The Grace of God’s Descent for our Salvation

D. Scott Meadows

Providence has brought an important and powerful truth to my special attention lately. At the heart of the biblical faith is the truth that salvation is by grace alone—not by our merit, strength, obedience, or struggle. This grace is not only proclaimed in the gospel but illustrated in redemptive history, most particularly in God’s “descent,” so to speak, to be our Savior in our Lord Jesus Christ and to enliven us by the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Truly spiritually-minded people have understood this to some extent in all ages, for they have depended upon it and were saved. Abel’s sacrifice repudiated self-salvation and exhibited trust in the divine, condescending mercy. Sinful Noah would have been swept away but for the divine provision of the ark that wafted him above the flood of justice below. Abraham journeyed by faith to the city without foundations only after receiving the gracious message about it and countless forgivenesses for his sins. Even great Moses was wholly dependent upon grace sparing his infant life and in prolonged divine forbearance of his unbelief and folly.

The greatest exhibition of God’s gracious descent to save His chosen people, however, is in the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit. We cannot mount up to heaven, so heaven comes down to us. God has come to us in the Incarnation, for Christ is Emmanuel, “God with us” (Matt 1.23). He deigned to live among us as our Prophet, Priest, and King—teaching us, representing God to us and us to God, offering up Himself as the definitive sacrifice for sinners, governing us for our good, and protecting us from all our enemies. Jesus said, “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven” (John 3.13), and, “I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me” (John 6.38). It is not that Christ’s human nature came down from heaven, for that was conceived in His mother Mary. Nor is it that His divine nature moved from heaven to earth, for Christ says expressly that He came down and yet is still in heaven—which is to say, omnipresent in the divine nature.

These biblical ways of speaking about God’s saving work in Christ are powerful means to describe the Incarnation—that in Jesus Christ we have the union of the divine and human natures in
one blessed Person. And as the Christ, He fulfills all righteousness for us, suffers for us all divine vengeance upon the cross against our sins, is risen from the dead for us, and ascends to heaven as our Mediator, always interceding for us, and He will come again for us and finish the good work He has begun in us and for us. Likewise, Pentecost bears witness to the Spirit poured out from heaven for the church of Christ.

What could convey salvation by pure and free grace more than all this, beloved? We truly are the passive recipients of all this saving work of God on our behalf. Our faith in Christ is essentially the repudiation of all effort to save ourselves and, rather, to entrust our whole salvation, from start to finish, to the God who descends in Christ and in the Spirit for our salvation.

This is the same Christian faith expressed by our spiritual forefathers in the Nicene Creed. Notice especially the terms of descent and procession.

I believe . . . in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, . . . who, for us men and our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end. And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father and the Son (excerpt).

From very early in church history, confessing this language was understood to identify one as a Christian—in distinction from all others in the world—and to express one’s faith and hope in the pure grace of God rather than in self-effort. Notice how the creed is utterly devoid of any mention of commandments or our obedience to them. That seems to be because it is a deliberate statement of the grace of the gospel rather than a comprehensive doctrinal statement or a description of our lives as Christ’s disciples. To some extent, I am indebted to Dr. Donald Fairbairn for this insight:

In Greco-Roman society, as in many pagan societies, there was great variety . . . about what a person had to do in order to attain to the realm of god or the gods (or to gain salvation, if one wants to say it in that way). But what the many different gods and paths to god had in common was that whatever one thought had to be done, human beings had to do it themselves. Varying religions offered competing versions of self-salvation. . . . In sharp contrast, Christianity affirms that what is necessary for people to be united to the true God is not something that fallen human beings can do themselves. It follows, therefore, that if we are to be saved, God has to come to us. . . . [and He does come to us in] two main descents: the incarnation of the Son and the descent of the Holy Spirit to indwell believers. In short, our salvation is accomplished because the Son of God has come down to live among us, and the Holy Spirit has come down to live within each of us (The Story of Creeds and Confessions, Fairbairn and Reeves, pp. 50, 51).

When our responsibilities to obey God’s commands and to lead righteous lives are so strongly emphasized to the practical diminishment or neglect of this unilateral, sovereign grace of God in the gift of Christ and the Holy Spirit for the salvation of elect sinners, upon which our salvation wholly and finally depends, people are forgetting and undermining the most fundamental point that distinguishes true Christianity from all the competing religions of the world: the grace of God’s descent. Some, perhaps with the best of intentions, distort Christianity so grossly that it really differs little from the sinful attempts of self-salvation found in other religions. Oh, beloved, let us treasure this grace of the gospel and shout it from the housetops, for the deliverance of Satan’s blinded captives and for the public display of God’s glory. Amen. Ω