EXTRAVAGANT GRACE: GOD'S GLORY DISPLAYED IN OUR WEAKNESS

Those of us who have been brought up in the Puritan tradition have always been taught that sin is terribly destructive, that it poisons our souls, separates us from God, and ultimately makes shipwreck of our faith leading to death. We believed that if we stubbornly continued in sin, God would ultimately give us over to our own lusts forever, condemning us to hell. Barbara Duguid isn’t having it. Duguid begins in her preface: If our ongoing sin keeps us at the foot of the cross, desperately in need of a refuge and redeemer, then the party starts here and now and my daily sin becomes the conduit for outrageous joy and celebration. So let the festivities begin. Her main thesis in the book is that there is something God loves even more than a life that is victorious over sin — he loves for his people to be broken and contrite — and for this reason he will often choose to walk us through our sin rather than give us victory over it. She says, Let’s be honest: if the chief work of the Holy Spirit in sanctification is to make Christians more sin-free, then he isn’t doing a very good job… his decision to leave Christians with many struggles with sin must also somehow serve to glorify him and benefit his people. This is shocking news, isn’t it? Think of what this means. God thinks that you will actually come to know and love him better as a desperate and weak sinner in continual need of grace than you would as a triumphant Christian warrior who wins each and every battle against sin. This makes sense out of our experience as Christians (p. 30). Personal experience ranks high in her determination of what is true and the whole book is filled with story after story about her personal failures. Duguid assures us that God’s real goal is not to remove sin but to make us more aware of it. She says, What is God’s goal for us as we mature in faith? Is it simply that we actually sin less and less, or rather that we see our sin more and more? If his goal is that we see more and more sin, then he is ordaining to leave and tolerate a great deal of sin in us for his higher purpose (p. 59). She also assures us that when we sin, it is because God willed it: It may come as a shocking thought that God ordains sin! We know from Scripture that he never tempts anyone to evil and cannot be tempted by it himself (James 1:13). However, it is equally clear that a God who could stop sin and chooses not to, but chooses instead to use it for his own ends, has clearly willed it without ever causing it (p. 60). Duguid lists further benefits of sin: However, if you believe that God is completely sovereign over your sin and is always using it for your own good to teach you more about yourself and more of his grace, then you are free to hate your sin but love what God is doing through it. This does not lead to discouragement, fear, anxiety, and depression. On the contrary, it leads to peace, joy, and greater confidence in the work of the Holy Spirit living in you (p.61-62). Duguid reimagines sanctification as a monergistic act of God, denying that at regeneration we have been empowered and equipped by the Holy Spirit to kill sin in our lives. According to Duguid, sin is inevitable and we are not free agents. What if God has left you in such a weak state here on earth that you couldn’t even want to flip that Holy Spirit switch (if there were such a thing) without his help and enabling? What if he has done this very thing for our own good—and for his glory? What if the pathway to huge, overwhelming, and abundant joy in Christ does not take us around our sin, but takes us right through the middle of it? (p. 98). God has been writing the story of your life and, on a grander scale, the history of his people by allowing and restraining sin. You are not a free agent (p.105). If decreasing the total number of sins that I committed were God’s primary objective, he would have kept me out of the wilderness…God loves broken and contrite hearts, and we don’t acquire those by living the victorious Christian life (p. 118-119). God loves a humble and contrite spirit, and this can come to us in no other way than through our own repeated sinful failure (p. 214). In the entire book, there is not one warning such as what we find in Romans 2:4-5. “Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But because of your hard and impenitent heart, you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.” The kind of extravagant grace Duguid celebrates is a counterfeit. The real thing is the grace that gives us victory over sin.