God Is Gracious

God Is Gracious

The sovereign God of Scripture is a gracious God.

“The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples; but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you….” Deuteronomy 7:6-8

In case it ever occurred to anyone in Israel to think that somehow something in them must have prompted God to redeem and claim the people of Israel for Himself, God made it abundantly clear that the sole motive operative in their redemption was His grace.

God did not need the world, but He made it. He made it and it pleased Him, therefore it must have reflected Him. In so doing, the world would have known a measure of the pleasure and fulfillment that exist in the Three-in-One God. Out of love God the Creator and Sovereign extended to helpless creatures the experience of His goodness, the experience of Himself.

Out of love God called a man out of riches and idolatry to be the father of many nations. From that one man a people descended on whom God set His love unto their redemption. In love He sustained them through the wilderness and spread before them a good land which was to be the temporal staging-ground for the next stage of covenant blessing.

In love God entered into a Covenant with His people, and in love He took it upon Himself to fulfill that Covenant in all that it requires (Gen. 15). In love God gave His Law to His people so that they, like creation before the fall, might enter into His goodness and love and live in love toward Him and their neighbors.

The God of the Law of God is a God of love; the worldview promulgated in that Law is, first, unto holiness, and, at the same time, unto love—for God, as of first importance, and for our neighbors as ourselves. We do not truly understand the worldview of God’s Law if we do not embrace and experience it as a worldview expressive of God Himself, Who is love.

For more insight to the nature of God’s Covenant, order a copy of T. M.’s book, I Will Be Your God, from our online store. Visit our website, www.ailbe.org, and sign up to receive our thrice-weekly devotional, Crosfigell, featuring writers from the period of the Celtic Revival and T. M.’s reflections on Scripture and the Celtic Christian tradition.

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In the Gates is a devotional series on the Law of God by Rev. T. M. Moore, editor of the Worldview Church. He serves as dean of the Centurions Program of the Wilberforce Forum and principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He is the author or editor of twenty books, and has contributed chapters to four others. His essays, reviews, articles, papers, and poetry have appeared in dozens of national and international journals, and on a wide range of websites. His most recent books are The Ailbe Psalter and The Ground for Christian Ethics (Waxed Tablet).

Scripture quotations in this article are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, (c) copyright 2001, 2007 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.