“My, that’s a beautiful card.  I’ve never seen one like it before.”
The merchant was complimenting the color and design of my debit card.

Now, I’ve received compliments on shirts, eyeglasses, haircuts.  Never a card.  Mine is one of those default factory generated ones sent from the bank.  Though I use it often, I never think about what it looks like.  I’m only interested that the thing works, and accesses my funds.  If my account was empty, though, even if Monet had designed the card it wouldn’t matter.   When the balance is zero, the card becomes meaningless plastic in a wallet.

Sometimes I think of grace and faith this way.  Grace is spiritual riches.  Faith is the means of accessing it.

From God’s standpoint, grace is there first.  It is after all, integral to His approach and attitude, even while it was sometimes not the prevailing characteristic of past covenants (specifically the covenant of Law).  He is “the God of all grace,” (1 Pet. 5:10), which was not a recent development.  Paul added that God “saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began” (2 Tim. 1:9).  Grace…before the ages began.  It’s hard for anything to predate that.

But from our standpoint and experience of salvation, faith comes first.  That’s why Abraham, the first in God’s redemptive template of Abraham, Isaac. and Jacob, exemplifies faith.  Only faith can access grace.  Paul writes, “Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.”  As we said above, all the faith in the world will get you nothing, if there is nothing to access and receive.

So, along came Abraham with his debit card of faith, drawing on the riches of God’s account.  What did he withdraw?  A child.  God promised, Abraham believed, and then Isaac, representing grace, was the outcome.  He was the gift that tumbled out in the wake of faith.  Though grace already abundantly existed in “the God of all grace,” and is primary above all and before all, it was poured upon Abraham through faith.  Its name was Isaac.

Isaac—hard to grasp

Of the three patriarchs, the story of Isaac’s life occupies the shortest space in the book of Genesis.  The Bible focuses less on what he did and more on what he was, calling him a child of promise (c.f. Gal. 4:28).  He embodies grace, which means God’s free act of giving.  Free. That’s attractive sounding, but difficult to grasp.  We don’t trust the concept of “free” very much.  At my house, anything that arrives in the mail saying “Free,” will receive a trip straight to the trash.

But the grace of God is true.

Furthermore, it is so amazing, Abraham had a difficult time conceptualizing it.  From the very beginning, he had interpreted God’s gracious promise of offspring in a certain way.  He assumed his eventual heir would be Eliezer, a house servant he would legally adopt (Gen. 15:2).  That would mean the “offspring” God had mentioned in Genesis 12 would turn out only as a figure of speech.  Adoption was a legal procedure people routinely undertook in the ancient world.  Yet God’s grace was not to be so routine.  And so God clarified it—“This man [Eliezer] shall not be your heir; your very own son shall be your heir” (Gen 15:4).

Still, grace took time to grasp.  For instance, since Sarah was nursing home age, she assumed that the baby could perhaps be Abraham’s, but not hers.  She went and got her servant woman, Hagar, and gave the woman to Abraham as a surrogate.  Sarah thought, “The resulting child will be mine by adoption.”  Abraham agreed with the arrangement.  The result was a son, but not the one God promised. Again, God clarified His promise to Abraham, saying, “I will give you a son by her” (Gen. 17:16), speaking of Sarah.  Isaac was to come from Sarah’s body, as well—an impossible arrangement from the human perspective, matching of course, the grace that is only possible for God (c.f. Luke 18:27).

Every time God revisited the subject of the promise, He seemed to put more “amazing” into it.  And so by the time the promised grace was completely crystallized to them, they were well past the age of childbearing, so old that Abraham’s body, and Sarah’s womb were dead (c.f. Rom. 4:19).  The baby would not, could not, be the product of human strength, or even logical likelihood.  It would have to be a miraculous gift, because no amount of trying on their part would ever suffice.  It was grace, or nothing.

Then the Lord did His work of grace—a miracle apart from their manipulations.  Genesis 21:1 said the Lord promised, the Lord visited, the Lord did. The old couple had a baby.  In v. 6 Sarah said, “God has made laughter for me.”  That’s the result of grace—happiness, refreshment, relief, amazement.  Sarah added, “All who hear will laugh over me,” because grace is catching.  It spreads.  Once it gets into a person, it also affects the whole environment around them.  She even named the boy Isaac, which means laughter.

Amazing Grace for Us Also Started with a Child

Where does the story of Isaac intersect New Testament experience?  Well, please don’t say it happened when you believed and got a spouse, a new car, a job promotion, etc.  “Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17).  Grace is in a Person.  And when you receive Him through faith, you are born…all over again!  That’s why Galatians 4:28 says we believers, as Isaac, are children of promise.

Your second birth was a miracle because as with Sarah, at some point in your life, three things took place:  God promised, God visited, and God did.  First, God spoke the gospel, the promise of salvation.  He did  it through others, no doubt, but He promised salvation to you in the name of Jesus.  When you believed, then He visited.  He came to your heart with his Holy Spirit, and then He did something—He regenerated you, gave you new life, second birth.  Hopefully, you rejoiced, and still are to this day.

But Isaac’s story doesn’t end with his remarkable birth, and neither does ours.  The grace of God keeps going.  Isaac was born into Abraham’s wealth, so we don’t see him working, struggling, to gather anything for himself.  They were his from the start.  That’s grace.  This is like Ephesian 1:3, where it says God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in Christ.  He has done it.

We all start in the position of blessing.  There’s no need to earn it.  Sometimes we believers focus on things we don’t have, and spend a lot of time trying to obtain them.  Prayer can sound like begging, pleading, and finally, disillusionment and anger when the outcome was not what was wanted.

We may not have considered that as people of grace, even what seems to be non-answers to prayer are exactly what we needed.  With many years’ hindsight, I thank God today for some requests of mine He didn’t grant!  Because of God’s considerable grace, sometimes we are given things we didn’t ask for at all, only to find later that they  led to our definite benefit.  But, as with Abraham and Sarah, God must continually revisit and clarify our current grace.  The more that happens, the more we’ll find ourselves laughing, and joyful.  We have the child of promise who is Christ, and being in Him, we ourselves are children of promise.

That’s going to create a lot of odd juxtapositions.  Because of grace, we can laugh while crying, rest while working, be filled while wanting, and hope while in the pit of disappointment.