When I began to work on this subject I was surprised to find that very few books of theology consider common grace. An exception is Louis Berkhof, whose work deals with it under three headings: 1) the nature of common grace; 2) the means of common grace; and 3) the effects of common grace. But most books of theology skip it, understandably, I suppose. Theologians stress the special grace of God in salvation. Nevertheless, the neglect of common grace is surprising if only because the early Christians seem to have used common grace as a natural starting point for preaching the gospel to Gentiles. Here are two examples.
A number of years ago a New York rabbi named Harold S. Kushner made a splash in the publishing world with a book entitled When Bad Things Happen to Good People. It was on the New York Times “best sellers" list for months, and its thesis was that bad things happen to good people because God is not omnipotent and things simply get away from him. At the end of the book Kushner advised us to forgive God and, like him, just try to get on with life and do the best we can.
The second great demonstration of the grace of God in the account of Adam and Eve's fall is the promise of a Redeemer found in verse 15. Theologians call this the protoevangelium, the first announcement of the gospel in the Bible. At this point Adam and Eve could not have known very much about what God was promising. They did not know when the Redeemer would come. They probably thought their first-born son was the Redeemer, because they named him Cain, which means “acquired” or “here he is.” To their dismay Cain turned out to be the world's first murderer. Adam and Eve did not know the name of the Savior either. That name was not revealed until thousands of years had gone by, when the angel of God told a man named Joseph and a woman named Mary, “You are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21; cf. Luke 1:31). Still, Adam and Eve knew enough to believe that God would send a Savior and that their only hope of salvation was in him.
At the end of yesterday’s study we saw how Satan tried to make Eve doubt God’s goodness. Satan's next thrust was to cast doubt on God's word. God had said, “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.” Now Satan said, "You will not surely die" (v.4). Here was a problem! God had said, “You will die,” but the devil said, "You will not die." Whom was the woman to believe? We know what she did. Instead of believing and obeying God implicitly, which she should have done, she decided to submit the matter to her own judgment and so examined the tree, finding it to be “good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom” (v.6). That is, she submitted it to a pragmatic test (did it have nutritional value?), an aesthetic test (how would it look on the table?), and an intellectual test (would she learn anything by eating it?). When the fruit of the tree passed those tests, she decided that the devil was right after all and so took some, ate it, and gave it to her husband, who ate also.
