NOW HIS GRACE IS TO ALL NATIONS
“I take up my pen in the year of grace 17— and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow Inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.”
So wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in his celebrated novel “Treasure Island”. And controversy about just what he meant and what the phrase “Year of Grace” actually means continues to this day.
Evidently, back in the 1700s, each year was widely recognised as a year of God’s grace; that is one that postponed the then much feared coming judgement. In our time, by contrast, little or no judgement is feared and no year is officially held to be a year of the Grace of God. Nor, for that matter, is any one day, despite churches fervently singing, “This is the day the Lord has made”.
Yet, recognised or not, the scriptural truth is that we live in an age, an epoch, an eon if you will, when the Lord Jesus Christ is still dispensing his grace to every nation.
How, you ask? Well, as He has for nearly the last 2,000 years, the Lord continues to send his message of salvation to each and every nation on earth. What’s more, from time to time He blesses nations with especial grace by visiting them. Such visitation turns the heart of a nation’s people back towards Him and, upon their favourable response, He further blesses them with “times of refreshing” (Acts 3:19) that bring social improvement and prosperity.
Right now I want very much to believe that the Year of his Grace 2024 will be such a year, a time when nations such as Britain, America, Australia and New Zealand, that once knew the Lord, turn back to again seek Him. A year when the dark forces of heathen and totalitarian states are restrained and the gospel is not only freely proclaimed but also honoured by the national leaders.
That God wills this to be so is clear. 2 Peter 3:9 declares that the Lord is “longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance”. And this grace is his calling card to each individual and every nation.
However, it’s important to understand that once this universal grace was a secret “hid from ages and generations” (Col. 1:26). Called a “mystery” in the King James translation “…in other ages it was not made known unto the sons of men” (Eph. 3:5). Then, nearly 2,000 years ago it was revealed to the Apostle Paul while he was imprisoned in Rome.
Now ‘made known to his holy prophets and apostles by the Spirit” (Eph. 3:5) the revealed secret is that:
The Gentiles [“nations” in the Greek] should be fellow heirs [with Christ] and of the same body [that is his church in which “He filleth all in all”, Eph. 1:21-22] and [fellow] partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel (Eph. 3:6).
In other words, from Paul’s time onwards the gospel of Christ is no longer just through and to Israel, only reaching the Gentiles in order to provoke God’s Jewish people to jealousy as it did in the Acts period. The “good news” is now sent to all the nations, placing them all, including Israel, on an equal footing before God. Thus today God has no favourites among the nations but extends grace to all.
What’s more each nation, each identifiable separate people, are fellow heirs with Jesus Christ to all that God has given Him – and that’s every spiritual blessing that exists in the “heavenly places” (Eph. 1:3). Sadly, though it seems that today not a single nation as such wants to want to claim this inheritance.
Nevertheless, the Lord (since Paul) has given and still gives all the different peoples on earth equal access to his grace. He also gives them the same responsibilities in the light of it. This was made plain by the Apostle Paul to the Athenian leaders when he stood on Mars Hill nearly 2,000 years ago and told them:
God made the world and all things therein … He giveth to all life, breath to all things ... and hath made of one blood [that of Noah] all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth and hath determined the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation, that they should seek the Lord, if they might haply feel after Him (Acts 17:24-27).
That doyen of sound biblical research, the late Otis Q. Sellers, rightly says that Paul’s use of the Greek word sunsoma, “joint-bodies” in Eph. 3:6 means “...that at the present time, under God’s present administration of grace, all nations are joint bodies in his sight and are being dealt with on the basis of absolute equality”.
This is in sharp contrast to the favoured place Israel enjoyed as a nation from Moses through to the days of Jesus on earth and on through the foretaste of the Kingdom of God in the Acts period when the gospel was “…to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Rom. 1:16).
Now, under grace for all peoples, the nation Israel, at least temporarily, has no special place in God’s favour but all the nations together including Israel do. However, as the Apostle Paul plainly told the Corinthians, it is important both for individuals and nations not to “receive the grace of God in vain” (2 Cor. 6:1).
One sure way for nations to miss out on God’s blessing is to turn from Him to idols and, sadly, it seems most every nation on earth in one way or another has done just that. Some may worship gods of stone (paganism), others those of gold and silver (in other words money and prosperity). All have turned from officially acknowledging the one true God as Creator and Saviour. The Lord’s response is found in Acts 17:30-31 which pronounces:
God now commandeth all men everywhere to repent because He has appointed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness by that man who He hath ordained, whereof He hath given assurance unto all men in that He raised Him from the dead.
You see, long ago Isaiah 26:10 proclaimed: “Let favour be shown to the wicked, yet will he not learn righteousness: in the land of uprightness will he deal unjustly and will not behold the majesty of the Lord”.
The answer to that perennial problem is a dispensational one. For, it is in a day to come, the day of judgement announced by Paul in Athens nearly 2,000 years ago and as of now yet to arrive, that the sometime wicked will learn to do right. Sadly, they don’t and won’t under grace.
But in Isaiah 26:9 the prophet states that “…when thy judgements are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness”.
And if all the above is so, then along with every other nation there must be a portion of grace especially for my own country, New Zealand. In a later study we will seek to identify just what that is.
Meanwhile if you want to know more about the “day of judgement” in which God will set the world and its people right, my book “The Glory of His Day”, explains much more. “His Day” is the “Day of Christ” (cited six times in Paul’s epistles) in which the Lord will take over government of the world replacing it with his own kingdom. The book is available online through Ingram Spark as both an e-book and paperback or direct from the author if you live in New Zealand.
John Dudley Aldworth
Email: john.aldworth@hotmail.com