Grace, grace is exactly and entirely opposite to that! The scandal of grace is that God saw us as His sworn enemies, as children of wrath, children of the devil, and with His image marred and trampled in the dirt, and while we were still shaking our fists at Him, engaged each day in cosmic treason and total defiance of Him, He was willing to pay the ridiculous ransom price of the death of this precious Son to redeem us.
It is not boring grace that saved us, as if God, paid the ransom price because He saw we were worth it – no, a thousand times, no. We are saved by unspeakable and amazing grace – a grace that makes all the angels aghast and perplexed that God would set His love on such hostile, rebel sinners! The devil never for a moment thought that God would be willing to pay this price… that Christ would endure the pain of the cross and absorb the punishment due to us rebels as the full fury of God’s wrath was meted out on Him. Who would ever have thought such a thing – the just would pay the price for the unjust? That He who knew no sin would be made to be sin for us, so that we may become the righteousness of God in Him? Who could have forseen this kind of love? But oh, what a love the Father has for us, a love He had for us from all eternity. And oh, what a perfect and wonderful Savior!
The saints of old knew this so well. They sang “Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me”… and “Oh what a wonder that Jesus loves even me!”
“There are multiple volumes to write about each step in Romans 8:28-30’s outline. There is beauty within beauty within beauty. A mustard seed of faith planted in the broken heart of a desperate sinner is the culmination of God’s foreknowing this sinner from before the foundations of the earth. Even in eternity past God, in grace, predestining him in love for adoption as a cherished son. And then God sent his only begotten Son to provide the sinless atonement for him, that he could be justified by the righteousness of Christ upon the Spirit’s regenerating of his stony heart. It’s simply staggering, isn’t it? And that this seed of justifying faith would grow through the faithfulness of the Father to administer a sanctifying faith, again through the Spirit’s work, all the way to the promise of glorification, is more staggering still.” – Jared Wilson
“The doctrine of ‘irresistible grace’… is simply the belief that when God chooses to move in the lives of His elect and bring them from spiritual death to spiritual life, no power in heaven or on earth can stop Him from so doing… It is simply the confession that when God chooses to raise His people to spiritual life, He does so without the fulfillment of any conditions on the part of the sinner. Just as Christ had the power and authority to raise Lazarus to life without obtaining his ‘permission’ to do so, He is able to raise His elect to spiritual life with just as certain a result.
I am a new creature, not because the old rebel decided to become something other, but because of the resurrection power of God by the Spirit. The very idea of someone kicking and screaming seems a bit ironic, in light of the Reformed insistence upon the deadness of man in sin. Surely the heart of stone contains no desire to be changed, but ignoring the impartation of resurrection life as the means by which a radical change in the will of the elect is effected again presents a fundamentally distorted view of the (Reformed) position…” – Dr. James White