NOTES for Eph 2:5
Words about saving grace have become commonplace in the Christian vocabulary. Today we usually give little thought to their meaning. What is this saving grace? How exactly and from what does it save us? The correct theological answer is known: from sin, which became the consequence of the fall and manifests itself in our life.
Sin hinders our salvation; by our own strength we cannot conquer it completely, and for such victory we need the grace of Christ, which saves us from sin and from eternal destruction. But what stands behind these words? If we understand them in the context of everything the Bible says about a person's relation with God, we have to admit that they describe a certain spiritual dynamic. A process. A process into which a person is included through his relations with Jesus. And these relations themselves, in turn, are an element of the process.
These relations are what should properly be called grace. Grace is not simply some divine energy spread through the world, or some force emanating from Christ in all directions. It is the unity of Christ with His Father, into which the person who entrusts himself to Christ is included. A person experiences this inclusion in Christ's relations with the Father as grace. Thanks to this inclusion, and in connection with it, a Christian shares in the life of the Kingdom.
And this sharing happens despite that sinfulness which by definition belongs to fallen humanity. Through overcoming this sinfulness. Through a person's resistance to his sin with the support of the power of God and the breath of the Kingdom that enter the person because he is included in that very spiritual process. Thus God, through Christ and in Christ, changes a person. He transforms him.
He changes his nature so that there will be no more place for sin in it. And more and more He makes the person being saved from sin an inhabitant of the Kingdom. The Kingdom where the whole fullness of grace is revealed to the human person. The whole fullness of life - not some separate life, but life within the relations that bind the King of this Kingdom with His heavenly Father. In the end, their relations form the foundation of the Kingdom. The whole fullness of grace is there, between the Father and the Son. And all others share in it according to the measure of their inclusion in Their relations. And in the life of the Kingdom, where there is no longer any place for sin.