The Nexus of Grace and Truth

The false dichotomy of grace vs truth is prevalent in the western church. It’s frequently seen in my church. We pit grace as the undeserved work of God in our lives against truth, which is confrontational and requires action. But it is not an either/or choice in terms of how we view our lives as disciples. It is just easier to choose one over the other. “I’m striving for obedience”, or “I choose grace”. So we get woo’d into choosing pleasing God over trusting God, or the opposite.

They are not in opposition, but in partnership. There is tension in our understanding of them, but not in the reality of them. For they are two facets of the person of Jesus Christ. As John tells us Jesus was, “Full of grace and truth.” Not only descriptors of Christ, but of His glory. The emanation of His greatness. So vast and immeasurable that we had to create a word that did not define it, but described the eternal experience of it. Blasted backwards like the guitar scene in Back To The Future. Overwhelming like Galadriel's revelation of her nature in Lord of the Rings. Bending reality like Neo at the end of The Matrix. The glory of Jesus Christ is so far beyond this, we are dumbstruck to effectively describe it! So we describe our barely glimpsed experiences of it.

The cross is where grace and truth collide, connect, reveal the true nature of the goodness and power of God. The revelation is chronological. He waited until the fullness of time. He waited until the fruit of the captivity was born in the nation of Israel. It is understood first in the manifest babe in a manger. Only then is it seen perfectly made real in the young adult of Christ, obedient, drinking the dregs of my guilt and His wrath.

This is why the truth rises poignantly pointing to the person of Jesus, as the “way, the truth, and the life.” It is experienced necessarily as an earth shattering truth “Surely, this is the son of God!”. The undeserved reality hits us as we experience that moment at the cross; and so we are called there, to see again and again the moment that grace and truth collide to shatter the status quo of separation and death.

We talk about grace without talking about the cross, as if there is grace at it's redemptive work separate from the cross. We discuss truth as something parsable and outline able without holding up our outlines and looking to see if they deviate from the finished work of Christ. To live well we need to keep our eyes fixed on the cross.