Prayer: Lord, we would never stop our worshipping of You as the speaking God. Thank You for Your spoken word and also for Your written Word that constitutes the Bible. Hallelujah! In this universe on this earth there is the Bible! What a wonder and what a grace! Even though Your Word has been spoken and written, we do not understand it that much. We understand it mostly according to the black and white, according to the letter. We have not entered into the intrinsic revelation that is conveyed in every word, especially in the crucial words, and the most crucial word is grace. For many years we have read through Your written Word, and we have taken many of the verses on grace for granted. We would never ask what they mean. We just read them and even recite them without the intrinsic understanding of what You are saying. Thank You for Your sovereign arrangement that we could have such a meeting week after week to get into the crystallization of Your deep Word, of the depths of Your revelation. Here is our prayer. We need You. We need You to be our understanding. How we long to see this matter of grace! We cannot speak because of the shortage of human language. We trust in You for the speaking. O Lord, be our speaking, be the speaking in our speaking. Be one spirit with us, and make us one spirit with You. We are not teaching people the Bible in the way of a Bible study. We are here seeking what is on Your heart, in Your desire, in Your pleasure, which is conveyed in Your Word. We trust in You. Amen.
Thus far, we have covered grace in the New Testament with three main writers: John, Peter, and Paul. John is the one who initiates and ends the New Testament concerning grace. Peter is rich in his writing concerning grace. But the most complete, perfect, and rich one is the apostle Paul in his fourteen Epistles. In this message we want to cover the gleanings in the vast field of God’s grace. The field of God’s grace is so vast that we need a gleaning.
In the typology of the Old Testament, there is a wonderful pattern of gleaning in the story of Ruth. Ruth was eventually married to Boaz through her gleaning in Boaz’s field. Boaz was very rich, kind, and generous. He purposely left some sheaves on the field and scattered them for the people to glean. In the Old Testament, God’s commandment to Israel concerning the reaping of the harvest was that Jehovah would bless the children of Israel if they left the corners of their fields and the gleanings for the poor, the sojourners, the orphans, and the widows (Lev. 23:22; 19:9-10; Deut. 24:19). Today we all are Ruths. We have become poor. We do not have a field, nor can we have a harvest like Boaz’s. But thank God that we can carry out the gleaning.
This is similar to the case of the Canaanite woman who came to the Lord Jesus for help. The Lord Jesus said that it was not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs (Matt. 15:26). But she responded, “Yes, Lord, for even the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table” (v. 27). She was saying that she had the right to glean. Day by day I feel that I am like a Canaanite dog who is gleaning of the riches of Christ.
In a sense, we have harvested the field of God’s grace. Now we need to come to the corners of this field to glean the riches of grace from the books of the New Testament which we have not covered. Only two writers of the New Testament do not mention grace: Matthew and Mark. Although John speaks of grace, he does not mention grace in his first and third Epistles. We need to come back to glean something of grace from Luke to Jude and from Peter’s field and John’s field.
The truth concerning grace is very important. Grace is covered by many writers in many different ways. Luke refers to grace at the time of the Lord’s conceiving in Mary. In Luke 1:28 the angel Gabriel said to Mary, “Rejoice, you who have been graced! The Lord is with you.” In verse 30 he said, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor [grace] with God.” Most translations use the word favor instead of grace, but the word in the Greek text is the same word used for grace. In our Recovery Version, we translated verse 28 properly. Mary was graced by the Lord. But in verse 30 we translated grace as “favor.” Note 301 says, “Or, grace.” In our revised version we will translate this as “grace.”
Mary’s conceiving of the Lord Jesus was great because that was God’s incarnation within her. This was not just Mary’s finding favor or being favored by God. This was a matter of grace. Whatever is mentioned as the first case in the Bible becomes the principle, and the first case in the New Testament of grace is the case of God’s incarnation. At one time God was in an unapproachable place (1 Tim. 6:16). In the Old Testament, He came out to visit people, but never in His visitation did He stay with the one who was visited by Him. He came to Abraham and feasted with him, but then He left. He came to Gideon and left. He came to a number of persons in the Old Testament, but His coming was merely a temporary visit.
His incarnation was different from this. His incarnation was not just His coming to visit Mary. Instead, He came to stay in Mary, to stay in her physical womb. Matthew 1:20 says that what was begotten in Mary was of the Holy Spirit. God came to visit Mary, and He entered into her and stayed in her to be the very essence of her conceiving of a wonderful Person, who would be both God and man, a God-man. The incarnation was a great thing. God came to visit people, to enter into people, and to stay in people. This is grace. Mary was graced by God and found grace with God.
Grace is God’s visitation to stay in man, to be born in man, and to be one with man. We should not forget that Mary’s being graced by God in the conception of the Man-Savior is the first mention of the word grace in the New Testament, so this establishes a principle. Second Timothy 4:22 says, “The Lord be with your spirit. Grace be with you.” The Lord came to stay in us, to be born in us, to be one with us, and even to become us. This is grace. We must keep this definition of grace in mind. Then with this definition we can interpret every verse where grace is mentioned in the New Testament.
Luke 2 says that the young boy Jesus advanced in grace and in wisdom and in stature (v. 52). Jesus, as a young boy, advanced in grace with God. What does this mean? We have to say again that grace is God’s visitation to stay in man, to be born in man, and to be one with man. No doubt, Jesus was a boy who behaved perfectly, but that was not all. He also advanced in grace with God. That means that God was growing in Him.