“By Grace You Have Been Saved” by Diane Bayne

“By Grace You Have Been Saved” by Diane Bayne

Fourth Sunday of Lent

Piety

Brothers and sisters:

God, who is rich in mercy,

because of the great love he had for us,

even when we were dead in our transgressions,

brought us to life with Christ — by grace you have been saved —,

For by grace you have been saved through faith,

and this is not from you; it is the gift of God;

it is not from works, so no one may boast.

– (Ephesians 2: 1-9)

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,

so that everyone who believes in him might not perish

but might have eternal life.  – (John 3:16)

Here we have the ultimate paean of praise to God for His extravagant love of mankind as demonstrated by His unimaginable two-fold gift to his human creatures.  With the first gift, God saves all mankind from eternal death by the life and death of His only Son, Christ Jesus, a gift causing great pain for the Father as well as for the Son.  And then, with another astounding gift, the Father enables his creatures to activate this treasure by nothing less than the gift of faith by which all men are able to believe in this only Son. 

The great Gospel explicator, William Barclay has called John 3:16, “Everybody’s text,” and “the very essence of the Gospel” for with this text we are told that “the very mainspring of God’s being is love.”  As the essence of our devotion to God, with this text we are shown a God “who cannot be happy until all his wandering children have come home”–or, as in the words of St. Augustine--a God who “loves each one of us if there was only one of us.”

Study

Jesus said to Nicodemus: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert,

so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. Yes, God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.  – (John: 3:16)

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.  – (John: 3:17)

Whoever believes in him will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.  – (John 3:18)

To understand the first part of this Scripture, one must be familiar with the Old Testament story told in Numbers 21:4-9.  Going through the wilderness after their miraculous escape from Egypt, the people of Israel complained about their food and water and regretted that they had ever left Egypt.  To punish them God sent a plague of deadly fiery serpents who bit the people so that many of them died.  God instructed Moses to make an image of a serpent and to hold it up in the midst of the camp; those who looked upon the serpent were healed.  John took that story and turned in into a kind of parable of Jesus, by saying that there must be a “double lifting up” in Jesus’ life:  first Jesus must be lifted up on the cross, and then lifted up into glory at the time of his ascension into heaven (see Acts 2:33; 5:31).

According to William Barclay, the remainder of this Scripture affirms that belief in Jesus is essential because by believing in Him we believe God loves and cares for us and wants nothing more than to forgive us.  Barclay tells us that it was not easy for a Jew to believe all of this about God, for a Jew looked on God as one who imposed his laws upon his people and punished them if they broke them.  He looked on God as a judge and one who demanded sacrifices and offerings, rather than as a Father who longed to have his erring children back home. 

Says Barclay, it cost the life and death of Jesus to tell men that.  We cannot begin to be Christians until with all our hearts we believe that.  So, to believe in Jesus means we need to believe that Jesus knew God well, was close to God and so one with God that He could tell us the absolute truth about God.  When we believe that Jesus is the Son of God, we believe that what he says about God is true.  So belief in Jesus is the belief that God is our loving Father and it is by believing in Him that we believe in the eternal life He promises.  It is this belief that gives us peace with God, with other men, with ourselves, and with life, in general.  Barclay concludes this summary by affirming that it is by faith in Christ that we are given assurance that the deepest peace on earth is only a shadow of the ultimate peace that is to come.

Action:

And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed. But whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God. – (John 3:19-21)

The above Scripture points unerringly to actions (“wicked things that hate the light”)  that should NOT be taken by those who wish to be identified as Christians, as it makes the definitive connection between those who “live the truth” and live in the light so that their works “may be clearly seen as done in God.” 

As Barclay concludes his commentary on the gospel of John, “The man who reacts in hostility to Jesus has loved the darkness rather than the light.  It is by his reaction to Jesus Christ that a man stands revealed and his soul laid bare. If he regards Christ with love. . . for him there is hope; but if in Christ he sees nothing attractive, he has condemned himself.  He who was sent in love has become his judgment.”