I want to flesh out my thinking a little bit more on something I touched on in my comments on the M&S advert. There I engaged with the question “what were you expecting from an advert?” Was it crass, self-centred commercialism? Well yes of course. The question is whether we should have expected better. Others have suggested that we could expect better, we could expect joy, niceness and fun because these things come through common grace.
When we talk about grace, we usually are referring to the means by which we are saved, God freely and unconditionally loving forgiving and rescuing us through Jesus’ death on the Cross. We sometimes describe this as “saving grace” or “special grace.”
Special or saving grace therefore is something specific to believers, to God’s people. Common Grace however is something for everyone. It’s about everything else that God provides for us, everything we get to enjoy which doesn’t involve salvation itself. Common grace includes practical things such as the conditions in creation that enable us to be fed and clothed. We might refer to those things as part of God’s providence. It’s also about the ways in which God restrains the worst of evil and moral depravity, the laws of the land, culture, education etc are part of common grace. We are right to think of joy, kindness, general humanity as being part of this. It’s common because it is available to all, its grace because due to sin, we don’t even deserve this. I would also treat things like “marriage” as being part of common grace.
However, as I’ve argued previously, I don’t think that common grace is available uniformly, to the same extent to all. In other words, we are not dealing with something binary, something either present or absent. Rather, because common grace is something that comes from God , then it is possible to have a greater or lesser enjoyment of it.
Think about it this way. Even believers don’t get to fully enjoy all of those benefits to their fullest extent yet. Our health, physical fitness and emotional well-being might all be seen as part of common grace but there are limits and disruption to those things now. When we reach the goal of special, saving grace, when Christ returns and renews all things, that’s when we will get to fully enjoy those things.
Common grace is really the overflow of God’s goodness, grace and love. In fact, some reformed theologians would argue that those goods were always intended first and foremost for God’s people so that others benefit from the overflow. We expect there to be greater joy, greater enjoyment of God’s gifts as we learn to glorify him and enjoy him. That being so, I would expect there to also be a reduction, a thinning of the enjoyment of these good things.
If our chief end is to enjoy God and glorify him for ever, then true joy comes when we are glorifying him. Just as John Piper realised that we glorify God by enjoying him, we can say that we enjoy God by glorifying him.
Faithroots 