Manifoldness Continued.
ii. The manifold Grace of God. Here the problem finds a blessed answer. We have studied an extremely complicated lock, and no key in all our store will meet it and move it. But the great Artificer of both circumstances and salvation appears here with His perfect key, His golden key, cast into the very mould of the labyrinthine wards, intended and able to fit them all. Need aboundeth, in its many ramifications. But “grace doth much more abound”; it is the manifold grace of God.
True, beneath its multiplicity grace has a divine simplicity and singleness. For what is grace, when we come to its ultimate description? It is no abstract thing; no mysterious substance, thrown off as it were by God and injected into man. It is the Lord Himself in action. Grace of acceptance – what is it but God, for Christ’s sake, pardoning and welcoming the sinner – “God for us”? Grace of sanctification, of peace and power and holiness, what is it but God working in us to will and to do”; “the Spirit strengthening us in the inner man;” “Christ dwelling in the heart by faith”? What is human kindness but a kind man in action? What is divine grace but the Lord Himself, infinitely kind, acting for, and acting in, the soul?
Thus there is a glorious oneness in the inmost idea of grace. But it is a oneness out of which springs its infinite manifoldness of fitness and application. Personal action, in its very nature, is thus manifold; and grace is divinely personal action. The most refined machine is limited to a rigid narrowness in line and scope of work; it stands utterly devoid of the power to feel and meet new circumstances. The humblest Person is capable, as such, of a boundless versatility, an endless adaptability, compared with the impersonal machine. Grace is manifold, beyond the variations of out utmost need, just because it is the action within the soul and will of Him, not it but Him, who dwells within.
Thus it meets the case, be the case what it may. Never for a moment interfering with our personality, or suspending the work and office of our conscience, it, that is to say the Lord thus present, comes self-adjusted to the trial, to the temptation, of this hour, of this minute. No craft of the enemy is too subtle for that skill. No force of circumstances is too pressing for that power. There is “no temptation with” which He cannot “make a way to escape” – into Himself. There is no labyrinth of so-called conflicting duties out of which He cannot guide into a straight path.
There is abundant skill and power in grace to bring the anxious and the weak to the feet of Jesus Christ, be their antecedent obstacles what they may. There is resource in grace alike for the life of ceaseless energy and intercourse, that it may be lived in God, and for the life of solitude and forced inaction that it may be made occasion for new sacrifices to Him. There is a fit provision for the temptations of the young, buoyant spirit, and for the needs of the melancholy and fearing. It, that is to say He, can so meet the case, that “the weak shall say, I am strong.” It, that is to say He, “gives what He enjoins.”*
It, that is to say He, is adjusted to every need of life. And when the need of death comes, when the “next thing” to do is to step into the valley, to touch the edge of the cold river, grace will be found (ah, let us be sure of it, as life moves on, and the thought of death only gains in mystery as we approach it), grace will be found perfectly adjusted to that hour. And our best preparation for that need will be to welcome this holy manifoldness for the needs of this present, for this waking moment of active or suffering life. We yet shall find, through Him that loved us and abideth in us, that it is “a very simple thing to die.”
So let us thankfully face the multiplicity of circumstances, and of trials. Let us recognize in “the changing scenes of life” fresh occasions for the great Artificer to employ His will, His power. Let us remember that for every one of them there is, somewhere in Him who is with us and in us, the corresponding gift. The subject is endless indeed in its development. Its treatment is coextensive with our life.
* Da quod jubes, et jube quod vis. St. Augustine.
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