“He built the bridge all the way” by Jerry Bridges

“God says to us:

‘Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.’ (Isaiah 55:1)

The gospel is addressed to those who have no money or good works. It invites us to come and “buy” salvation without money and without cost.

But note the invitation to come is addressed to those who have no money—not to those who don’t have enough.

Grace is not a matter of God’s making up the difference, but of God’s providing all the “cost” of salvation through His Son, Jesus Christ.

The apostle Paul spoke to this issue in Romans 3:22 when he said, “There is no difference.”

There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, between the religious and the irreligious, between the most decent moral person and the most degenerate.

There is no difference between us, because we all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

To say the grace of God makes up the difference of what God requires of us is like comparing two people’s attempts to leap across the Grand Canyon.

The canyon averages about nine miles in width from rim to rim. Suppose one person could leap out about thirty feet from the edge while another can leap only six feet.

What difference does it make? Sure, one person can leap five times as far as the other, but relative to nine miles (47,520 feet!), it makes no difference.

Both leaps are absolutely worthless for crossing the canyon.

And when God built a bridge across the “Grand Canyon” of our sin, He didn’t stop thirty feet or even six feet from our side.

He built the bridge all the way.

Even the comparison of trying to leap across the Grand Canyon fails to adequately represent our desperate condition.

To use that illustration we have to assume people are trying to leap across the canyon; that is, most people are actually trying to earn their way to heaven and, despite earnest effort, are falling short of bridging the awful chasm of sin separating them from God.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Almost no one tries to earn his way to heaven (Martin Luther, prior to his conversion, being a notable exception).

Rather, almost everyone assumes that what he or she is already doing is sufficient to merit heaven. Almost no one is making a sincere effort to increase the length of his “leap” across the canyon.

Instead, in our minds, we have narrowed the width of the canyon to what we can comfortably cross without any additional effort beyond what we are already doing.

The person whose moral lifestyle might be equivalent to thirty feet sees the distance as narrowed to a comfortable twenty-nine feet; and the person who can leap only six feet has narrowed his canyon to five.

Everyone expects that God will accept what he is already doing as sufficient “currency” to “buy” a house in heaven.

Like the first audience who heard Jesus’ famous parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, most people are confident of their own righteousness (Luke 18:9–14).

They may, at a moment of serious reflection, concede they are not perfect by any means, but they consider themselves to be basically good.

One great problem today is that most of us really don’t believe we’re all that bad. In fact, we assume we’re good.

Like the tax collector, we do not just need God’s grace to make up for our deficiencies; we need His grace to provide a remedy for our guilt, a cleansing for our pollution.

We need His grace to provide a satisfaction of His justice, to cancel a debt we cannot pay.

It may seem that I am belaboring the point of our guilt and vileness before God.

But we can never rightly understand God’s grace until we understand our plight as those who need His grace.

As Dr. C. Samuel Storms has said:

‘The first and possibly most fundamental characteristic of divine grace is that it presupposes sin and guilt. Grace has meaning only when men are seen as fallen, unworthy of salvation, and liable to eternal wrath. Grace does not contemplate sinners merely as undeserving but as ill-deserving.… It is not simply that we do not deserve grace; we do deserve hell!‘”

–Jerry Bridges, Transforming Grace: Living Confidently in God’s Unfailing Love (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2008), 27–29, 33-34.