Two Wonders

A great salvation suggests a great fall.  The two go hand in hand.  There is room in the Christian life for a deep consideration of both.  Having only the great salvation and not the great fall wouldn't be the Christian gospel.  Perhaps this is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "cheap grace."  It doesn't cost much.


A stanza from Elizabeth Clephane's hymn reads thus: "Upon the cross of Jesus/mine eye at times can see/the very dying form of One/who suffered there for me:/and from my stricken heart with tears/two wonders I confess,/the wonders of redeeming love/and my own worthlessness. (Trott, A Sacrifice of Praise, 558).  She calls them two wonders.  They surprise us.  It is their nature to be deeper and more mysterious than we expect to understand fully.


P.T. Forsyth reflects on how we might proceed with our two wondrous wonders: "It is for the redeemed to magnify the cost, the preciousness, of redeeming grace.  It is not for the Redeemer.  It would be ungracious in Him to do so.  He brought the grace to us, and brought it as grace, not as cost; He offered it as a finished thing, rich and ripe, in its fullness and freeness of beauty, love, sorrow, and searching power.  For Him to dwell on the cost, who paid it, and to do so while paying it would have been to rob grace of its graciousness, to impair its wonder, amplitude, and spell.  But would it not have been just as ungracious, as much of a reflection on grace, if it had made no apostle or saint leap forward, to go behind the constraining liberating, re-creating charm of grace, and to draw out for our worship the cost of it - what holy Fatherhood paid in forgiving and what He was too generous to obtrude, till it pricked the conscience and woke the wonder of the forgiven?" (The Holy Father, 18-19)  To use Clephane's terminology to interpret Forsyth, the first wonder of redeeming love is pure gift - the life of Christ given for us.  The second wonder of "my own worthlessness" happens second, when I look at the gift that has been given, and find myself, in Forsyth's delightful paradoxical phrase, 'leaping forward to go behind' the gift to find the cost of it.  And this draws out my worship.


The charm of grace sends me searching for the cost of it.