Ocean of Grace (25): SATURDAY – O Sweet Exchange (p86ff)

 Lent Book: https://www.thegoodbook.co.uk/an-ocean-of-grace

 

My jottings:

 

(Comments welcome)

 

Ocean of Grace (25): SATURDAY – O Sweet Exchange (p86ff)

 

Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones famously preached on the words “but God” from Ephesians 2:4.

https://www.mljtrust.org/sermons-online/ephesians-2-1-10/but-god/ (audio and some text)

 

Or:

 

Martyn Lloyd-Jones - #4042​ - But God' The Christian Message to the World (Ephesians)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP1yUwhc8zU – he comes onto the word “but” especially about 6 minutes in!

 

In both Titus 3 and Ephesians 2, these words help us to see that the decisive intervention of God is absolutely necessary. Left to ourselves we would have been entirely lost BUT GOD loved us and acted in grace towards us making all the difference. We could not save ourselves, but of course God could save us. His action changes everything. Nothing could prevent his salvation.

 

* * *

 

Although God is not the morally responsible author of sin (we sin because we want to – God doesn’t force us against our will), God must have had a morally sufficient reason to permit the Fall. God is all knowing so of course, he made men and women knowing that they would sin against him, but he always had in mind the great redemption which he would bring about. Some theologians have even called the Fall a “happy fault” (felix culpa, in Latin) because of the wonderful salvation from sin which followed from it. Sad and sinful though the Fall was, God thought it worth it.

 

Wikipedia tells us the earliest known use of the term happy fault is in the Catholic Paschal Vigil Mass Exsultet: "O happy fault that earned for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer."

 

Ambrose speaks of the fortunate ruin of Adam in the Garden of Eden in that his sin brought more good to humanity than if he had stayed perfectly innocent.

 

Augustine says: “God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.”

 

Thomas Aquinas argued that: "God allows evils to happen in order to bring a greater good therefrom".

 

In Paradise Lost, Milton has Adam proclaim that the good resulting from the Fall is "more wonderful" than the goodness in creation:

O goodness infinite, Goodness immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good; more wonderful
Than that which creation first brought forth
Light out of Darkness!

(Book 12)

 

Hymn: There is a new song (Your love has lifted me) / When I was lost, you came and rescued me

 

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73JuxCgFEgk

 

Words: https://www.music-ministry.org/hymns/when-i-was-lost/