Only Grace Can Save You

A woman comes to Jesus carrying the kind of pain that empties you out. Her daughter is tormented, afflicted, maybe a teenager wrestling with thoughts of ending her own life. The mother begs. And Jesus answers her not a word. Not one word.

That silence is hard to sit with until you understand what He is doing. Jesus came to bring an old thing to an end so He could usher in something new. To read His words and actions rightly, you have to watch carefully and notice when He is operating as an Old Testament prophet and when He is speaking the language of the new covenant. The two are not the same, and He moves between them deliberately.

Here, at first, He speaks the verdict of the law. And under the law, this Gentile woman was simply shut out of salvation. That is why He does not answer her a word. Not because He is cold, but because He is about to show her, and everyone watching, that the law she is unknowingly appealing to has nothing to give her. Righteousness based on how well you keep the law cannot save you, because it requires either flawless obedience or nothing at all.

Something came before grace

For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men... looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from every lawless deed.

Titus 2:11-14 (NKJV)

Read it carefully. The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men. That means something existed before grace appeared, something that could not do what grace does. That something was the law, and not the ten commandments only, but the 613 commandments of the Torah. If salvation reached all men only when grace appeared, then what stood before it was never able to save.

This is the whole matter. Righteousness based on how well you keep the law cannot save you. Only righteousness based on the grace of God alone can save you. And the woman standing before Jesus, excluded, is not the exception. She is every one of us. If it depended on the law, not one of us would be saved today.

Why law-keeping can never save

First, because the law demands everything or nothing. It requires one hundred percent adherence. Break it at a single point and you have broken it all. Let us be honest with ourselves. Unless you are circumcised according to the law of Moses, you cannot be saved. Unless you keep the sabbath perfectly holy, you cannot be saved. All that praise the Lord you shout on the sabbath day, by the strict letter you are breaking it. And we could go on and on. We are all lawbreakers, and no one under that standard walks away justified.

For whoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all.

James 2:10 (NKJV)

This woman stood no chance under the law; she was a Gentile, outside the covenant entirely. But do not comfort yourself that you are on the inside. Every one of us is like this woman. Even if she had somehow kept every single commandment, she would still have been keeping it for the wrong reason. And that is the second problem.

Second, then, even perfect keeping would be for the wrong reason. As long as the arrangement is do this and I bless you, fail and I curse you, you could never keep it out of love. You would keep it to earn a reward or to dodge a punishment, and that is selfishness, which is itself sin. So in the very act of keeping all the law, you would be living in sin. Any attempt to put God in your debt is sin. How dare we, when even the breath in our lungs comes from Him.

This is why God could say that your sacrifices and your temple worship are like filthy rags to Me. Law-keeping puts God in the debt of man; it makes man selfish. That was the whole trouble with the old covenant. It set God up as a debtor to human effort, and it trained the human heart to be selfish, forever calculating what it was owed, never once acknowledging that it was God Himself who supplied even the strength to obey.

Third, because the law actually reveals the kind of person you are, someone who does not naturally keep it. Outwardly a person can look like the humblest, most loving soul, while underneath it flows from a heart of pride, or a heart full of hate and anger and grudge and bitterness, held down only by restriction. Someone glancing at the surface sees a saint. God sees the heart it is coming from.

Remove the restriction, put the person where the heart finally has a chance to show itself, and you will not believe what comes out. Give a person power and authority, and authority becomes a place to hide behind while the real heart acts out. Give a person wealth, and out comes the need to control, to be honored, to be feared. If it were suddenly acceptable to sleep with anyone, how many would hold back? If you could lie and never be caught, would you lie to save your own skin? The law does not make you righteous. It only holds up a mirror, and the face in it is not a pretty one.

Do you see it? Strip a man of every external restraint and what surfaces is not a hidden saint but a hidden sinner. That is the honest testimony of the law about all of us. It does not flatter, it does not exaggerate, it simply tells the truth, and the truth is that none of us is naturally the kind of person the law describes. Which means the law can expose us, but it can never fix us.

What the law is actually for

So the law was never given to save you. It was given to show you that you need a Savior. That is precisely why grace had to appear, because nothing else could rescue us. The law is a diagnosis, not a cure. It can tell you, with perfect accuracy, exactly how sick you are, but it has no medicine to offer. It was never meant to. Its whole job is to drive you out of your own strength and into the arms of the One who can actually heal you.

Now come back to the woman. Watch what Jesus does next. He throws the law at her. Woman, He says, you are a dog, and what you are asking for belongs to the children. It sounds brutal until you see what it is for. This is the proper use of the law: to get you to stop leaning on what you do and to lean entirely on what your Savior has done. He is not slamming the door on her. He is walking her to the end of herself.

And she goes there. She does not argue for her own merit. Yes, Lord, she says, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table. She agrees with the verdict, and in agreeing she steps out of the law and into grace.

O woman, great is your faith! Let it be to you as you desire. And her daughter was healed from that very hour.

Matthew 15:28 (NKJV)

The hardest sentence you will ever say

Here is where salvation actually turns. The first step is to agree with the law: I am a sinner. I am a wretch. Apart from what God has done for me, I am a dog and I deserve hell. This is the hardest part, the part every one of us resists.

Say it slowly, because it is the key that opens the door. If not for what God has done for me, I am a sinner, I deserve nothing, I deserve hell. We resist this part with everything in us, because everything in us wants to bring something to the table, some merit, some record, some reason we should be received. But the table is already set, and grace does not need your contribution. It only needs your empty hands.

Until you can say that, until you come to the end of yourself the way that woman did, the grace that brings salvation will keep slipping through your fingers. But the moment you stop defending yourself and fall on His mercy, the door the law had shut swings wide open. That is the good news the law was always pointing to. Only grace can save. And grace can.