‘It’s not fair!’ was a frequent cry in our home when our three boys were younger.
I’ve been thinking ‘It’s not fair!’ more and more recently. Reflecting on God’s grace I’ve been struck once again that there is nothing fair about it.
The parable of the workers in the vineyard in Matthew 20 is a graphic illustration of God’s generosity to the least deserving. It wasn’t normal for a landowner to go out to hire workers – he usually sent his foreman. But five times this landowner went out into the marketplace to look for workers. At 5pm, when the working day was almost done, he hired another group of labourers. He instructed the foreman to pay them for a day’s work, even though they must have been in the vineyard barely an hour. The other workers grumbled, not because they had been underpaid, but because these other workers had been overpaid. They were outraged by God’s grace.
In a similar way, the father in Luke 15 was watching and waiting, ready to welcome his prodigal son back with open arms. ‘Filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.’ No time was given to rehearse all the son’s failures, instead his father threw a party. He called for the best robe to be put on the young man, new sandals on his feet, a ring on his finger and the best meat on the BBQ.
Like the last round of labourers and the prodigal son, when we come to God, unable to save ourselves and in need of grace, we discover to our amazement that it is not measured out sparingly and there are no balancing scales in sight. God’s grace is relentlessly generous because it is who He is.
In Exodus 34, God reveals himself to Moses as ‘the gracious and compassionate God’. When the apostle John first describes Jesus he says: ‘We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth’ (John 1:14). The fullness of Christ’s grace was seen most powerfully on the cross, when He died in my place and yours. But there’s still more grace to come: ‘In the coming ages’ God has promised to show us ‘the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus’ (Eph. 2:7). God will never give up on us, His grace will never run out because it’s rooted in His character, and it has been guaranteed at Calvary.
Sometimes, we imagine God’s grace should work like Dorothy clicking her red slippers in The Wizard of Oz – immediate answers to prayer and favourable circumstances. So, when we face ill-health, challenges for being a Christian, strained family relationships, worries about jobs and finances, we can’t help but wonder: ‘Has God forgotten to be gracious? (Ps.77:9 ESV). But the Bible reminds us that even these circumstances are ‘the true grace of God’ (1 Peter 5:12). God hasn’t forgotten about us; He hasn’t lost control of the situation. He is working out his purposes, He’s making us more like Christ. Often, if we let them, our struggles can help us see that ultimately our relationship with God is the only thing that really matters – and God’s grace has secured that now and forever. When God doesn’t answer our prayers as we’d hoped, when circumstances remain unchanged, pray that we’d learn to say with Paul that God’s grace is ‘sufficient’, because we’ve found that He is all we need.
When it comes to you and me, God is profligate in His grace. He gave the best that He had to save us. In Christ, His generosity to us has no limits. It’s certainly not fair.
