But the gift of God is also indescribable because of the grace by which it is given. Most of our gifts have nothing to do with grace. We give because the recipients of our gifts have some claim upon us: they are members of our family, people who have helped us in some way or individuals who gave to us last year. Even when we give to someone who has no special claim upon us, someone who is perhaps just in great physical or material need, we usually do so because of some recognized obligation due to both of us being members of the human race. But God is not a member of the human race, and our race is in rebellion against Him. We are His enemies. Yet it is “while we were still sinners [enemies, that] Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8).
One of the books in my library is an anthology of master sermons from the Reformation to our own day, compiled by Andrew W. Blackwood, former professor of homiletics at Princeton Theological Seminary. It contains a sermon on this theme by the original speaker on “The Lutheran Hour,” Walter A. Maier.
The great gift of Christ is granted not to God’s friends, but to his enemies, to those who in their sins have risen up against God and declared war against the Almighty. To every one of us suffering, as we and our world are under the destructive powers of sin, God offers his gift of ‘unspeakable’ grace. Christmas does not offer rejoicing to a selected few; it cries out, ‘Joy to the world!’ We stand before that supreme and saving truth, the holy of holies of our Christian faith, the blessed assurance that ‘Christ Jesus came into the world,’ not to build big and costly churches, not to give his followers earthly power and rule, but—and this is why the angels sang their praise— ‘to save sinners.’ He came, not to establish social service, social consciousness, social justice, but first and foremost he came to seal our salvation.
No wonder that the apostle calls the mercy of God as shown by the gift of Christ ‘unspeakable’; it goes beyond the limit of human speech. Just as beholding the glare of the sun, men lose their power of vision, so raising our eyes to the brilliance of Jesus, the Sun of Righteousness, we are blinded by the splendor of the greatest Gift that God himself could bestow. Christ came to save—blessed assurance! But more: he came to ‘save . . . to the uttermost,’ so that no sin is too great, no sinner too vile, to be blessed, when penitent and believing, by this Gift.1
It is not only the gift but also the gracious manner in which it is given that exceeds our powers of description. Reason falters, logic fails, oratory stammers when confounded by this mystery.
1Andrew Watterson Blackwood, compiler, The Protestant Pulpit: An Anthology of Master Sermons from the Reformation to Our Own Day (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1978; original edition 1947), 234.
