By C. I. Scofield, D.D., Editor “Scofield Reference Bible.”
Grace is an English word used in the New Testament to translate the Greek word, Charis, which means “favor,” without recompense or equivalent. If there is any compensatory act or payment, however slight or inadequate, it is “no more grace” - Charis.
When used to denote a certain attitude or act of God toward man it is therefore of the very essence of the matter that human merit or deserving is utterly excluded. In grace God acts out from Himself, toward those who have deserved, not His favor, but His wrath. In the structure of the Epistle to the Romans grace does not enter, could not enter, till a whole race, without one single exception, stands guilty and speechless before God.
Condemned by creation, the silent testimony of the universe (Rom. 1:18, 20); by wilful ignorance, the loss of a knowledge of God once universal (Rom. 1:21); by senseless idolatry (Rom. 1:22, 23); by a manner of life worse than bestial (Rom. 1:24, 27); by godless pride and cruelty (Rom. 1:28, 32); by philosophical moralizings which had no fruit in life (Rom. 2:1, 4); by consciences which can only “accuse” or seek to “excuse” but never justify (Rom. 2:5, 16); and finally by the very law in which those who have the law boast (Rom. 2:17; 3:20), “every mouth” is “stopped, and all the world becomes guilty before God.”
In an absolute sense, the end of all flesh is come. Everything has been tried. Innocence, as of two unfallen creatures in an Eden of beauty; conscience, that is, the knowledge of good and evil with responsibility to do good and eschew evil; promises, with the help of God available through prayer; law, tried on a great scale, and through centuries of forbearance, supplemented by the mighty ethical ministry of the prophets, without ever once presenting a human being righteous before God (Rom. 3:19; Gal. 3:10; Heb. 7:19; Rom. 3:10, 18; 8:3, 4); this is the Biblical picture. And it is against this dark background that grace shines out.
DEFINITION
The New Testament definitions of grace are both inclusive and exclusive. They tell us what grace is, but they are careful also to tell us what grace is not. The two great central definitions follow:
“That in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us through Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:7).
This is the inclusive, or affirmative, side; the negative aspect, what grace is not, follows:
“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast” (Eph. 2:8, 9).
The Jew, who is under the law when grace comes, is under its curse (Gal. 3:10); and the Gentiles are “without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12).
And to this race God comes to show “the exceeding riches of His GRACE in His kindness toward US,” “through CHRIST JESUS.”
The other great definition of grace is: “But after that the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man appeared”- the positive aspect; “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us” - the negative aspect.
Grace, then, characterizes the present age, as law characterized the age from Sinai to Calvary. “For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” And this contrast between law as a method and grace as a method runs through the whole Biblical revelation concerning grace.
It is not, of course, meant that there was no law before Moses, any more than that there was no grace and truth before Jesus Christ. The forbidding to Adam of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:17) was law, and surely grace was most sweetly manifested in the seeking, by the Lord God, of His sinning creatures, and in His clothing them with coats of skins (Gen. 3:21) - a beautiful type of Christ “made unto us … righteousness” (1 Cor. 1:30). Law, in the sense of some revelation of God’s will, and grace, in the sense of some revelation of God’s goodness, have always existed, and to this Scripture abundantly testifies. But “the law” as an inflexible rule of life was given by Moses, and, from Sinai to Calvary, dominates, characterizes, the time; just as grace dominates, or gives its peculiar character to, the dispensation which begins at Calvary, and has its predicted termination in the rapture of the Church.