The business world mistakenly calls it luck or fortune. They commonly speak of being lucky or fortunate when things go well. Einstein knew better. He knew that “God doesn’t play dice.” Nothing is uncertain for God, who knows everything. God knows that there is no such thing as luck or fortune. God knows because God is the giver of grace.
Why grace? To understand grace requires the acknowledgment of the reality and extent of sin. Sin is moral failure, which implies a moral standard that has not been met. Morality apart from a common standard is meaningless. The standard provides a rule or measure by which morality can be defined and determined. When people use different systems of measurement all moral determinations become subjective or relative — and morality becomes meaningless. Only in the face of a common standard of right and wrong can a behavior, decision or action be designated as moral or immoral, right or wrong.
The primary moral question is whether or not a common standard exists and whether it can be imposed upon all human behavior, actions and/or decisions. If there is such a standard it must exist as a documented fact of history. In addition, because no human being can have a truly objective perspective, the standard must come from a higher order of intelligence and must be universally imposed upon all people for all time. Anything less cannot claim the objectivity needed for the standard to be truly universal.
The God of the Bible meets all of these criteria, and has set the standard for right and wrong, moral and immoral. Yet, the Bible itself proves that people cannot meet God’s moral standards. God well knew that people would not be able to meet His standards of perfection, so He sent His only begotten Son to demonstrate the standard and to pay the consequences of our failure.
In the light of Jesus Christ that standard cannot be dismissed as humanly impossible, nor rejected because of our failure to meet it. Rather, by following Jesus Christ people are protected from the ultimate consequences of God’s judgment for our failure, and we are strengthened and encouraged to live our lives by God’s standards as best as we are able, knowing that Christ will provide for us what we cannot provide for ourselves.
Grace is not something added to human experience to get people through life’s difficulties. Rather, grace is the only source of real meaning and purpose in life because apart from grace people are destined to fail to be and do what is required of them. In Christ alone are people free to be who God created them to be and to accomplish what God has given them to do.