The Attributes of God - God's Grace (Part Two)

 

The Attributes of God - God's Grace (Part Two)

 A Journey into the Father's Heart, Volume 1

  By A.W. Tozer  

(Pages 103-106)

Grace Is What God Is Like

Grace is what God is like. Grace is God's goodness, the kindness of God's heart, the goodwill, the cordial benevolence—this is what God is like. God is like that all the time. You’ll never encounter a part of God that is hard; you will always find God gracious, at all times and toward all people, forever. You’ll never find any meanness in God, no resentment, no rancor, or ill will, for there is none there. God has no ill will toward any being. God is a God of utter kindness, cordiality, goodwill, and benevolence. And yet, all of these work in perfect harmony with God's justice and God's judgment. I believe in hell and I believe in judgment, but I also believe that there are those who God must reject because of their impenitence. Yet there will still be grace. God will still feel gracious toward all of His universe—He is God, and He can’t do anything else.

Grace is infinite, but I don't want you to strain to understand infinitude. I have had the temerity to preach on infinitude a few times, and I got along all right—at least, I got along. Let’s try to measure it against ourselves, not against God. God never measures anything in Himself against anything else in Himself. That is, God never measures His grace against His justice, or His mercy against His love. God is all one. But God measures His grace against our sin. "Grace hath abounded unto many," says Romans 5:15, "according to the riches of His grace" (Ephesians 1:7). And Romans 5 again says, "But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound" (Romans 5:20).

When scripture says "Grace did much more abound," it means not that grace does much more abound than anything else in God, but much more than anything in us. No matter how much sin a person has committed, grace literally and truly abounds toward that person. Old John Bunyan wrote his life story and called it, I think, one of the finest titles ever given to a book: *Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.* Bunyan honestly believed that he was the man who had the least right to the grace of God. Grace abounded for us who stand under the disapproval of God, who by sin lie under sentence of God's eternal, everlasting displeasure. Grace is an incomprehensibly immense and overwhelming plenitude of kindness and goodness.

If we could only remember it, we wouldn't need to be entertained so much. If we could only remember the grace of God toward us, who have nothing but demerit, we would be overwhelmed by this incomprehensibly immense attribute—so vast, so huge, that nobody can ever grasp it or hope to understand it. Would God have put up with us this long if He had only a limited amount of grace? If He had only a limited amount of anything, He wouldn’t be God. I shouldn’t use the word "amount" because "amount" means a measure, and you can’t measure God in any direction. God dwells in no dimension and can be measured in no way. Measures belong to human beings. Measures belong to the stars. Distance is the way heavenly bodies account for the space they occupy and their relation to other heavenly bodies. The moon is 250,000 miles away, the sun is 93 million miles away, and all that sort of thing. But God never accounts to anybody for anything—He is God. God's immensity, God's infinitude, must mean that the grace of God must always be immeasurably full. We sing "Amazing Grace"—why, of course it's amazing. How can we comprehend the fullness of the grace of God.