THE STORY OF GRACE
By Horatius Bonar
Christian Focus. 155 pages. £11.99
ISBN 978 1 527 111 899
This new reissue of Horatius Bonar’s The Story of Grace is a sheer, yet too-brief, delight. Bonar’s original Victorian use of the English language has been ‘lightly updated’, but by no means spoiling the original authorial yesteryear style.
Following a moving Foreword by Sinclair Ferguson, the writer’s own Preface was penned in 1847, halfway through his 50-year fruitful and hugely appreciated ministry in Scotland. Not much else of Bonar’s writings is available today, save for his legacy of many much-loved hymns.
Starting in the Garden of Eden, Bonar shows how the God of grace commenced exhibiting His grace towards fallen mankind right at the very outset. It was a grace of God to create the world ‘good’, reflecting His own goodness and demonstrating that goodness to Adam. But, immediately humankind fell, it was equally a grace of God to show to fallen humanity the sinfulness and seriousness of sin. For what is sin but the spurning of God’s goodness and grace?
Thus, in 13 chapters, various aspects of the grace of God are revealed in the Garden. God’s revealing of His own character, the unfolding of His purpose in creation, the overruling of humanity’s rush to self-destruction.
‘Grace is from eternity’, Bonar writes, ‘the Fall did not produce some new feeling in Him; it only called forth what had been in Him from everlasting’, and he quotes Romans 5:20, ‘where sin abounded, grace did much more abound’. It is in Eden that ‘the story of grace is first told’, where God meets Adam in his sinfulness, going to meet Adam before Adam ever thought to seek God. When the man fled, God followed. This is grace, which can only be understood in the light of the ‘exceeding sinfulness of sin’.
Of course, Bonar does not so dwell within Eden that he forgets how Eden is fulfilled long down the line ‘through the intervention of the woman’s seed’: we all know who He is. The grace of Eden, for Bonar, is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the ‘Conqueror’. The Christian gospel of grace is made transparently clear in this new, thoroughly readable edition of Bonar’s Victorian, yet oh-so-timely yet timeless, tome.
