By Russ Johnson
Grace is easy to love until we let it mean what it means.
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace.” (Romans 3:23-24)
All sinned.
All are justified.
No conditions.
Which can be surprisingly unsettling.
Because conditions give us handles. A way to define ourselves by what we do. Grace takes the handles away.
And when our sense of security can no longer depend on something we can control, the yeah, buts come naturally.
Yeah, but God is holy.
Yeah, but Jesus had to die.
Yeah, but if everyone's justified,
doesn't that make faith unnecessary?
These aren't small questions.
But underneath all three is really one: If God’s grace really has no conditions, what does a holy God do with everything that's wrong with us and the world?
The answer is Jesus.
He forgave people before they ever uttered a word. He ate with people we were told God couldn’t get near.
Which was a public announcement: you belong.
Every one of those moments raised the same unsettling question:
If Jesus is revealing God, why does he keep looking so unlike the holy God we've inherited?
Then Jesus made the claim
that forced everyone to answer it:
“Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father,” for, “I and the Father are one.” (John 14:9; 10:30)
Which means the tension they felt wasn’t between Jesus and God’s holiness. It was between Jesus and their understanding of holiness.
The Hebrew word for holy — qadosh — means set apart, whole, lacking nothing. God is unlike anything else.
But somewhere along the way, people turned holiness into fragile purity. God is clean. Sin is dirty. So a holy God must keep His distance.
There's just one problem.
Jesus.
He touches a leper. Under the Law, the man is unclean. Jesus should become unclean too. He doesn't. The man becomes clean. (Matt. 8:1–3; Lev. 13–14)
Then a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years touches Jesus.
Again, uncleanness should travel toward Him. Instead, healing travels toward her. (Mark 5:25–34; Lev. 15:25–27)
If Jesus is God,
and God is holy,
then apparently holiness
doesn't mean God can't be near
what the Law calls impure.
It means what the Law calls impure cannot survive God's touch.
Which brings us to a question: If holiness doesn’t mean God cannot be near sin, then why the cross?
The answer many of us inherited is:
God is just. He cannot simply forgive. Somebody had to pay. So Jesus stepped in to make his grace possible.
This is where our understanding of the word just has to reckon with something Scripture says just as plainly: “God is love.” (1 John 4:16)
Not that God is loving until justice requires otherwise.
God is love.
Which means whatever his justice is, it cannot be something other than his love in action — the love that “keeps no record of wrongs… always protects… never fails.” (1 Cor 13:5-8)
That love isn’t a reaction to us. Love is what God has been like all along.
And Scripture tells us
exactly how long
all along is.
“Grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus.” (2 Tim. 1:9–10)
Do you see it?
Grace was given
before time had a first page.
Jesus dying on a cross didn't make this grace possible. He made visible
what had always been true.
That’s the point of Romans 3:24-26 when it says God presented Jesus as a hilastērion — the word used for the mercy seat, the place of atonement — to demonstrate his righteousness because he had previously “passed over” sins.
Knowing his grace was already given, the point isn't that God finally found someone he could punish.
The point is that in Jesus, God finally shows us what his righteousness
does about our sin — our delusional unbelief. (Rom 14:23)
At the cross, humanity does its worst.
We betray him.
Mock him.
Strip him.
Beat him.
Nail him to wood.
And he doesn't run from it. He enters it.
And instead of passing it back, he absorbs it, reconciling to himself “all things, making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” (Col. 1:20)
We were the ones who were enemies, “in [our] minds.” (Col. 1:21)
Never him.
The cross isn't where Jesus changes his heart toward us.
It's where a loving God, knowing the destruction that flows from our unbelief, shows us how far he will go to bring us back into peace with who he has always been.
Which is why Paul
doesn't stop with Jesus dying.
Neither should we.
God “made us alive with Christ even when we were dead,” and “raised us up with Christ.” (Eph. 2:4–6)
When he died, we died with him. (Gal. 2:20)
When he rose, we rose with him. (Rom. 6:4–5)
“For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” (1 Cor. 15:22)
All.
The answer to our problem wasn't making the old life better. It was giving us his.
That's the only permanently good news this world will ever hear.
And one of the hardest to believe because of a verse that's been misread for years.
“My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46)
For centuries that line has been preached as proof that the Father, too holy to be near sin, turned away from his Son.
But read carefully.
Jesus is quoting David in Psalm 22. A passage that begins with the cry we all know: Why have You left me?
But doesn't end there.
“You have not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; you have not hidden your face from him.” (Psalm 22:24)
From: Why have You left me? To the truth we missed: You were here the whole time.
Because, again — Jesus is God on the cross. You cannot divide the Trinity. The eternal Son remains one with the Father and Spirit — holding all humanity in himself. (John 10:30; Col. 1:15–20; Eph. 4:6)
Jesus couldn’t have been clearer
about what would happen on that hill:
“On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you." (John 14:20)
That’s the whole meaning of Jesus’ last words: “It is finished.” (John 19:30) The myth of a holy and distant God, whose love had limits, was finally ended.
Because mercy and morality were never opponents.
God didn't need to become less holy in order to be gracious. And grace doesn't require God to pretend what destroys us isn't destructive.
There will still be failures. Some will need apologies. Some will face consequences. But none of them put your belonging to the Father back up for debate.
When sin and grace are allowed to mean what they mean, what happened can finally be about what happened.
You can tell the truth about it. You can notice what gave life and what took it away. You can learn. Apologize. Change course.
Not because your place at the table depends on it.
Because it doesn't.
Grace doesn’t make faith unnecessary. It finally gives faith a loving Father to trust in the life you actually have.