Grace Abounding part II

"Where sin abounded grace did much more abound." Rom. 5:20.

God seems to love to take the worst materials for His greatest triumphs. He chose a Jacob and a David in the Old Testament, both weak and wicked men in many a terrible sense and measure, to become the respective heads of the patriarchal and the kingly periods. He saved a Manasseh after half a century of bloody crimes. He took a Rahab from the slums of Jericho, to be a mother in the line of the Messiah's ancestry. And when He would choose His most illustrious apostle to preach the glorious work of the gospel among the infamous Gentile races, He took "the chief of sinners." There is no doubt that Paul's calm estimate of his own wickedness, given by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, was not exaggerated. Moral though he was, yet even his own testimony leaves sufficient evidence of the atrocity of his religious crimes. Not satisfied with insulting the name of Jesus and agreeing with the murderers of Stephen His faithful martyr, he devoted himself to exterminating the followers of Christ; and with a fiendish excess of cruelty he feared not to destroy their souls as well as their bodies by committing the most fearful crimes and compelling them to blaspheme the Name of Him on whom they believed. He must have known full well the awfulness of the crimes he required of them, and that although they might even be mistaken in their faith, yet to sin against their conscience by profaning the name of Christ was, to them, the height of impiety, and on his part the very extreme of refined and Satanic cruelty.

And yet he, "the chief of sinners," tells us that he obtained mercy for this very purpose, that he might become the pattern of the principle on which God was to act in the economy of grace, namely, to "show forth all long-suffering unto them that should hereafter believe on the name of Jesus Christ to life everlasting." And this does not merely mean that God will save the most guilty, but that He will take peculiar pleasure in making more of their redeemed lives just because of their former wickedness. And so Paul can say "the grace of God was exceeding abundant towards me, with faith and love which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." "Where sin abounded grace did much more abound," not only in forgiving the sin but in making the sinner a vessel of the riches of divine grace and love, and an instrument in the hands of God for greater usefulness than ever was permitted perhaps to a mortal.