I would like to set here a basic practical frame for a grace-based approach to God.

My intention is to cut past many complicating factors for the sake of clarity and practicality. This will likely not be satisfying to those who are looking for a critical or analytical approach. It will likely not be satisfying for those who are interested in deeply theoretical conversations. Lastly, it is not likely to meet the needs of those looking for duties to accomplish, obligations to fulfill, or rules to follow. None of these approaches are of interest to me.

There are many possible approaches to God and the Bible. There are many ideas and terms we could work on. I am going to suggest a frame here that involves understanding two basic terms: law and grace.

Law and Grace

Some people may associate the Old Testament with law and the New Testament with grace. This isn’t entirely wrong. But the Old Testament is by no means without grace, and the New Testament by no means turns the Old Testament into useless garbage. That is not what I am saying. There is one God at work in both the Old and the New Testaments.

The Old Testament unfolds in terms of the law. Christ comes in the New Testament: he fulfills, ends, and replaces the law. Theologians speak helpfully of the law as having three uses. The law provides a basis for order and justice. The law exposes and condemns human sin. And for believers, the law has a continuing usefulness in providing inspiration and example.

For our purposes here, I am not trying to fully describe the Bible, the relationship between the testaments, or even the law itself. In the frame I am suggesting here, we are talking about law and grace as they function in our lives.

How Law Works

Law points out problems. Law exposes our sin, lays bare our weakness, and accuses our conscience. Law points the finger at the guilty party. Law condemns those at fault. Law demands obedience and justice. Law encourages obligation and duty.

The law is the problem. By this I don’t mean that law is bad, but that it focuses on and exposes problems. The ultimate difficulty with law as an approach for us is that it does not work. The law does not change our hearts or our lives. If we are not careful, we will look at the Bible, at God, and at our own lives through a paradigm of law. This leads us to respond in crappy ways to the problems exposed by the law. In other words, a law-based approach means we react to problems laid bare by law with law-based responses. We respond with duty, obligation, guilt, and effort in an attempt to deal with the problems exposed by law. Feel worse. Work harder. Do more. These efforts can provide a temporary illusion of progress, but are ultimately fruitless.

What does a law-based approach look like in real life? It is common in Christian churches to hear preaching which is completely law-based. A preacher might read a Bible story about a particular hero such as Abraham or Moses or Rahab or Ruth. Then the preacher will talk about how amazing the end result of the story is: the victory was won, God was glorified, the day was saved in whatever manner.  Finally, the preacher will focus on the various actions of the hero. The gist of the message is that the people in the pews will receive a list of actions they need to take to be like the Bible hero to get the kind of results seen in the text. Christians walk away with a list of more duties to complete, more obligations to fulfill, and more rules to keep. The guilt and weight are tangible.

How Grace Works

There is one point in the end to all law: human effort is not good enough. Only God’s work ultimately measures up. This is the offense of the gospel: people fall short, God does not. An overwhelming percentage of Christian thought and teaching pays lip service to grace, but takes a law-based approach to practical matters. Christians are “saved by grace” in order to follow the rules and live up to the obligations.

Grace is the solution. I think we know that at a cliche level or as a Sunday School answer. Of course Jesus is the answer! This is most certainly true, but it isn’t helpful because Christian approaches are so riddled with law. This is why I like to define grace more simply and clearly. Grace is God’s work. Grace is God at work. If you are looking at something and a human is doing it, it is not grace. What we should be looking for and what we ultimately need is to find and know and feel God at work. It is shocking and scandalous that God and God’s work are so difficult to find in Christian circles.

What does a grace-based approach look like in real life? I sadly confess that I have heard far too little grace from Christian preachers. So I am saying as someone who has spent nearly a half century in church as the son of a preacher and grandson of a preacher, I am not sure exactly what a grace-based approach looks like. A preacher showing forth God and his work might preach Bible heroes in an entirely different way. Instead of making a human the hero, and then telling us how to be smarter and work harder to be like that hero, a preacher might tell us we are not David but the Hebrew army up on the hillside peeing our pants. David is a figure of Jesus, God conquering evil on our behalf and saving our skins.

A grace-based approach does not neglect the problems exposed by law. But it also doesn’t stop there. It asks who is God, where is God, and what is God doing? These are all good questions that help properly orient us to the Bible and our own lives in the most practical of ways.

The Four Questions

I really like this simple Bible interpretation frame that I learned years ago from reading Paul Scott Wilson’s The Four Pages of the Sermon: A Guide to Biblical Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999), and supplemented later by in-person teaching from Wilson and his colleague John Rottman. I feel free to adjust it here as practical for me. It involves four basic questions we will bring to Bible texts, which force us to deal with the ideas of law and grace. It helps us find grace and not simply load ourselves down with efforts to address law with more law.

What is the problem in the text?

What is the problem in our world?

What is God doing in the text?

What is God doing in our world?