God’s Grace means all of Him for all of us in the humanity of Christ. It is a personal reality, God’s Self-given reality that He does not and will not keep to Himself. It is not something that we can grasp or hold onto, but a reality in Christ that grasps and holds onto us. God’s Grace has been fully actualized in the new creation, the resurrection of Jesus Christ; it is the new thing of God for the world wherein the world finds its orientation and blessed Hope. This is the most important aspect of Grace in my mind: that God has recreated a new thing because the old thing has passed away. The old thing has been the reality almost from the beginning in Genesis 3 when Adam and Eve plunged the world into sin; the old thing has passed away almost from the beginning when God in the protoevangelium promised that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the Serpent. A passage of Scripture that typifies what Grace is most, as the new thing, is found in Romans 4 when the Apostle Paul writes of Abraham’s faith:

¹⁶ For this reason it is by faith, in order that it may be in accordance with grace, so that the promise will be guaranteed to all the descendants, not only to those who are of the Law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all,¹⁷ (as it is written, “A father of many nations have I made you”) in the presence of Him whom he believed, even God, who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist. ¹⁸ In hope against hope he believed, so that he might become a father of many nations according to that which had been spoken, “So shall your descendants be.” ¹⁹ Without becoming weak in faith he contemplated his own body, now as good as dead since he was about a hundred years old, and the deadness of Sarah’s womb; ²⁰ yet, with respect to the promise of God, he did not waver in unbelief but grew strong in faith, giving glory to God, ²¹ and being fully assured that what God had promised, He was able also to perform. ²² Therefore it was also credited to him as righteousness. ²³ Now not for his sake only was it written that it was credited to him, ²⁴ but for our sake also, to whom it will be credited, as those who believe in Him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, ²⁵ He who was delivered over because of our transgressions, and was raised because of our justification. –Romans 4.16-25

Notice verse 17 and the part I have emboldened. I have always thought of this clause as corollary with the concept of creatio ex nihilo (‘creation out of nothing’). In my view this typifies God’s Grace: God calling into being something that does not exist. In the Roman context that which did not exist was the creation that had passed away, the dead creation, that came into re-existence in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the being for humanity that did not exist prior to his coming to exist in the womb of Mary, and His recreation of that passed away reality into the new reality of the glorified and risen humanity He brought into existence by the Word of His power. The point of this Grace is that it is God’s and God’s alone to give in the par excellence reality of His Self-giveness for us in the Son of Man.

Karl Barth describes this theocentralized conception of God’s Grace this way:

Grace is really the orientation in which God sets up an order which did not previously exist, to the power and benefit of which man has no claim, which he has not power to set up, which he has no competence even subsequently to justify, which in its singularity—which corresponds exactly to the singularity of the nature and being of God—he can only recognise and acknowledge as it is actually set up, as it is powerful and effective as a benefit that comes to him. Grace is God’s good-pleasure. And it is precisely in God’s good-pleasure that the reality of our being with God and of his being with us consists. For it is Jesus Christ who is God’s revelation, and the reality of this relationship in Jesus Christ is the work of the divine good-pleasure. God’s revelation breaks through the emptiness of the movement of though which we call our knowledge of God. It gives to this knowledge another side, seen from which it is not self-deception but an event in truth, because it happens by the truth. It makes us those who do not have to do only with themselves but also with God. It provides our knowledge of God with its object. And all this because it is God’s good-pleasure. For we, real men, have to do with the real God because the mercy of His good-pleasure comes upon us in all the majesty, freedom, undeservedness, unexpectedness, newness and arbitrariness of grace.[1]

We see Barth emphasizing Grace as the ground of genuine knowledge of God; that is the context this quote from him is taken from. But we also see reference to what I was referring to previously with reference to calling into existence that which did not exist previously. It is this primal and apocalyptic aspect of Grace that I think is so important for the Christian to begin to get an inkling of. There is nothing more history delimiting, creational forming than God’s Grace; and as Barth prudently underscores, God’s Grace is nothing other than God’s Self-giveness for the world in Jesus Christ. Grace is not something that can be grasped, it is not a thing at all, but it is the power of God come in an aspectual reality that has no analogue in natural history. Grace is an alien reality, but the basic reality of all that is or ever will be in the world; because Grace is God for the world, and He is all that is or ever will be outwith His free choice to create and recreate us as His counterpoints wherein we can dwell together with Him in eternal koinonia and bliss.

But the theological point I think that is so important for us to hook into is: that God’s Grace is nothing other than God for us in Christ. As such Grace cannot be manipulated or possessed by us. Grace is only God’s reality, and we are at His behest in His choice to be with and for us. As He has freely chosen to be with us, we can now be with Him; this is Grace.

[1] Barth, CD II/1 §26, 71-2.