Ephesians: Amazing Grace

What’s So Amazing About Grace?

⁸ For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— ⁹ not by works, so that no one can boast. ¹⁰ For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Ephesians 2:8-10 (NIV)

This passage is part of a letter that was circulated and read aloud in several churches in Asia Minor. The churches were mainly comprised of Gentiles, who would have been considered by the Jews as sinners, excluded from the family of God. Paul is telling them that because God loves them, they are to be fully accepted into the people of God. They knew they had been living according to the the world’s standards and culture; they were not Jews after all. But Paul says the Jews had been living the same way in spite of their claim to be God’s people. They had all been raised up together by God. This would have been an amazing message! There was no need to become Jews first, then somehow work toward becoming full family members.

Most people in our world don’t have this same worry. We have grown up as part of a culture that is at least nominally Christian. We consider ourselves already “in the family”. Even when we encounter the gospel, we have a tendency to see ourselves as basically good, or at least better than a lot of people. In a sense we feel like we’ve already earned salvation.

The theological principle at work in this passage is that God’s act of grace has saved his wayward people; they did not and could not save themselves. Grace means getting something that is undeserved. None of us deserves to be saved; not because of who we are; not because of what we’ve done. This principle is echoed throughout the Bible. Paul writes elsewhere that all of us have sinned, failed to do what we were supposed to do. No one has been declared righteous by following the rules. Yet God has declared us just simply by his grace.

Paul’s original readers would have known they were not God’s people because they were not Jews. In this passage is the clear message that this simply doesn’t matter because it’s God’s grace that’s important, not their “Jewishness.” Today we may think that God couldn’t possible accept someone who has done the things we’ve done. This passage gives us the same assurance…it simply doesn’t matter what nasty things we’ve done because it’s God’s grace that’s important. Those who have tried to do enough to earn their acceptance hear that there is no need to worry…it simply doesn’t matter if they’ve done enough good things because it’s God’s grace that’s important.

Grace is simply amazing. It’s all that really maters.