Fullness of Grace

From the fullness of His grace we have all received one blessing after another. __John 1:16__

I’m what you might call a borderline universalist, meaning that I harbor tendencies toward the idea that, because of God’s grace being so huge, everyone is going to be with him in the end. I’m not there completely. I still think that there is a vast amount of judgment and exclusion language in Scripture that needs to be addressed and interpreted. And I still believe that there at some point has to come a decision on our end to either embrace this grace or give it the finger, so to speak. It’s passages like this that keep reminding of the immensity of grace. And maybe that’s what I’m believing more in: that God’s grace is already given to everyone, that everyone is forgiven through the cross of Christ, that everyone is getting into the party at the end, but that there will be some that refuse to enter the party and enjoy what God has given them free of charge (a number of Jesus’ parables point to this idea of inclusion, though I don’t have time here to go into them). Let me just break this passage down into bite-sized chunks to reveal my thought process and some of the questions that remain unanswered.

From the fullness…  My thesaurus tells me that a synonym for “fullness” is “extensiveness.” Either way you say it you are dealing with the whole measure of God’s grace in Christ. Every. Last. Bit. God is holding nothing back, not keeping any grace in reserve. He’s packing every ounce of His grace into this deal. Imagine packing for a trip. You are limited to one large duffel bag and you have to fit everything into that one bag. You cram and pack and smoosh. In order to get the zipper closed you have to sit on the bag and have your spouse hold the zipper teeth together in order to get the thing zipped. This is fullness.

…of His grace… This is God’s unmerited, unearned, unfair, unjust, undeserved, (perhaps) unasked for favor that comes through the Word-made-flesh (see 1:14—“full of grace”). There is nothing you can do to gain it. Nothing you can give to buy it. And I dare say, nothing you can do to avoid it. It comes from Him simply because. It is the reality of how the world really works.

…we have all received… Who is “we”? Does he just mean Christians? What does John mean here buy “all”? I suppose that I tend to lean towards “all” meaning, well, all. Everyone. If you draw breath then you are included in the word “all.” You, me, and the crack-whore down the street—everyone of us has received blessings from God because of His full, overflowing, duffel-bag-zipper-busting grace. Maybe some of us don’t even realize that we’ve received all of these blessings from God. Maybe this is pointing to the fundamental way that reality is. Maybe it is our decision whether we choose to live inside that fundamental reality or not, open our eyes to see, open our hands to receive and open our hearts to accept the beauty of God’s fullness pouring down around us like rain.

shalom, matt