NOTES for Eph 2:5

Words about saving grace have become commonplace in the Christian vocabulary. And today we usually give little thought to their meaning. What is this saving grace? Exactly how and from what does it save us? The correct theological answer is well known: from sin, which became the consequence of the fall and shows itself in our life.

Sin hinders our salvation; by our own strength we cannot defeat it completely, and for such a victory we need the grace of Christ, which saves us from sin and from eternal ruin. But what stands behind these words? If we understand them in the context of everything the Bible says about a person's relationship with God, we have to acknowledge that they describe a certain spiritual dynamic. A process. A process into which a person is drawn through his relationship with Jesus. And these relationships themselves, in turn, are an element of the process.

These relationships are precisely what should be called grace. Grace is not simply some divine energy diffused through the world, or some force proceeding from Christ in every direction. It is the unity of Christ with His Father, into which the person who has trusted Christ is included. A person experiences this inclusion in Christ's relationship with the Father as grace. Through this inclusion and in connection with it, the Christian comes to share in the life of the Kingdom.

And such sharing takes place in spite of the sinfulness that, by definition, belongs to fallen man. Through the overcoming of this sinfulness. Through a person's resistance to his own sin with the support of that power of God and that breath of the Kingdom which enter a person through his inclusion in that very spiritual process. In this way God, through Christ and in Christ, changes a person. He transfigures him.

He changes his nature so that sin no longer has any place in it. And more and more He makes the person being saved from sin a resident of the Kingdom. That Kingdom where the whole fullness of grace is opened to a person. The whole fullness of life, not some separate life, but life within the relationships that unite the King of this Kingdom with His heavenly Father. In the end, their relationship forms the foundation of the Kingdom. The whole fullness of grace is there, between the Father and the Son. And all others share in it as they are included in Their relationship. And in the life of the Kingdom, where there is no longer any place for sin.