The grace of God teaches us to live exactly like God lives.

Jesus is the vine, Father is the gardener. He takes away every branch in him that doesn’t bear fruit. This is the sin of Israel: not bearing fruit. Israel as a nation wanted to hear the word of God and then work up obedience to it, but when God sent the provision for all obedience in Jesus, Israel’s leaders rejected him. They already had all they thought they needed, so his word had no place in them.

When Father said that he wondered that there was no intercessor, so his own arm was going to work salvation for him; he was prophesying the coming of Jesus. When God said that man conceives chaff, gives birth to stubble, and has a spirit of self-consuming fire; he was talking not just about the gentile nations. He was telling Israel that he’d seen what they could produce, what they could work up; and that he wasn’t impressed. Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered! “Now I will arise, now I will be exalted,” is God’s answer.

This is still God’s answer today. Grace is so much more than an unmerited wink, so far above being man’s ongoing blanket new-covenant alibi. Grace parts the Red Sea, grace stacks the Jordan up to the heavens so God’s people can pass through, grace drives out the armed giant inhabitants of Canaan before Israel, grace anoints a shepherd boy with a heart just like God’s to lead Israel, grace raises up a Cyrus to return the captivity of Zion. Grace is the power of Almighty God working in and on behalf of his people.

Then in the fullness of time, when Father wants to reveal the fullness of his grace; he sends Jesus out of his own bosom. The one most intimately acquainted with Father came to make him known. Jesus came as the one and only way to the Father, which was without controversy proven by his resurrection from the dead. Who is the Father? Just who Jesus revealed him to be: he is the servant of all, he is love, and he displays the glorious apex of his power in an unstoppable uncontainable resurrection that forever calls the dead to eternal life.

Father ordained that in Christ all should die, so that all should live again in him.