latest terrorist attack by posting an article. And the article was called, Thoughts on Vegas, Why Men Keep Doing This. And the answer in the article? Three answers. Men are lonely. Men have experienced ongoing play deprivation. Men are deeply ashamed, having been ridiculed, rejected, and humiliated. And the solution, which he actually concludes by calling good news, he says the good news is, here's his good news, you as an individual can make a difference by helping in one of those areas. Now again, don't hear me wrong, those probably contribute to people's problems in some ways. And helping with them is certainly not a bad thing in and of itself. But when I pointed out that this is basically Pelagianism to my friend, he first asked, what is Pelagianism? Did you hear what I said about him? He went to college and seminary, same one I went to. Both are Christian things, places. Then he said, maybe we're just coming at this from different approaches. I just wanted to use it to start a conversation about the importance of good friends. Now, my friend is not a Pelagian. This week he also wrote a letter calling this event, quote, the sinful rebellion of mankind on full display. He's not a Pelagian. But I want you to think about what this kind of thinking means, especially when it has crept into the church. Michael Horton begins his treatment of our topic today by saying this, quote, if human beings are basically good and evil is attributable to impersonal forces, structures, institutions, and upbringing, the doctrine of grace, the essence of the gospel, is meaningless. Now, the Church of the Reformation was bad. Let's go back 500 years, as we're remembering this 500-year anniversary of the Reformation. But you want to know something? Believe it or not, it was not this bad. That means that we're talking about something today that's even more important for us than it was for Martin Luther. The Roman Church held what's called semi-Pelagianism. They still do. This is the idea that God helps those who help themselves. The saying in Luther's day was, God will not withhold his grace from those who do what lies within their power. At least in that system, grace is needed at some point. In Pelagianism, it's basically irrelevant. And yet, fighting against just semi-Pelagianism, as it was expressing itself through indulgences that we talked about last time, where you have grace plus Something like buying your way into heaven. Luther would write his 95 thesis and this was thesis 62. The true treasure of the church is the most holy gospel of the glory and grace of God. And yet he would say just one later, but this treasure is most naturally odious for it makes the first to be last. Grace is not something we want to have. As Kevin Van Hooser says, grace contradicts every system of religion, precisely because God's free mercy cannot be predicted, calculated, or manipulated. Grace is especially troublesome for control freaks, sinners curved in on themselves, bent on securing their own existence and status. Therefore, what we want to do is look at the first of the three solas that are in some ways one. They are grace alone, faith alone, and Christ alone. These are usually the middle three of the discussion. I'm going to talk about them in this order because grace is the prerequisite that holds them together. Faith is the only instrument that God gives to receive the grace and as a climax, we could, I thought about putting Christ first, but I want to do it as a climax because he's the only basis and he's the end to which all these others point. So as we consider this, I'm going to look at a New Testament passage, just a few verses of it, okay? Then we're going to go to an Old Testament passage and then we'll return to our New Testament passage. And as with all these doctrines, there's many, many places in scripture that we could turn, but these two really seem to get to me at the heart of this needed theology and the pastoral importance of sola gratia, of salvation by grace alone. So let's begin in Ephesians 2, that we read for the gospel, and we're gonna begin with three verses that really are not the gospel. Verses one through three. As we think about the passage as a whole, I want you to understand that it's all about grace. Verse five, by grace you have been saved. And verse eight basically repeats the same thing, although it adds something else that we'll look at next time. And then also verse seven talks about grace, describing the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. But that discussion of grace begins with a needed backdrop, starting in verse one. And this hits right where we began. I said earlier that even semi-Pelagianism is bad, but a lot of people would disagree with that. So how do I justify such a remark that would surely get me into trouble in many other churches across the land today? Ephesians 2, 1 through 2, and you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked." This is God's holy word, all right? This is not some man-made doctrine. God said this. You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked. What does this verse teach? So the language the Apostle Paul uses is the word dead in English. The Greek word is nekros. You know what kinds of words we get from that? Listen, necrosis. The death of cells through injury of disease. Necropsy, the examination of a body after death. Necropolis, a cemetery. Necrophilia, obsessive fascination with death and corpses. Necromancy, the practice of communicating with the spirits of the dead in order to predict the future. Are you getting the picture of what the word means? You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked. So what does that mean? Semi-Pelagians and Pelagians read this very differently than I do. A good Semi-Pelagian or Arminian, it's really the same thing, just a different flavor, they will read it as teaching a kind of Miracle Max theology. You remember Miracle Max? Princess Bride? I know it's been a long time, about 30 years ago this year, the anniversary of one of the greatest movies ever made. And the man in black is brought to Miracle Max and he declares, Inigo Montoya declares, he's dead. And Miracle Max says, he isn't dead, he's mostly dead. There's a big difference between all dead and mostly dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. In other words, Paul is saying that you were slightly alive in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked. Now you might say that's an absurd interpretation, but I'm going to tell you it's not as absurd as you might think. It is profoundly confused though. So I want you to notice some other things about this. Notice that he says you used to walk in them. He goes on to say in verse two that you were following the course of the world, following the practice of the power, the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that's now at work in the sons of disobedience. See, words like walking and following and disobeying, these demonstrate that the person is in fact alive, don't they? So what I'm saying is that we have here both life and death. The semi-Pelagian solves the problem by merging them to say that it's talking about slightly alive people and so grace becomes like gasoline for the tank or like a blood transfusion for the body. On the other hand, the reformed believe that it's talking simultaneously about completely alive people and completely dead people. I think a lot of people don't understand that that's what our teaching is. We do not mix them so that both are lessened We believe that both are 100% true simultaneously. How can you possibly understand that? First thing to do is to take seriously the word dead. Paul means dead. That's the word he used. But Paul also means alive because he uses words that clearly refer to people being alive. So then what is the meaning of dead in trespasses and sins? Go to another passage that helps to clarify it. Go to 2 Corinthians 2.14. He uses two different words, natural and spiritual. The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. This verse presupposes that a natural person understands and accepts many things. That is, they are alive. Now, how do they do that? physically. They have beating hearts, they have functioning minds, they have working wills. They make choices and decisions. But it states it is impossible for them to make right decisions or good choices regarding God because the things of God are not naturally discerned. So the person, he says, is spiritually dead, but physically alive. And being spiritually dead, he simply can't understand the things of God, because the words are foolishness and a stumbling block the way he says it in 1 Corinthians 1. And so the person needs to be born again. And the question is how? By free will? By making a decision? By cooperating with grace? No, no, no. You're born again by the Spirit of God calling things that are not into existence. It's as simple as that. Now Martin Luther described this as being in bondage to the will. It's a state of living death, lifelong slavery to the world, the flesh, and the devil. And by the way, the devil shows up in Ephesians 2 too, doesn't he? This becomes the reason why he believed, like Augustine did before him, that the predestinating grace of God is an absolute requirement for coming to saving faith in Christ. It's also the reason why he believed that the work of God in a person's life to save them is due to absolutely nothing in that person. It is entirely the work of God's grace alone towards them. And in fact, It's not just Luther who believed this at the Reformation. J.I. Packer wrote an introduction to Martin Luther's Bondage of the Will, and listen to what he said about this. Quote, historically, it is a simple matter of fact that Martin Luther and John Calvin, and for that matter, Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Busser, and all the leading Protestant theologians of the first epoch of the Reformation stood on precisely the same ground here. On other points, they had their differences, but in asserting the helplessness of man in sin and the sovereignty of God in grace, they were entirely at one. To all of them, these doctrines were the very lifeblood of the Christian faith. Every single first generation reformer was unified on these points. I want to make that clear. All of them. It's part and parcel of what it means to be reformed in Lutheran. This is the reformation. It's the very heart of sola gratia. For grace is only grace when there is absolutely nothing that a person can do to earn it, merit it, or will salvation of themselves. And I mean absolutely nothing. It is completely and totally of God's grace alone because he's pleased to look upon you on account of Jesus Christ. The word that you will come across sometimes here is the word monergism. There's a famous website reform that's been up for 20 years called monergism.com. Monergism is opposed to what's called synergism. It's a one working versus a cooperation. Synergism is what all semi-Pelagians have in common. You cooperate with divine grace in a kind of 50-50 dance in order to get saved. And here's how it works. You do your half. then God will do his. That's the order of it. God tells you to believe in Christ, you go ahead and make that choice, and then you will be saved. Jesus reaches out his hand, you've seen it, you've heard it told a million times, right? Reaches out his hand to a drowning person, just take my hand, and then he'll pull you up. This is the Church of Rome, although there's always been dissenters. It's Eastern Orthodox teaching, it's Arminianism, it's Wesleyism, and it's most Baptist. But Augustinians, and in Rome actually, Benedictines and Jansenites, there's been a whole group of people in Rome that have denied that. And all of the Reformation denied that. This is important because this was not a new doctrine that the reformers were espousing, even in church history. Scripture alone tells us that unless God does the work in a person's heart, and he does it by a miraculous work of his spirit, and he does it through the gospel alone, that's the power of God to save someone. The Bible says no one will ever come unless God does that. But it also says that when he does do that, they will come. Okay? The reformers did not deny that people come, nor did they deny that people choose. Some Calvinists wrongly teach this, and it's worse than nonsense because it ends up denying sola fide. You're saved by faith alone. We'll look at that next week. But instead of the choice being the thing that regenerates you, being regenerated is the thing that causes you to choose. Do you see the order of that? Only alive men do this. In other words, faith is a gift of God, not the one good thing that you do to merit God's favor. And as I said, we'll talk about this a lot more next time. The point is, this is the meaning of sola gratia. Without it, you do not have grace alone. You have grace plus something else. And this is why the sola part was added, so that you may know that God's grace and his grace alone is what saves you. Rome, of course, believes in grace. Every Christian believes in grace, but not grace alone. That's what we're proclaiming here. So we need to think about what grace is. This is a very important question. And so I want you to turn to the Old Testament passage. Let's use Exodus 33. And it's basically verses 19, and then we'll kind of skip ahead. and go into 34, five through nine. This is the famous great self-disclosure of the biblical God who is speaking to Moses. And he said, I will make all my goodness pass before you. This is verse 19 of chapter 33. I will make all my goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim before you my name, the Lord. And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will show mercy to whom I will show mercy. Now, in the context, grace is chiefly this. It's God's goodness in Christ proclaimed and granted. That's what grace is right here. It's his goodness in Christ proclaimed and granted. And this can be summed up in one word. The word is favor. Grace is God's favor towards you. Now, the last verse of the text, verse 9, chapter 34, says that. And he said, if I have found favor in your sight, oh Lord, please, and then he says a bunch of things that he would like God to do. The point is the story begins with goodness and grace and it ends with favor. Favor is a good thing, isn't it? It means that God is for you, he's not against you. Anytime you're thinking of one of his graces and it's causing you to question or to doubt or to worry, then you've changed grace into something else. Maybe you can't understand why God would be gracious to you. And I wanna tell you something, that's the whole point, okay? I don't know why would God be gracious to me, why would he love me? That's the point of grace. It has nothing to do with you. He favors you simply because it pleases him to do so. Is that not wonderful news to a despondent person? This is defined with several terms throughout the story. Verse 19 uses another word. The word is mercy. I preached on this back in, I think, Psalm 51. I'll say it again. Sometimes we hear that mercy is not getting what you deserve, and grace is getting what you don't deserve. You deserve punishment, and so that's mercy. You don't deserve the good gifts or benefits, and that's grace. But really, these are just two sides of the same coin. In fact, mercy is defined here in this verse as compassion upon someone who's an offender. And compassion's not a lack, it's a presence of grace. And so they are in the same verse together. And I want you to know that this verse is quoted in Romans 9 as part of one particular benefit of God's grace. I'm not ready to talk about that yet, because first I want us to learn more about what this incredible gift of God is. Verse six in chapter 34 unfolds more of it. The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful, so there's our word mercy again, and gracious, there's grace again, and that says slow to anger. To understand grace, you need to know that it means that God is slow to anger. Now this is exactly the opposite of most people that I've known, including myself. The tiniest thing happens and we get set off. And then we project ourselves upon God as if he's like us. He isn't like you, friend. People sometimes ask, where is God when times are evil? Because he's not there. He's not getting angry. That's one of my answers. He's slow to anger. He's not taking people out the moment that they first sin. He's slow to anger. Next, it says he's abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. Now, here's a word hesed, steadfast love. This is a word that emphasizes how God acts when he's in a covenant with someone. Okay, it implies a positive relationship to them. So when this is the case, God has much or abounding steadfastness and faithfulness to them. He acts truly, never falsely. And really it presupposes that you're acting the exact opposite of him. We see this in the next section of verse seven, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. You see, it assumes that you're sinning. Part of his steadfast love is that he forgives you of your sins. And he doesn't just do it once, he does it always. He does this to all and any who call upon him to do so, because that's the meaning of thousands. And therefore, when you call out to God for him to forgive you, when you say, God, forgive me, please, you are to be assured that he does this. That's what grace is. Of course, there's an opposite here, which is that if you do not call upon him, he will not forgive you. Instead, he visits the iniquity of the fathers and the children's children to the third and fourth generation for those who are guilty, it says in verse seven. This idea of guilt has a second benefit of grace that we will begin to work our way towards thinking about. So as we do that, I want us to think about the chief benefit of grace, the chief benefit of grace. And this is actually gonna vault us ahead two weeks. But since it's here in both of our texts, I'll really only talk about it in the Exodus one, but boy, it's all over the place in Ephesians 2 as well. We need to discuss the chief benefit of grace. Because everything else that I will say after this pales in comparison to this. The chief benefit of grace is God himself. and particularly God in the person of Jesus Christ. As someone has said, grace is God's unmerited favor to sinners in communicating life in Christ. What I want you to see here is that Christ is not a means to an end. And almost everybody treats him that way. He is the end. He is the goal. He is the treasure. He is the benefit. He is grace. Grace is given for the sake of Christ alone, and Christ is given because of grace alone. Christ is here with Moses, okay? Christ is here with Moses. He is the Lord, in verse nine, who is speaking to Moses. He is the Lord whom Moses asks, please go in the midst of us, pardon our iniquity and our sin and take us for your inheritance. Now, just a few chapters earlier, and this is important to understanding that verse, verse nine there. Just a few chapters earlier, Moses was told this in chapter 23. Behold, I send an angel before you. Pay careful attention to him and obey his voice. Do not rebel against him, for he will not pardon your transgression, for my name is in him." Now there's a lot I could say here, you all know that. But just notice how the themes of forgiveness of sins and going before the people are explicit there. Moses is talking to the angel. And furthermore, this idea of taking Israel as an inheritance is the great privilege of the second person of the Trinity in the Old Testament, as we've been seeing in the Psalms. And two other themes are present in the encounter with the Lord on Mount Sinai. The first is the voice, Moses says. Okay, the Lord said he would proclaim something to Moses. And then the second thing is the name. He would proclaim the name. The voice of the Lord is the word of the Lord, right? Makes sense. And the word of the Lord comes from the word of the Lord, the logos. We're orbiting closely to soul of scripture here. Moses is hearing a sermon from God and he's recording it for you in the biblical book of Exodus. And the name of the Lord is also the word of the Lord. That's what John tells us because the word is the angel and the name is in him. This is the apostolic message. Listen to these verses in the New Testament. Repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Now don't you just think about what we saw about the angel and what we see about Moses asking about these very same things. Repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations beginning in Jerusalem. It's the way the book of Luke ends. And then Romans, that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. But how are they to hear without someone preaching? And what is that name? The name of the Lord Jesus, Jesus whom Paul proclaims. My point here is that Jesus is the chief benefit of God's grace to you. He is not the way to something better. He is the something better. You hear about that benefit by being told through the proclamation through the preaching of the gospel. And therefore, preaching is a great grace to you. Because through it, you're able to call upon the name of Jesus and be saved. And what is it that you're told about him? Okay. What have we been thinking about? That he is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but who will by no means clear the guilty. This is needed good news to the guilty sinners and frankly this is the exact opposite of what everyone out there is telling you Jesus is like. I want to consider two points that I raised earlier and talk about them chronologically, that is, the way that they happen in real time. And then we're going to think about a couple more from the Ephesians passage. So first we want to return to the idea of having mercy on whom he will have mercy. And remember, I said this is quoted in the book of Romans in chapter 9. In Romans 9.15, And it's about this long discussion about the doctrine of predestination. So what I want to say is predestination is a great grace of God, but I want us to think about what it is. Now, I'm going to hammer home that predestination is a grace of God. Some people think of and treat predestination as a great terror, almost like it's not gracious at all, but it's the opposite, like it's some kind of divine judgment. And this is to misunderstand the doctrine to your own spiritual harm. Listen carefully. Damnation is not predestination. Damnation is the result of sin, not predestination. Being reprobate is not predestination. Reprobation comes from a Latin word meaning disapprove. It's the result of God leaving people in their sins. That's not predestination. Predestination is what the word literally means. It is a predetermining of something by God. And what is that predetermination? It is His gracious decision to choose whoever He wants for salvation before the foundation of the world. We learn in Romans 9 some important things about this. Predestination is based upon something in God, not something in you. In verse 11, I'll apply this to you, it talks about Jacob and Esau. When you were not yet born or had done anything good or bad. Now some people will ask why God chooses one person and not another. The answer we can give with certainty is that it has nothing to do with what he foresees someone will choose. Why? Because if God did that, do you know that everyone would end up in hell? Because everybody would choose the exact opposite of God. We prove that every day of our lives. Instead, it's for the glory of God. That's why he does it. In verse 11, in order that God's purpose of election might continue, not because of works, but because of him who calls. It's for the mercy of God. It depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who has mercy, verse 16. And verse 17, so that God might show his power in you, so that his name might be proclaimed in all the earth, the name is Christ. Verse 20, so that no one can talk back to God. Verse 22, so he can display his wrath. And verse 23, to make known his mercy, so that it would all be of grace and nothing else. And by the way, if we had time, we could do the entire backdrop of Ephesians 2, which is the entire chapter of Ephesians 1 that talks about all of this theme. But displaying his wrath is something that terrifies people about this doctrine, and it shouldn't. I want you to hear this carefully. A professor told me this in seminary. I thought long and hard about it, and I think he's exactly right. Predestination should never terrify you. The Bible never ever gives this doctrine to terrify anyone. It is always given to give them hope and joy and peace. God does not have to predestine someone to hell in the sense of making like a positive decree because a bunch of people are neutral and he just takes these neutral people and he goes, plop here, you go to hell, you go to heaven, you go to hell. That's not what it's about, okay? No, there's no one that's neutral. We've already established that. All God has to do is leave you in your own willful state of rebellion and you'll end up in hell. That's all he has to do. He has to do nothing. Predestination is a grace for that very reason. It's a doing of something. If God didn't predestine people, everyone would end up in hell. Predestination ensures that stubborn, wicked people will in fact come to Christ. Predestination guarantees that. It is His favor towards you, that's what predestination is. So the question is, have you come to Christ? If you have come to Christ and you trust in Him, and you ask Him to forgive you of your sins, then do not enter into a labyrinth. Do you know what a labyrinth is? Some of you don't know, in the middle ages they made these labyrinths that like circular buildings where every single room looked exactly the same and you would get completely lost in them. You have no idea where you're at. Don't go there. Don't speculate about whether God has predestined you or not. Don't look to election. Look to Christ. If you're looking to Christ, then you can be assured that you can only do that because you're predestined. That's the way the Bible talks about this. That's the order. Predestination is a grace, it's not a terror. It's given for your comfort, not your torment, and you need to use it that way. Okay, second question then is how do you come to Christ? Okay, I brought this up with the idea of guilty. God does not acquit the guilty we read about. Now at first that seems to lead to a horrible problem because if everyone's sinful then everyone's guilty and therefore God can't acquit anyone. That's not good news. But this is exactly why we need grace. Somehow those who are guilty are able to be brought into a covenant relationship with God in his love. How does that happen? It happens by the Holy Spirit counting you righteous in Christ. By being counted as righteous, that's what we mean by the term justification. God justifies the guilty. He declares them not guilty, even though they are. And believe it or not, that's completely unfair. How could a righteous God let guilty people go free? Well, the answer is that he didn't let the guilty go free. That's one of the reasons Christ died, 2 Corinthians 5.19. In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them. Not counting their trespasses against them, why? It's because Christ was punished in your place. Justice has been met. God is the God of justice. The guilty has been punished in Christ. And I want you to know, of course, Christ was not guilty, but he took your punishment in your place as part of an eternal decree and arrangement in the Godhead because of grace. Jesus' death is a great grace. Here's how Ephesians puts it in verses 4 through 5. We'll go back to chapter 2 now. but God being rich in mercy, we could spend forever on the but God, bad, bad, bad news, bad news, bad, you terrible, horrible people, but God, you see that transition there? But God, not but you, but God being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together in Christ. Do you see that dead men are being brought to life? God did that. God made us alive together. People don't get God to make them alive by an act of free will. Do you understand that doesn't make any sense at all? Rather, God makes them alive and then he liberates their will from death to sin so that now they freely choose him because that's the power of God in Christ. Again, we'll look much more at that, how that happens next time in justification by faith. But know that this Ephesians passage does bring that up. Verse eight, by grace you've been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God. Through faith, God justifies wicked people. He gives the grace of faith. But the benefits divine that spring forth from God's grace here is amazing. Let's talk about, I think, two of them. First, he makes us alive. I was dead, now I'm alive. I'm alive to God. I'm alive to the good. I'm alive to the law. I'm alive to freedom. I'm alive in spirit. I'm raised from the dead. I was alive naturally, now God grants spiritual life. And how does he does it? How does he do it? By grace alone, through the means of the gospel proclaimed, which is the power of God to salvation, Romans 1.16. The gospel, I'm not ashamed of the gospel, because it's the power of God to save anyone God wants to save. He brings you to life. Lazarus, come out! Remember, that's what he said. And the word calls, and Lazarus comes to life. That's predestination applied in time. Through the life-giving calling, the gift of faith is granted, and it's all of God from the beginning to the end. Even greater, he unites us literally to Christ in the language of verse six, we are in Christ Jesus. Okay, God raised us up with him, seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. As a head is to a body. as a branch is to a vine, as a wife is to a husband, so you are to Christ. It is a mystical union. It is an inseparable union. And the reason why is because it's all of grace. If it was of you, it couldn't be that way. And through it, God literally gives you the very life of Jesus Christ himself, who's been raised from the dead, because he's put his spirit in us, the spirit of Christ, Christ in you, the hope of glory. Now, a couple more things, two particular benefits of grace mentioned right here. The first is that we have Christ's authority. To be seated with him in heavenly places is to be given power and dominion in heavenly places. This gives us power over the evil one. He ends the letter this way, chapter six, right? It allows us to be carrying out our function as image bearers on the earth. We're created and renewed in the image of God in chapter four. This is looked at here in Ephesians as particularly doing good works, part of this authority. It's the opposite of Adam. Verse 10, we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. So believers do good works. It's an act of his grace. And then second, it allows us to enter heaven in the coming ages. And we call this glorification, the transforming of our earthly bodies into bodies that are fit for eternity. What awaits us there? All Paul says here in verse 7, immeasurable riches that he will show us. In 1 Corinthians he says, the riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ." Well that's here in Ephesians, and then he says, what no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no heart of man imagine what God has prepared for those who love him. These graces, I thought about doing Romans 8, the chain of salvation, the grace is from the beginning, predestination, to the giving of the gospel, to the regenerating, to the effectual calling, to the justification, to the sanctification, to the glorification, it's from grace from first to last. I'm going to conclude by giving a couple of quotes about grace alone in the early church, and then some thoughts about where we started. So first, this doctrine was in the early church. By grace alone, you understand the scripture. Here's Justin Martyr. This grace alone was given me from God to understand his scriptures, in which grace I invite everyone to share freely and abundantly, lest I should be held accountable at the judgment. It's grace alone that predestines. Augustine said it is grace alone that separates the redeemed from the lost, all having been mingled together in a massive perdition from a common cause leading back to their origin. He's talking about sin, where all sinners and predestination is a grace. fill-in in full gentius grace alone causes a person to believe the gospel he says grace alone worked in Paul to change him from an unbeliever into a believer it converted an enemy in bestowed faith upon an unbeliever at the time when because it was unbelief he did not deserve to receive faith Paul such a great lesson in this isn't he because what is Paul doing on the road to Damascus he's going to kill Christians this is not a guy looking for God Jesus comes to him and he saves him, grace alone. This might be the favorite one that I found because of who said it and who published it, and it deals with justification. This comes from Leo the Great, Pope Leo the Great, and it was published by the Catholic University Press. Quote, for he sees a new people from all the human race being brought into adoption as children of God. And he sees the virginal fertility of the church, the births of the regeneration being increased. He sees, this is the devil, that he is deprived of the power of his dominion, expelled from the hearts of those who once possessed, that thousands of the old of both sexes are snatched from him, thousands of the young, thousands of children, that neither one's own sin nor original sin stand in the way of anyone when justification is not granted by merits but is given by the generosity of grace alone. And of course, our own confession talks about this. When God converts a sinner and translates him into the state of grace, he freely from his natural bondage under sin and by grace alone enables him freely to will and to do that which is spiritually good. Yet so that by reason of his remaining corruptions, he does not perfectly nor only will that which is good, but he also does that which is evil. It adds grace along with the effectual calling and the idea of the covenant of grace in Christ. I invite you to come to Sunday school. We'll talk about those a little bit later. So what are we to say to all this? Yeah, exactly. So I think a case can be made that evangelical church of our day is either semi-Pelagian or as Dr. Sproul has argued, it's full out Pelagian. This is not good. But either way, something horrible is being perverted in the law and the gospel, in both of those. With regard to the law, it's not clearly being preached in such a way as to make people consider their own sinfulness in relation to a holy God. Why do people turn to Pelagianism? Well, as Anselm of Canterbury said long ago, you have not yet considered how great your sin is. That's why they do it. And we have seen that this is a huge problem because if people do not recognize themselves to be sinners, then what possible sense could the gospel of Jesus Christ and his death on the cross even make? What would be the point? And that's where you get the whole moral influence thing. Well, Jesus died to be a good influence. That's all he did. So go be like Jesus, I guess. Go die on the cross for somebody. Okay. Grace often isn't the point. It's the last thing, not the first thing that we think about sharing with people. That's troubling. This is precisely why not only do we find Pelagianism rearing its ugly head when horrible things happen, horrible things happen all the more when it rears its ugly head. Why is that? It's because the gospel of Jesus Christ is the only thing that can truly restrain our evil, wicked, violent hearts. only when a person has internalized the love of God, the kindness of God, the forgiveness and mercy of God. In a word, only when they've experienced God's amazing grace can there ever be a change of the heart of stone. And you don't get that unless the law and the gospel is proclaimed. Why don't Christians wanna talk about this? Maybe it's because they're just not being taught it. Maybe, God forbid, they've never come to see how amazing grace really is. Laws and regulations can curb outward sins for a time, but if there's no change in our life, the natural order of things is really just an eternally devolving free-for-all of greater and greater depravity. Eventually, those with the power end up destroying those who do not have the power. All great socialist experiments are rooted in one common anthropological denominator. All of them. Pelagianism. People are basically good. From the communists of China and Russia who murdered how many millions of people? People are basically good. To the socialist Nazis. Now he didn't believe all people are, but he believed his people are basically good, didn't he? to the socialist experiments unraveling our society right now in our country. That's the premise. If we want to see this madness come to an end, there is only one power in the entire world capable of overturning it, the grace of God through Jesus Christ and proclaim the gospel and experience firsthand by Christians. I'm going to leave you with a quote from a Lutheran scholar who wrote the following on the 400th anniversary of the Reformation, 100 years ago. He said, quote, Hearing him and him alone, Luther learned a glorious truth, two words, and all scripture was written for their sake. Two words and all spiritual life and so also the life of the Reformation sprung from them, sola gratia. They tell the despairing sinner that God in his infinite mercy has laid all the sins of the world on Jesus, that he is not required to bring about his salvation by his own good works and that his sins are forgiven him freely by grace and grace alone. Lord, it is such a troubling thing. We're living in such crazy days. I just pray that the gospel would once more be known in the church. Goodness, and that friends that I have who are Christians and that pastors that I know who are Christians would come to know what your word says about these things. Lord, this changed the entire face of civilization. And it is, we're living in a dark ages of grace alone. And things are only getting worse because of it, because of our inability to see our own wickedness and depravity, things get worse. Father, I pray that you would convict us of our sins, not of everyone else's sins, but our own sins today, where we've fallen short of your glory. so that we would know the riches and the mercy of your kindness and grace towards us in Jesus Christ. And if your people can catch hold of how they have been forgiven when they don't deserve it, how would it not change the world? I ask you hear this prayer in Christ's name and bless the hearing of your word today for his sake, amen.