INTRODUCTION
G.K. Chesterton was a Roman Catholic who famously saw the beauty and extravagance and personalism of God’s world. Life is an epic adventure, an extravagant stage, an outrageously stunning canvas of God’s glory. Unfortunately, Chesterton believed that Calvinism was a plot to bury all that glory in a pile of fatalism (He knows better now). But the Bible teaches that the doctrines of grace (Calvinism) recovered in the Reformation go hand in hand with his exuberance. Sovereign grace brings the glory into sharp relief.
Robert Capon put it this way, “The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two hundred proof grace – bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel–after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps–suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started. Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale, neither goodness, nor badness, nor the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.”
The Text: “Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world: But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son…” (Gal. 4:3-7).
SUMMARY OF THE TEXT
Scripture tells the story of our salvation like a grand adventure. We are all like lost orphan children, trapped and imprisoned in the great dungeon of sin and death (Gal. 4:3). And just when all hope seemed lost, God sent His Son, born of Eve just like us yet without sin, made under the law just like us yet no law breaker, to lead the great prison break, and bring us home to His Father – not only to bring us home but to be adopted as sons (Gal. 4:4-5). Not only have we been adopted, but God has given us the very same Spirit that fills His Son, teaching us to call Him “Abba, Father” (Gal. 4:6). This means that we are no mere servants but true and full sons, and royal sons, with a full inheritance at that (Gal. 4:7).
RAGS TO RICHES
Imagine that one of your ancestors was adopted by a Great King, but through pride and greed was tricked by an enemy and betrayed the King and was disinherited, banished from the Kingdom, and all his descendants were sentenced to work as slaves ever since. But one day a letter arrives at your slave hut, and it is an official legal document, a will and testimony with a deed to a castle. But it isn’t just any castle, it’s the castle of the King your ancestor betrayed, and the will restores all that was lost, making you a lord in the kingdom, and it is signed and sealed in the blood of the Great King’s Son with the words “Debt Paid In Full.”
That is what the gospel is. The gospel is the “good news” that what we thought we had lost forever, what we thought was impossible, has been found and completely restored – the gift of living forever as God’s favored nobility.
DOUBLE IMPUTATION
Theologians call this legal transaction “double imputation.” The gospel is that what is rightfully ours (sin, guilt, and judgment) inherited from Adam has been reckoned to Jesus Christ on His cross, and what was rightfully His (righteousness, holiness, and the inheritance of God), since He was completely sinless and obedient – that has been reckoned to us by faith alone. “For He [God] hath made Him [Christ] to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him [Christ]” (2 Cor. 5:21). “For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit” (Rom. 8:3-4). This double imputation is only possible because Christ came as a new Adam, a new covenantal head. So just as by Adam’s sin, we all inherited sin and death, so by Christ’s righteousness, all who trust in Him inherit His righteousness and life (Rom. 5).
BEFORE THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD
But there is one more significant piece that really makes a big difference. The Bible teaches that all of this was planned before the foundation of the world: “according as He hath chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world… having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ… That in the dispensation of the fulness of times He might gather together in one all things in Christ… in Whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of Him who worketh all things after the counsel of His own will: that we should be to the praise of His glory” (Eph. 1:4-6, 10-12). “Sovereign grace” is God’s eternal plot to save.
CONCLUSIONS
Chesterton thought that this doctrine of predestination (Calvinism) was a terrible thing because he thought it turned God into a monstrous puppeteer and destroyed the beauty and excitement of Christian life. But Scripture says just the opposite. God’s absolute sovereign grace underlines two things about our salvation: It was utterly impossible for us, and it is all His mercy (Eph. 2:5-9). We were dead, and God made us alive. That is the beginning of the most epic adventure.
If God were not absolute goodness and beauty and life, we might grant that His absolute sovereignty could be a downer. But if the most brilliant, creative, and perfectly gracious and personal Author is telling the story, how could the story be anything less than wonderful? We are His characters. This world is His canvas, His symphony. This story is His surprise party.
All our doubts come down to one central fear: but what if God isn’t good? And the answer to that is: He sent forth His Son to make us His sons.