Grace: The Existential Answer

I have always searched for answers, for the truth. Socrates said “The unexamined life is not worth living”. If I knew what is important from what isn’t, I reasoned, then I can live a better life, a life worth living. It annoyed me but also amused me that most people didn’t seem to contemplate or to even be interested in these matters, at least nothing close to how I do. Besides, something was off, why hasn’t anyone figured out what is the best way to live, what is the meaning of life, what is important and what isn’t? Why am I the one who has to do it? To be clear, there is no shortage of answers to these questions. But none of them seemed satisfactory. None of them were deep enough, universal enough, applicable enough, etc. 

I didn’t want to limit my search to a specific direction. I thought the truth should be universal enough that I can find it in any field. The humanities dealt with such questions about what it means to be human and what is the meaning of life. Therefore, that is where I mainly sought my answers. This included philosophy, psychology, religion, and a bit of art, or beauty. These seemed to me to be the major human endeavors to understanding what it means to be human and a major attempt to answer these questions of how to live the good life. 

From my readings, I realized that what guides my search as well as what guides the search of every philosopher and psychoanalyst for these answers is a fundamental human problem. We, as humans, are afflicted. We are cursed, if you will. Our human condition is pitiable, sad, lonely, and meaningless. At our core, our humanity afflicts us with anxiety, fear, guilt, confusion, and feelings of inferiority and weakness. I was planning to describe to you this existential problem through various philosophers and psychoanalysts to show you the gravity of this problem and its spread. But I think I will stick to religion. I just want you to realize that this is not just the problem of a group of people, it is a human problem, there is no one who is safe, who doesn’t experience this nausea from existence as Sartre put it. 

The existential human problem starts with the story of the fall of Adam and Eve. 

Genesis 3Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

² The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, ³ but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

⁴ “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. ⁵ “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

⁶ When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. ⁷ Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

⁸ Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. ⁹ But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”

¹⁰ He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

¹¹ And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

¹² The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

¹³ Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”

The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

¹⁴ So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

“Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.¹⁵ And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring^[a] and hers; he will crush^[b] your head, and you will strike his heel.”

¹⁶ To the woman he said, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband,
 and he will rule over you.” ¹⁷ To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you;  through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.
¹⁸ It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.
¹⁹ By the sweat of your brow  you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

²⁰ Adam^[c] named his wife Eve,^[d] because she would become the mother of all the living.

²¹ The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. ²² And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” ²³ So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. ²⁴ After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side^[e] of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.”

What seems to have happened at the fall of mankind is a fundamental change in our nature. Our eyes were opened, which means that we became self-aware, we became self-conscious. It is fascinating that our first experience as a self-conscious being is that of shame. Shame at the nakedness of the body. As we shall see, the dichotomy of the mind and body is at the root of the human problem. I always wondered whether what happens next in the story is a result of God’s judgment or a natural consequence of the fall. It seems as though God inflicts punishment on both Adam and Eve before they get kicked out of heaven. But is it possible that what happened was a natural consequence of the knowledge of good and evil, of becoming a self-conscious human?

Here’s Ernest Becker: In this story of the fall is contained the basic insight of psychology of all time: that woman/man became a union of opposites, of self-consciousness and of physical body. Mankind emerged from the instinctive thoughtless action of lower animals and came to reflect on their condition. He/she was given a consciousness of his/her individuality and part-divinity in creation, the beauty and uniqueness of his/her face and name. At the same time he/she was given the consciousness of the terror of the world and of his/her own death and decay. 

Humans have a symbolic identity that brings us sharply out of nature. She is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to mankind literally the status of a small god in nature, as the renaissance thinkers knew. 

Yet, at the same time, as the eastern sages also knew, wo/man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; she has her head up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-grasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways-the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Mankind is literally split in two: she has an awareness of her own splendid uniqueness in that she sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet she goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever.”

For us, becoming self-conscious meant experiencing pain and death as a personal affliction. It meant that the labor pains for Eve are a punishment, that the toils of Adam to make a living are a punishment, that death is the biggest punishment. Notice that the animals don’t get kicked out of heaven, they are still living in the heaven of Eden. What we fail to see is that animals very much experience labor pains, they spend their entire lives toiling for food and shelter, and all animals die too. But because animals are not self-conscious, they don’t spend time contemplating how evil the experience of pain is, they don’t curse their luck at having to work to earn their living, and most importantly, they are not conscious of their own mortality and death. Animals live within the experience of the body and the environment, they lack the power to contemplate their self and existence. 

Here’s Becker again: “The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively, as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don’t know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one’s dreams and even the most sun-filled days__ that’s something else.”

Once we have defined the problem, we can start to look for a solution to it. Perhaps here is where we encounter a huge part of the human confusion at our condition. The existential philosophers rejected simple beliefs, distractions, and societal and cultural hero systems that give us superficial ways to answer this dilemma. The existential philosophers encouraged us to embrace the feelings of despair and anxiety that arise when we contemplate our condition instead of avoiding them or drowning them in addictions and material possessions and half-assed beliefs. Existentialists often view these feelings of despair and anxiety not as problems to be avoided but as the truth that reveals the depth of human freedom and the need for personal authenticity. Once we do, we can carry the burden of our own existence on our shoulders. We do so bravely and defiantly, because even though we are “condemned to be free” as Sartre put it, we are the creators in an empty and hostile world. 

I appreciated and respected these thinkers, they are authentic, sincere, and brave. They are smarter than most of us and refused to accept pre-cut solutions. Still, their answers also didn’t seem satisfactory. The reason is because their solutions were working from within the human existential problem, a problem that we did not create and have no ability to solve. Instead of living a meaningless life as they saw it, they took it upon themselves to create their own meaning and significance. Yet, although admirable, their battle is an uphill battle, and, eventually, a losing battle. 

I stumbled across the answer through this class. There were many times when Dr. Weaver talked about Grace. But it was a class about living the good life that revealed it to me. I always wondered about the solution to the fear of death. The fear of our own mortality and annihilation. This is intimately connected with the human dilemma, because our mind cannot fathom the fact that since our bodies are meant to die, the mind will cease to exist as well. It is a huge fear, an unconscious fear, nevertheless it is this fear that animates all of our striving as Becker thought. 

Grace is the existential answer. It is the only answer to the existential problem of being human. The existential answer has to come from outside of us, from existence itself. The existential answer is God herself. 

 As we noted, the existential problem is two sided. First, we struggle because we are animals and tied to this body that is destined for decay and death, but second we also struggle because we are creative humans, we are self-conscious and desire freedom, power, and meaning. Grace answers both of these sides. With Grace, we fully renounce our human freedom. We are not equal to the creator; we don’t create our own purpose and meaning. As Jesus said, Grace is a yoke. With grace comes the acknowledgment of my finitude, my bondage to God. My purpose and meaning is the one that God supplies to my life, not the one I desire to create. The purpose of my life is the glory of God, not my individual glory. But that’s not the end of it, because grace is what supplies the answer to the animal body. The body that as humans we desire so much to rid ourselves of. The body that is the law of sin and death, as Paul noted. Grace is the only thing that does that for us. It tells us that despite having an animal body, we are very much not animals. It is God that gives us our value, it is God that relieves the guilt of the original sin. The guilt that arises from the dichotomy of the human experience. Grace provides the freedom that we seek but never achieve on our own. Jesus emphatically tells us that we are valued more than animals and plants. Matthew 6:26-30 “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?”
“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?”

God transcends the physical needs of the body with spiritual provisions. God provides us with spiritual food and drink. Grace is the bread of life, the body of the crucified Jesus. Grace is a fountain of water that spills into eternal life. God also provides us with magnificent clothing, a robe of righteousness that shines so bright, it is essentially made out of light. What we are missing is a tiny bit of faith, a faith to see the Truth with a capital T. The faith to turn our sight from ourselves and our condition and look at God and His glory. This is the meaning of the story of the bonze serpent. Our sight is transfixed at the sin that the serpent has bitten us with, so much so that we fail to see the crucified God. We only need a tiny bit of faith to look outside of ourselves onto God to see grace and to heal. 

The promise of the serpent at the fall is that to distinguish between good and evil we become more like God. The serpent promise is the promise of existential philosophy, the promise of faulty religion. I can make my way to God through my good actions, I can earn my salvation with my good works. I have existential freedom to decide for myself what is right and what is wrong, this is my existential responsibility. Yet, this promise of freedom, this promise of being creators exactly like God, is what keeps us enslaved, keeps us condemned. It keeps us separated from God, lonely, and confused. Grace is a complete reversal of the existential problem. With grace, we are not free agents, we do not control our own destiny and fate. Yet that is the truth that sets us free. That’s why grace is so paradoxical, so hard for us to wrap our heads around it. The paradox of grace is that true freedom is found in surrendering our perceived independence. When we embrace grace, we release our endless striving, our anxiety over controlling our own destiny. Instead of carrying the weight of creating our identity and value, we find that we are already loved and valued by God, not because of what we’ve achieved or avoided, but because of His nature. This can feel counterintuitive—because it contradicts our deep-seated instincts for self-reliance and control.

With grace, the pressure of self-justification dissolves. We’re liberated from the cycle of proving ourselves and are invited to rest in a new kind of freedom: the freedom that we are loved unconditionally. Here comes another place for faith, the faith to believe God when he says in “Genesis 1:27So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” We are born in the image of the king of the universe and our inheritance is of royal standing. It is living in the castle, royal food and water, a ring in the finger, a robe of righteousness, and an eternal party. 

Grace collapses the existential problem from every aspect of human endeavor. With Grace, there is no separation of the problem into different fields of humanities. I think this is why Grace is an experience of awe like no other. It hits deep at the core of the human problem. In a single instant, Grace resolves the anxiety of death, it saves us from the original sin, it relieves the condemnation of freedom, it answers the absurdity of existence, it gives us value, meaning, and worth and exposes our blindness at our existential loneliness. Experiencing grace is experiencing God. It is both a painful and a joyful experience at the same time. Grace confronts us with the reality of our own brokenness, limitations, and guilt. To truly experience grace is to come face to face with the truth that we cannot save ourselves, that we are utterly dependent on God’s mercy. This recognition can be deeply painful—it exposes our pride, our independence, and the illusion of control that we so often cling to.

Yet, at the same moment, grace is joyful—it is the ultimate act of love and redemption, the invitation to participate in the life of God. There is no greater joy than the freedom that grace brings. It is the joy of knowing that we are loved and accepted, not for what we do, but simply because we are. Grace is both humbling and exultant. It strips away all our illusions of self-sufficiency, but it also fills us with a love and peace that surpasses understanding.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Donald: Controlling our own destiny appears to be what we ultimately want. We want to control our own destiny. And everything we learn in life is trying to somehow establish that you are in control, and then we quickly realize that we’re not, from a variety of life experiences. I don’t know that I agree with you on the question of animals. I don’t know that it’s critical. But, you know, a herd of elephants are not self-aware; they just see part of the herd go down. Animals are in a constant state of fear. Wild animals never get to relax because it’s always about survival, and you’re somebody else’s meal. I’m not sure they ever are at peace—they may look it, but I think that’s our understanding of animals. I don’t know that it’s critical. So we are cursed with anxiety, fear, and guilt.

David: I don’t think so. I’m sorry to differ. I don’t feel cursed personally. I don’t feel depressed. I don’t feel that existence sucks. I don’t feel that existence is a burden at all. From time to time, yes, I get despondent over something, but in general, no. And if existence really sucks, then preachers would do better standing on the roadside handing out Prozac rather than religious tracts. They’d do more good. I just cannot accept the premise that the whole world is depressed with an existence that sucks.

Anonymous: We don’t have to go too far from the Bible to see what Michael was telling us about. The philosophers and the writings of Solomon gave us this picture before anyone else. It is true, and the fact that human beings don’t want to admit it is because we reject it. We don’t want to live it. We don’t want to acknowledge it. We don’t want to give it any attention. We live like drunkards, away from reality, but the reality is what Solomon said: life sucks in human terms, but there must be a better expression for that, and we have the solution. Thank God for His grace. When we come to realize this is a fact of life, we are much more hopeful, and we don’t need Prozac or fear because there is a solution, and God provided it. All we have to do is accept it and surrender. We have to break our prideful, proud hearts in order to live happily, to accept what is, and to be like children, surrendering and trusting in God. There’s no problem, no fear of that. We came right from His hand, and we’re going back to His hand. So God worked everything out for us.

Don: I wonder, David, if the reason you don’t see life in the same way as others is that you’ve accepted grace. Maybe that’s really the key element here—the question of how much grace you can accept, and whether you will or not. I’m also puzzled by the emotional toll that grace takes on the individual. By toll, I mean that the emotions of grace are very strong. We see this in all kinds of stories in the Bible; grace elicits joy, but it also elicits anger and disdain. I’m wondering if maybe, David, you’re in a different place than maybe some others, and maybe you’re in a better place. I’d like to know how I can get into that place.

David: I agree with Anonymous, except I don’t believe it’s applicable to everybody. I believe it’s applicable when you need grace, then it kicks in exactly the way she said. I think Jesus said as much in the Sermon on the Mount in the Beatitudes: that’s when grace kicks in, when you’re at the end of your tether, when there’s nowhere else to turn but to God. In the meantime, when you’re not in that dire situation, I think you’re sort of in a state of grace, even if you don’t know it, even if you don’t think about it, if you are simply living life, obeying the Golden Rule. I think that’s all you need to live in a state of grace.

It’s not something you need to be aware of. Jesus did not suggest that the Good Samaritan was piously aware of being a good Samaritan. He just saw someone in the street who needed help, and his heart led him to help, in effect sharing the grace that he already possessed. But I don’t think he was thinking at all in terms of grace and being a good Samaritan. He was just doing what was already in him to do.

I do believe I am more of an optimist than a pessimist. I do believe that most of us are “blessed” with a generally good life, not a burdensome life. It’s true for most people most of the time, but some people much less of the time. There’s no question about that. The mugged victim in the Good Samaritan story was not living the best of lives at that point in time. Life can be awful—“nasty, brutish, and short”—but it isn’t always that bad for everyone. In general, most of us are living, I think, a grace-filled life.

Carolyn: Where do the 10 Commandments come in? You say we all want to be in control. I agree with that, and I also agree with “Do unto others”—that is so primary, and yet God has said time and again we have to keep the commandments.

Anonymous: I see the 10 Commandments connected to love, and when we are aware of our miserable existence and turn to God, we know for sure we are naked—all of us. We are equally naked all around the world. And when we get to that point, and we come to God, and we feel the love, we know that He is the solution for this problem. He offered it right when Adam and Eve sinned, right from the beginning; He found the solution for us. It’s so natural to come to Him and say, “I am your slave, Lord, I want to do anything you want, and you want me to do right.” Therefore, keeping the commandments is not something we force ourselves to do; it’s something that just naturally springs out of our hearts.

David: Jesus kind of swept away the 10 Commandments with the central one of loving your neighbor and loving God. In that sense, He “fulfilled the law”—the old commandments—and established a higher law than the law written in the Old Testament. So I don’t worry about obeying the 10 Commandments, but I do think it’s important to obey the central commandment, the Golden Rule.

Kiran: I look at this thing a little differently, probably because I come from an Adventist background, maybe a traditional Adventist background. So the 10 Commandments, which Jesus shortened into two—love your God and love your neighbor—didn’t go away. They’re still required, but the way I see it is that loving others the way God loves us is something we had before the Fall. The first thing that happened after Adam and Eve realized they were naked and all that stuff, and God asked, “What have you done?” is they started accusing each other and started accusing God. So they lost the ability to love the way God loves us, or the way they used to love each other. The only way such love can come back to us is through grace.

When talking about grace, everybody focuses on one part of the three aspects that grace does. The first part is it takes away punishment. That’s fine, but it doesn’t stop there. The second part is grace internally transforms us so that we love others the way God loves us. We all desire to love in the way God loves us. That’s why we come to church, why we are in this community. But we recognize, no matter who we are or which background we come from, there is something insufficient in our lives. So it is the job of grace, or it is the job of God, to transform me inside out so that I can love the way God wants me to love. What I’m saying is that grace is about trying to love others as God loves, not by my own effort, but by God’s transformation.

I’m not saying that grace means you just go and do whatever you want to do—that’s not what I believe. What I believe is that you don’t need to try and fail again and again to have purity of thought. It’s not humanly possible, but with God’s help, with His transformation, whatever grace does in my life, eventually I’ll get there. So I don’t worry about it anymore.

Carolyn: I guess it’s because I’ve been raised in a certain way that even though I believe totally in grace, and I believe that we have to be transformed, and I believe in the greatest commandment… but where does that leave us? We all know it’s wrong to kill and to steal, but where does that put the Sabbath, and how we keep the Sabbath? Does that take all that away? Does it leave the ritual up to us rather than something God has predetermined? We’ve had much discussion on how we keep the Sabbath and rituals. Is that unimportant? Should we just live our lives and give it all to the Lord? I give it all and I want to be transformed, but that doesn’t take the edge off of having what I would call self-condemnation, of being afraid I’m not doing it just right. If I don’t have to worry about it, that sounds so wonderful—that these little things don’t mean that much.

Frank: I’ve been coming to learn in terms of the law of God and the 10 Commandments. I used to think it was a form that I needed to work really hard to obey, and if I messed up in this little way, then God was mad at me, and I was lost and wouldn’t make it to heaven someday. But when I look at Romans chapter seven, Paul is saying that while a woman is married to her husband, she cannot be married to another, but if her husband dies, she is free to marry another. And Paul uses this to illustrate our relationship with God. He says:

“Therefore, my brothers and sisters, you also were put to death in regard to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might belong to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. For while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were brought to light by the Law, were at work in the parts of our body to bear fruit for death. But now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter.” (Romans 7:4-6)

The way I see that is that we are not trying to serve the law, looking to the law to ask how we ought to live. We are in Christ, and the Spirit of Christ is in us. Another part of the Scripture says that the law is written on our hearts so that everything we do for God is heart service. It’s all about the heart. When we have accepted Jesus and received Him as Lord of our life, and He has put His Spirit in us, He will work in us to will and to do of His good pleasure. When we have that spirit of God in our hearts, natural obedience follows. It’s not that I have to work hard, strive to do this, and if I don’t do it a certain way, God will frown upon me. Instead, it’s: “I’m going to do this thing, and if I mess up along the way, I’m going to get back up and just keep following Christ.” Jesus continues to work in our hearts, and everything we do is a service that flows from the heart that has accepted Christ.

Kiran: I still struggle with the question that Carolyn asked. I grew up in the church, learning about how to keep the Sabbath, which is very important. It’s actually a sign. The distinction between the Sunday versus the Saturday Sabbath bothers me a little, or the way I’m keeping the Sabbath. I worry that I may be throwing God’s sacrifice onto the floor and trampling on it (that’s one of the expressions people used to use in the church when saying you’re wasting the sacrifice of Jesus Christ). I used to feel quite guilty about it, and one day I was thinking about some of the best days of my Sabbath keeping, and then I realized, even in those days, my effort was like scoring 1 out of 100 points, and no matter how hard I tried, I never crossed the threshold of one point.

But that doesn’t mean I threw away the importance of Sabbath day. Rather, it became something different for me. Now the way I look at Sabbath is as a promise or a sign that God is the one who sanctifies you. You can’t sanctify yourself. So now I look at each commandment as a promise of God. “I will make you a faithful husband. I’ll make you meet your commitments, do your duty. I will make you such a worthy man that you will never steal again.” So I look at each commandment as a promise from God that He will accomplish those things in my life as I continue to look at Him.

This gives me such peace. The fear that I used to have of messing up has gone away. I used to focus so much on my own efforts. Now I focus on what God is doing in my life. And that switch didn’t happen instantly. It took years. I always walked between that fear and peace, but now I walk only in peace.

Reinhard: God made us in His image and likeness. When we talk about animals, of course, God created living things made out of cells; maybe animals share some similarities with us. But we are more than animals. We are created just slightly lower than heavenly beings, which is something very high in quality. Speaking of the law, the first law is the guidance for humans to live. That was the intention after Sinai—that humans must have a standard of living, which is the law of God. We know this from the 10 Commandments, which are established to last forever, as in the Psalms. To me, when we are close to God, when He knows our hearts, it seems like the 10 Commandments—the basics of moral values and standards—are not hard for us to follow. Once we know what God wants, of course, if we sum it up, it’s love of man and love of God.

Remember when a young man came to Jesus and asked what to do? God still recited the 10 Commandments: Do not kill, do not do this or that. When it comes to the 10 Commandments, the Sabbath is the one thing among Christians where there are differences in practice. But God will judge based on what people know. As far as their faith in God, when God gives us grace, we experience it in our daily lives—all the goodness that comes from God. Of course, that’s grace. But the ultimate grace God gave us was through the crucifixion, which was to forgive our sins. This is the greatest grace, because the impact of our sins being forgiven is what leads us to salvation. That’s the main thing: the grace God gave us, the ultimate price, so we can someday be with Him in heaven. All the grace we experience in life—it’s God’s blessing, God’s grace, all the good things we feel. When it comes to the law, when we are closer to God, it’s not hard to follow. We may stumble, but God gave us grace to save us, to forgive us. That’s the principle we have to remember, that when we are in Jesus, there’s nothing hard to do, although we’re not always perfect.

Anonymous: I’d like to ask Dr. Weaver about his remark that grace elicits despair and guilt feelings.

Don: I was referring to Jonah, who became so angry at God’s demonstration of grace. I was just pondering why grace seems to be, on the one hand, such an elevated and joyful experience, and on the other hand, sometimes can elicit tremendous anger. It’s a very emotion-filled event. I think we misinterpret grace when we get angry with God for delivering us with grace.

Sharon: For me, it’s all about the relationship. The commandments are just guideposts, and it’s not up to me to change myself anymore, but it’s up to me to trust completely in the saving power of grace and the Holy Spirit’s influence in my life to tackle those things. So my challenge is just to stay connected to the vine and trust in Him, with the peace that being connected to Him will allow Him to do the work that needs to be finished in me.

Don: Thanks to Michael for a beautiful essay.

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