More on Common Grace

Throughout this grandeur of grace series we are focusing on the special love of God towards His people. His love that is particular and persuasive.

This doesn't mean that there isn't a common love of God towards His creation. There is...
"God's common grace restrains evil (Genesis 20:6) and bestows good (Psalm 145:15,16) so that no one is a stranger to God's kindness." --Robert Peterson and Michael Williams

Genesis 20:6 God said to him (Abimelech) in the dream, “Yes, I know that you have done this in the integrity of your heart, and it was I who kept you from sinning against me."
and

Psalm 145:15 The eyes of all look to you,
and you give them their food in due season.

16 You open your hand;
you satisfy the desire of every living thing.

Abraham Kuyper

this is one of those quotes that i read and realize, "this resonates with what I experience"; i saw it in a ken meyers article called "christianity, culture, and common grace":


. . . the unbelieving world excels in many things. Precious treasures have
come down to us from the old heathen civilization. In Plato you find
pages which you devour. Cicero fascinates you and bears you along by
his noble tone and stirs up in you holy sentiments. And if you consider
your own surroundings, that which is reported to you, and that which
you derive from the studies and literary productions of professed infidels,
how much more there is which attracts you, with which you sympathize
and which you admire. It is not exclusively the spark of genius or the
splendor of talent which excites your pleasure in the words and actions
of unbelievers, but it is often their beauty of character, their zeal, their
devotion, their love, their candor, their faithfulness and their sense of honesty. 

Yea, we may not pass it over in silence, not infrequently you
entertain the desire that certain believers might have more of the
attractiveness, and who among us has not himself been put to the blush
occasionally by being confronted with what is called the “virtues of the heathen”? 

--A. Kuyper


(I actually had this type of experience earlier this week, and wrote about it here)

Common Grace as Shade

Especially because of the common curse, common grace is necessary. Laboring
under the physical, spiritual, and emotional strains of a fallen world, without any
shade in the scorching sun of God’s wrath, man’s suffering would be, well,
hellish. But human experience is not hellish. In fact, considering what he
deserves, human culture is an amazing gift. But that doesn’t make it the Kingdom of God.

--Ken Meyers

More on Common Grace

The fruits of common grace include the ability to perform what has been

called “civic righteousness,” or justitia civilis, “that which is right in civil or

natural affairs, in distinction from that which is right in religious matters, natural

good works especially in social relations, works that are outwardly and

objectively in harmony with the law of God, though entirely destitute of any

spiritual quality.”

Berkhof is consistent with the Reformed confessions, compare, for

example, the Westminster Confession on “Good Works,” (ch. XVI, paragraph VII):

Works done by unregenerate men, although for the matter of them they

may be things which God commands; and of good use both to

themselves and others: yet, because they proceed not from an heart

purified by faith; nor are done in a right manner, according to the Word;

nor to a right end, the glory of God, they are therefore sinful, and cannot

please God, or make a man meet to receive grace from God: and yet,

their neglect of them is more sinful and displeasing unto God.

So works that are “of good use to themselves and to others” are done by

the unregenerate. These works include works in the social and cultural spheres.

--Ken Meyers 

Christianity, Culture, and Common Grace
Ken Myers (.pdf)