The challenge is not getting God into our lives but realizing that our lives are already in God. (Wrestling With Grace, Robert Corin Morris, 2003, p. 23)
The question that haunted me as a teenager was how available the grace of God was to me. While others seemed to rejoice over the easy access to God’s grace, I had trouble claiming it for myself.
I suppose it might have had something to do with my personality. As a highly sensitive person with a low self-image, perhaps I was suspicious that the message of “free grace” was too good to be true. For whatever reason, I picked up the message that in order to access the grace of God I had to jump through a series of hoops.
But just like I failed at sports, it seemed that I could never make it through all the hoops lined up for me in terms of accessing grace. I always tripped up on one or the other hoop and repeatedly I watched in despair as grace slipped through my fingers. I would not be able to win the prize for which I longed – to be bathed in the grace of God.
Eventually, when grace arrested me, it took me by surprise. The sun broke through the clouds and I was bathed in a tidal wave of love that I knew instinctively had nothing much to do with all my grasping at grace. It was a gift, pure and simple. So, the question I have wrestled with ever since is how available God’s grace actually is to me, and indeed to the whole world.
In recent years I have found significant help from John E. Toews in his commentary on Romans in the Believers Church Bible Commentary series. It comes by way of suggesting an alternative, non-traditional reading to Romans 3:21-26.
The traditional interpretation goes something like this: God’s gift of grace is only available or activated on the basis of human faith. That is, if I can cobble together an appropriate kind and amount of faith, I can pry open the door to the storehouse of God’s grace. Or to say it another way, grace is locked behind closed doors and to get at it I must find the right key and unlock the door from the outside.
The troubling question, of course, is what happens when I can’t find the right key, or indeed, if the key has not yet been brought to the world in which I live? Or if, groping around in the darkness, I can’t find the keyhole?
The alternative interpretation which Toews suggests goes something like this: In this passage the Apostle Paul is answering the Jewish charge that if his assertion is correct in which he places Jews and Gentiles on the same footing before God, then the righteousness of God is compromised. God has not been faithful to his promises to the Jewish people.
Paul counters that charge by saying that while the law and the prophets anticipated this new move, God’s righteousness has now been revealed apart from the law – “through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ for all who believe” (v:22). Many modern translations use some variant of the phrase, “through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.” Toews points out that this is an unnatural reading because it means that the last two phrases basically say the same thing: that the kick-starter for grace is faith in Jesus and belief in Jesus. Why would Paul repeat himself this way?
Two critical questions emerge in the translation of this text. One is how to translate the preposition coming before Jesus Christ. Toews notes that both “of” and “in” are legitimate translations, but as noted above, the “of” is the more natural translation. In fact this is what the King James Version uses. The other question relates to the translation of the Greek word “pisteos”. Toews argues it can be translated as faith or faithfulness, but that the latter is preferred because of the larger context involved here.
Toews than offers an alternative translation of Romans 3:21-22a as follows:
But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been and continues to be revealed, being witnessed to by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God, through the faithfulness of Messiah Jesus to all the ones believing.
While this trek through a bit of Greek grammar and translation may seem to some to be picking at gnats, for me it has monumental implications. Toews’ dissecting of this passage leads me to a much more generous understanding of the availability of God’s grace. It does not depend upon finding the right key to unlock the storehouse of grace. It is dependent upon the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.
To catch the grandeur of this alternative reading, one just needs to keep reading “the faithfulness of Christ” wherever the term “faith” appears in most translations. So in verses 25b-26, Paul is saying that what God has done through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ is
“…to demonstrate his righteousness through the forgiveness of previously committed sins in the forbearance of God, to demonstrate his righteousness in the present time, to be himself righteous even in making righteous the one living out of the faithfulness of Jesus.
And Romans 5:1 can read as follows:
“Therefore, since we are justified through the faithfulness of Jesus, let us have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
In reference to this abundant grace unlocked by the faithfulness of Jesus, Robert Corin Morris says, “The Ancient vision of The Eastern Orthodox Church emphasizes how God becomes known through these “infinite and eternal energies” rushing in “movements” through the world, streams of grace “in which everything that exists participates. Grace is present, shining and available in every situation to eyes that can see it, waiting to be savored, named and claimed.”
A much more generous vision of grace than I had thought at first. Hallelujah!
