Sola Gratia: More Amazing Than You Know

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If you were given the task to describe God in a single sentence, what would you emphasize?
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Listen to how the Old Testament describes God:
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Psalm 86:15 “But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.”
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Joel 2:13 “and rend your hearts and not your garments.” Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster.”
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Finally, look at  Jonah 4:2 “And he prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.”
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Is this just some writer’s opinions? How do we know that they have the right view of God? Why does it seem like they are all working off that same line “gracious and merciful”? Sounds like that comes from somewhere.
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Well that line does come from somewhere. It turns out that this is the line that God uses to introduce Himself! God is going to use a sentence or two describe Himself. So what does a perfect (by definition) summary of God sound like?
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Exodus 34:6 “The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,” Now, there is more that we will get to in a moment, but let’s focus on this first part for right now.
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What does it mean to be gracious? One definition I found put it this way: “goodwill freely disseminated (by God); especially to the benefit of the recipient regardless of the benefit accrued to the disseminator.” In other words, God doesn’t need anything, so His showing grace to you doesn’t advance Him. It is coming purely from a character that loves to be gracious.
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Let’s take a look at these passages to see what they tell us about grace and the God who wields it.
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God is more gracious than you can imagine
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Let’s start with Psalm 86:14–15 “O God, insolent men have risen up against me; a band of ruthless men seeks my life, and they do not set you before them. But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.”
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Here, David is praying to God for favor (the same root word for “grace”) because “ruthless men” are after him to kill him. They possess power and are quick to use it for violence. Isn’t that what we see with people that get power? They use it for their own ends.
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God is different. God is in contrast to powerful, violent men. Instead, He is a God merciful and gracious. He uses His power for the good of His people. This is God’s character that He Himself introduces, so David is pleading not on the basis that God sometimes acts in a gracious way. He pleads on the base code of God.
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Is that how you think about God? I mean, usually people think about God, especially in the Old Testament, as being the mean and mad one until Jesus comes. This passage comes as a bit of surprise. King David pleads on the basis of God’s grace even when Jesus hasn’t come yet.
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Now, some may respond, “Well, of course God is gracious to the king of Israel! After all, King David is a man after God’s own heart (well, except that bit where he was philandering and murdering). But what about when God has to respond to, like, deep sinners. In fact, let’s challenge God further: Let Him respond to Gentile sinners!”
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Fine. Let’s do it.
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We actually have a humorous example of this very challenge in
Jonah 4:2. Jonah, as you may remember, was told to go preach to the people of Nineveh, and he tries to go the exact opposite way. When we get to this verse at the very end of the book, we find out why. It turns out that Jonah, a member of God’s people and a prophet, hates these people, and he wanted to see them burned up by God. But Jonah knew, he KNEW that God was a gracious God and would haul off and forgive their sins when they repent. These were very cruel people, and Jonah wanted to see them destroyed not forgiven. It seems unfair, unjust even, when violent, evil people are forgiven. I mean, these people would go through an area and impale people and leave their twitching body on the side of the road on a pole! Yet, they repent in response to God’s Word, and God spares them.
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Don’t you feel a bit of indignation build up for just a minute? Right before you tamp it back down because you know you aren’t supposed to feel that. You feel almost a sense of injustice in this. But this is only because we are more like Jonah than Jesus. We are not gracious and full of mercy. When people do something wrong, especially when they do something wrong to us, we want to see them pay.
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This is why the revenge movie genre is so popular. We want to see a wrong set right, or at least as right as possible. When the bad guy kills a member of the hero’s family, we spend the whole movie rooting for the hero to put a bullet through the villain’s head, don’t we?
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What I find fascinating in some movies today, is they want to have it both ways. Some have the hero extend grace to the villain, saying something like, “Well, this won’t make it better,” and attempt to walk away from the villain the better man. Well, that’s an unsatisfying conclusion, isn’t it? We all sit forward and say, “Come on, Man! Take him out!” But the hero starts walking away despite our pleas. We begin to feel bad about ourselves until the villain begins to stir, he’s got a gun, the hero is going to die! So, left with no rational choice, the hero pulls out his own weapon and dispatches the villain forever! Everyone wins! Moral complication resolved! The ethicists are happy, and so are the moviegoers. The bullet traveling through the whole movie hits its mark.
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So what happens when God is on the warpath? What happens when God’s people are the villains?
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Let’s find out by looking at the prophet Joel. Turn if you will to  Joel 2. According to scholars, Joel is hard to pin down as to exactly when, and therefore why, it was written. In fact, one source said, “The Book of Joel has been assigned by different authorities to very various dates, ranging over 4 or 5 cents …in fact, whether J. is perhaps the very earliest or the very last or among the last of the writing prophets” (Robertson, 1690). Thanks, scholars! Coulda been written anytime, really. But I think that’s on purpose, because what we see here I think can be applied to any time because what is being discussed here is God’s character.
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Here in  Joel 2, we are seeing what it looks like when God is coming.
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Listen to Joel 2:1–7 “Blow a trumpet in Zion; sound an alarm on my holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming; it is near, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness! Like blackness there is spread upon the mountains a great and powerful people; their like has never been before, nor will be again after them through the years of all generations. Fire devours before them, and behind them a flame burns. The land is like the garden of Eden before them, but behind them a desolate wilderness, and nothing escapes them. Their appearance is like the appearance of horses, and like war horses they run. As with the rumbling of chariots, they leap on the tops of the mountains, like the crackling of a flame of fire devouring the stubble, like a powerful army drawn up for battle. Before them peoples are in anguish; all faces grow pale. Like warriors they charge; like soldiers they scale the wall. They march each on his way; they do not swerve from their paths.”
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This culminates in verse 11, Joel 2:11 “The Lord utters his voice before his army, for his camp is exceedingly great; he who executes his word is powerful. For the day of the Lord is great and very awesome; who can endure it?”
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God is coming! His army is swift, efficient, focused, devastatingly destructive, and heading for you! God isn’t rash or emotional. He means what says! You want to rebel against God? Well, then, here it comes!
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But then! Look at Joel 2:12–13 ““Yet even now,” declares the Lord, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.” Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster.”
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What?? God is coming on you that hard, and yet even then, in the midst of judgement, when the army is in sight, burning all that is in front of them, at your door, yet EVEN NOW, if you turn, if you come back to the Lord, I will bless? It is as if God doesn’t want to punish, and that He will use the first excuse not to punish. If his people will repent, (which this passage seems to indicate the people did) look at how God responds in
Joel 2:19 “The Lord answered and said to his people, “Behold, I am sending to you grain, wine, and oil, and you will be satisfied; and I will no more make you a reproach among the nations.”
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Gracious and mercy. Good gracious.
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The hero has turned from the villain! He let’s the villain live! But now what happens when the villain turns yet again. What if at the end of the movie the villain trains his gun, not on the hero, but on his son? Anyone would step in front of a bullet to save the child, so the villain hits where it hurts.
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Sound familiar? God sent His only Son, the perfect representation of grace and mercy. The One who said, “Come to me and I will give you rest! Let the thirsty come and drink at the Living Water, let the hungry taste of the Bread of Life, come through the door to salvation, be taken up in the arms of the Good Shepherd” and God’s people said, “No! Not only will we not do that, we will take this Son and kill Him. Not only will we kill Him, but we will use His Father’s own words against Him in Deuteronomy 21:23, which says that any man hung on a tree is cursed! We will kill him in the most torturous, the most shameful way we can possibly think of to do it and on the very day in which we celebrate Your deliverance of us from Egypt.”
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It doesn’t get any more evil, any more sinister than that.
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And yet. Even Now. The hero turns to the villain with his bloodied son in his arms and says, “This body and blood is given for you. This very act of murder I am going to use to purchase your redemption!” And at these words, the Son rises from the grave, holes still in His hands and side, and offers you life.
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That’s gracious and merciful. That’s your God. It is by grace that you have been saved, and this is not of your own doing, for what villain having done this has any hope to redeem himself? This is not of works, don’t make it about you, lest you have anything to boast about. The villain gets no credit here. The Hero gets it all.
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So what does this mean for us? Why does Sola Gratia make a difference? Recognizing who God is will make you worship. Maybe that is why your heart gets cold because you don’t realize what has been given to you. Remind yourself of this grace, and I dare you not to worship.
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If you haven’t come to Christ yet, then I would urge you to do it today. The rest of our verse today says that this same God who is gracious and merciful, who loves to forgive sins,
Exodus 34:7b, “but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” Don’t take God’s gracious character to mean that He is a pushover. He is most decidedly not.
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Let’s see that from the New Testament,
Hebrews 10:28–29“Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?”
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If God is going to be that gracious to you to give you His Son, and you decide that you love your sin more, eventually, God will bring justice. He is good. He must punish. Eventually, the hero turns the gun on the villain.
Hebrews 10:30–31 “For we know him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.” It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
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Don’t push away your own salvation. Don’t despise your own grace. Embrace it. Turn from those sins in the power of Christ, and rest in the glorious grace of our merciful God. Drop the gun; the hero isn’t going to die. Instead, with a heart changed by the Spirit, tearfully receive the Son’s hand, and be lifted up into the joy of the Father.
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James Robertson, “Joel,” ed. James Orr et al., The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia (Chicago: The Howard-Severance Company, 1915), 1690.