Scandalous Grace: A Book for Tired Christians Seeking Rest

by Preston M. Sprinkle

The Old Testament is all about grace.

Divine grace is God’s relentless and loving pursuit of His enemies, who are unthankful, unworthy, and unlovable. Grace is not just God’s ability to save sinners, but God’s stubborn delight in His enemies—yes, even the creepy ones.

We demean grace by reducing it to another Christianese buzzword.

The Old Testament is all about grace. You can’t understand grace apart from the Old Testament, and you can’t understand the Old Testament without understanding grace. If you read the Old Testament and aren’t kindled and confronted by the scandal of grace, then you need to go back and read it again. You missed it. If you see only wrath and judgment, then you’ve missed the best part, the main plot, the primary message.

Every character, every event, every single page from the Old Testament bleeds grace.

we’ve been trained to read the Bible, especially the Old Testament, morally.

most of the characters of the Old Testament are not good examples to follow.

God not only loves us; He actually likes us. He eagerly dirties His hands with our mess to mold us into masterpieces of beauty. And when we emerge clean from the mud, we owe it all to God. When we fall back into the pit of addiction and lust and greed and selfishness, God is eager to roll up His sleeves and go to work. And God loves to go to work.

God doesn’t merely forgive us or save us. He actually enjoys us—even in our darkest moments. He doesn’t enjoy our sin, but He enjoys us as redeemed image bearers. Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection enable His pleasure to flow freely to unpleasurable people who have faith in Him.

There are over one hundred billion stars in each of the one hundred billion galaxies in the universe. That’s around one sextillion stars, which is a number we get if we write out ten with twenty-one zeros behind it. There are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe, each one spoken into existence by an all-powerful Creator. If we get too close to one of these stars—like ninety-two million miles away, the distance between the earth and the sun—and stare at it for more than five seconds, it’ll fry our eyes. If there is an intelligent designer behind creation, then He must possess power beyond all comprehension.

Some of the greatest lies you’ll ever believe are told by your eyes as you gaze into a mirror. Lies fueled by your own doubt and a culture that worships a false standard of beauty and worth. Beauty is formed in the eye of the beholder. But your Beholder is God. He made you in His own image; He gave you that crown.

Far from being a faithful saint, Abraham is a trophy of God’s scandalous delight. When God first meets Abraham, he is a pagan idolater. Abraham is bowing down to idols, offering sacrifices to different gods, and having sex with temple prostitutes so that a moon god named Nanna will show him favor.

God forms the nation of Israel, delivers it from the Red Sea, conquers the land of Canaan, raises up King David, speaks through the prophets, sends His Son, Jesus Christ, and saves you and me, all because of His daring promise to a wicked man from Ur. Our salvation rests upon God’s unyielding commitment to a pagan idolater.

If God’s promises rested upon Abraham’s behavior, then we would all be in hell.

Abraham nearly squanders the promise that God would make him into a mighty nation through Sarah. Do you ever get discouraged about your ongoing struggle with gossip, pride, porn, or alcohol? I imagine Abraham did too. Apparently, he had an ongoing struggle with lying. It’s no wonder that the apostle Paul, when reaching for an Old Testament example of grace, went straight for Abraham.

We bring nothing to the table when we come to Christ. And our performance does not dictate God’s love for us after we’ve come to Christ. We don’t just leave grace at the door after we enter salvation—thanks, God. I’ll take it from here. Grace is just as necessary for our ongoing life as it is for our conversion.

God’s promised Messiah—the One who will kill the snake and redeem the world (Gen. 3:15)—will come through Judah, even though everything in our transactional bones wants to see God use Joseph, the morally superior choice. God deliberately selects the genealogical line of Judah, not Joseph, to bring forth the Savior—the snake-crushing seed of Eve.

God hand selects Perez—the illegitimate son from an illicit affair between a father-in-law and daughter-in-law dressed up as harlot—to be a part of His plan to redeem the world. God deliberately gets His hands dirty by molding Judah’s mess into a conduit of grace, because God is in the business of working through our messes.

Grace means that God seeks out repugnant sinners—the Judahs of the world—and uses them to redeem wicked people. And we are Judah.

God isn’t just able to use messed-up sinners to accomplish His plan. He actually prefers to. “God chose what is low and despised in the world … so that no human being might boast in the presence of God” (1 Cor. 1:28–29).

God using a bunch of women to rescue His people from slavery in Egypt. God’s choice of female redeemers is a backhanded slap to the patriarchal, male-centered culture He was working within.

You cannot see God’s image wholly in a monastery.

If there ever was clear evidence that God saves people based on who He is and not on what we have done, it’s the exodus from Egypt. God doesn’t rescue His people from Egypt because they are righteous. They aren’t fasting, praying, or even living righteously while in slavery. They aren’t on their knees, seeking the Lord. In fact, the Bible tells us they are on their knees, worshipping idols.4

If God’s covenant with His people is like a marriage, then the Israelites are committing adultery on their wedding night.

When you are apathetic toward God, He is never apathetic toward you. When you don’t desire to pray and talk to God, He never grows tired of talking to you. When you forget to read your Bible and listen to God, He is always listening to you.

Pick up any children’s Bible and you’re bound to find glowing portraits of Gideon, Barak, Samson, and other heroes to emulate. But skim the stories and you’ll see that these warriors don’t have a moral compass, or if they do, it’s always pointing in the wrong direction. In our attempt to be like the heroes of old, we should consider what that would actually mean. Such imitation could land us on death row.

Far from being a character to emulate, Samson is just another Judah.

God doesn’t employ Gideon because he’s righteous, but despite his unrighteousness. The book of Judges is not about God using people who have it all together, or doing powerful things through powerful people. It’s about God using cowards to do courageous feats, the violent to accomplish peace, and women to strengthen the spineless backbone of a patriarchal culture.

God likes to stack the deck against Himself in order to show off His grace and power, and this is what the book of Ruth is all about.

I wonder if David would be allowed in our churches today. In most cases, when a church member has an affair, he is shunned at best or mistreated at worst—even if he repents. But David doesn’t just have an affair. He lusts, covets, fornicates, lies, and gets another man hammered. Then he tries to keep his dirty little secrets by murdering the husband of the woman he “loves.” I doubt I’ve met anyone as sinful as David. Have you? He breaks half of the Ten Commandments in a single episode. And he doesn’t repent until he’s caught. But when Nathan shoves his prophetic finger into David’s chest and rebukes him, David falls to his knees and admits his guilt. And right then, at that moment, God rips open the heavens to reach down and touch David’s soul with stubborn delight. God eagerly forgives David for his sin, and all of it is buried at the bottom of the sea, never to be remembered again. There is no hiccup in God’s furious favor toward David.

For some reason we love to define people by the sin in their lives—even past sin in their lives—rather than by the grace that forgave it.

God’s plan of salvation was not upheld by the mighty arms of Israel’s judges, but by God’s tender grip of grace on social rejects. Looks like Jesus read His Bible growing up.

The nation of Israel, in fact, is often compared to a promiscuous woman who has slept with every guy in the neighborhood, and this analogy most often occurs in passages where grace is the main point.1

Ezekiel 16 offensively proclaims that God takes the initiative to love us and redeem us. God pursues wayward whores with His unconditional, one-way love so that He can clean us up. He won’t send a bolt of lightning to take care of your sin. He already sent a Son. Such unilateral love saturates the Old Testament, especially the prophets.

God commands Hosea to live out the allegory of Ezekiel 16:

Gomer is not a very valuable product among the lineup of slaves. We know this because the price that Hosea ends up paying for Gomer is only fifteen shekels and a bunch of barley. This was only half the price of the average female slave at that time.

Hosea’s scandalous, shameless, one-way love for his unlovable whore is a mere snapshot of God’s grace toward us. While we were still whores, Christ eagerly climbed up on the cross to redeem us from the slave market.

Popular renditions of the Christmas story reflect little historical truth. Jesus was most likely not born outside of a commercial “inn,” as our English translations suggest (Luke 2:7). The word kataluma can refer to an ancient motel, but it usually refers to a spare room of a house, not an “inn.” There probably weren’t any commercial inns in a small village like Bethlehem, so “spare room” is the best translation of the word kataluma.2 So when Mary and Joseph sought shelter in their hometown of Bethlehem, they almost certainly went to a house of a relative and asked to stay in his spare room, his kataluma. “Sorry,” the relative said, eyeing Mary’s expanded waistline. “There’s no space in our kataluma. You’ll have to sleep out with the animals.” “But, sir,” Joseph pleaded, “my wife is about to have a baby, and—” “Fiancée, Joseph! She’s your fiancée, not your wife,” his relative interjected. “You can sleep out with the animals if you want. But you cannot come under my roof.” Extending hospitality to the unwed couple would give approval to their actions, and the whole village would soon find out. Joseph’s relative could not risk the shame. So Mary and Joseph remained outside in the courtyard, where the animals were kept at night.

God never wanted to relate with us from a distance. He didn’t want a cosmic Facebook relationship with His image bearers. He didn’t want to tweet us once in a while or shoot us a text to see how we’re doing. “Don’t have time to call, but just wanted to make sure you’re okay.” Our God carves our names into His hands. He enters into our pain and finds us under the bridge.

In the ancient world, genealogies determined a person’s status—whether you came from an honorable family or a shameful one. A person’s family line says something about that person. Their character, their social status, the types of people they would hang out with. And Jesus’s genealogy says one thing loud and clear: Jesus is right at home with sinners, thugs, and outcasts.

Not only was God born in a feeding trough to enter our pain, but He chose to be born into a family tree filled with lust, perversion, murder, and deceit. This tells us a lot about the types of people Jesus wants to hang out with. It tells us that Jesus loves Tamars, Judahs, Gomers, and you.

The incarnation is a powerful demonstration of grace, since it shows that God doesn’t just care for our needs but loves us to the point of experiencing our needs. He not only knows our pain, but He has felt our pain. He not only knows when we feel lonely, discouraged, scared, or exhausted—He has been there.

When we read the New Testament from a distance, it’s tempting to spackle over the offensive stuff with religious familiarity.

Jesus planted the first church on earth with a group of hoodlums who wouldn’t be let inside the doors of most churches today.

One incident that gives me tons of confidence as a Christian is when Peter denies Jesus three times. Peter has been hanging out with Jesus, being mentored by the Creator of the universe. Then someone asks him if he has been with Jesus, and Peter denies that he even knows Him. “Hey, weren’t you hanging out with this man from Nazareth?” “No, sir, I wasn’t. I don’t even know the man.” Can you imagine if you said this about your wife? “Are you married to Christine?” “Christine? Who’s Christine? I’ve never heard of the woman.” Now, I get how scary this could be—Jesus is being hauled off by the authorities and a big, burly soldier with a club asks if you are part of His clan. But according to Matthew, the people who question Peter aren’t much of a threat. They aren’t soldiers or government authorities, police officers or jailers. The people who ask Peter if he was with Jesus are two slave girls and some random people looking on (Matt. 26:69–75). None of them are carrying clubs. But Peter’s denial of Jesus isn’t the end of their relationship. It’s only the beginning. Because Peter’s commitment to Jesus isn’t sustained by Peter. Peter remains committed to Jesus because Jesus is steadily committed to Peter. Just before Peter denies his Lord, Jesus promises to never let him go: “I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:32). If it weren’t for grace, Peter would be finished. The same is true for you. Your Bible-reading plan, prayer life, and baptized New Year’s res...

In the first century, Rome ruled over Israel. This would be equivalent to, say, Iran, North Korea, or China fighting against, conquering, and then continuing to rule over and oppress America. So imagine that you work hard all day and barely make enough to live on. Still, much of your money goes to fund Iran’s development of nuclear weapons so it can continue to rule over and oppress you. Your taxes go to help build beautiful mosques around your town, paper walls with pictures of Iranian leaders, and pay the salary of the abusive soldier who just slapped your wife and kicked your kids because, well, he simply felt like it. And Matthew—the kid you grew up with, used to play ball with—has betrayed America by working for Iran. They hired him out to be the one who would collect your money. But he’s not working just for them. He’s the one who is physically taking your money. Not only is your former friend and patriot helping to fund those oppressing you, but he’s also skimming off the top of your paycheck to line his own pockets. You see him daily in the local restaurant, laughing with his new friends, eating expensive steaks, and tossing back exotic drinks as you watch your kids spend night after night doubled over with hunger pains and shame. And bruises from the back of Matthew’s hand. Matthew is the visible extension of everything you hate, and everything that hates you.

Mary Magdalene is one of the most well-known and yet misconstrued women in the Bible. She’s often portrayed in Christian art as a forgiven prostitute, but nowhere in the New Testament is she depicted as such.3

Put yourself in Mary’s shoes. Imagine everyone who knows you thinks you’re a nuisance, you smell horrible, and you have nothing to offer. Imagine that this is your life—and has been for as long as you can remember. Your mother and father have abandoned you. Your brothers and sisters have disowned you. You’ve heard the word friendship, but you’ve never known what it means. You’ve seen people laugh, but you’ve never experienced the sensation. Every now and then strangers approach you, but just when you think they’re going to talk to you, they kick dust in your direction, spit on you, and then walk away. And then, a young Jewish rabbi walks up, surrounded by a bunch of men—and you think you’re done for. How many wads of phlegm will cover my face before they kick me, beat me, and gang-rape me. Is this my death? But instead of death, the rabbi offers a tender hand, gently raises you up from the ground, and commands the demons to leave you. “This woman is Mine! I value her. I delight in her. And you have no business here anymore—Mary is My disciple. And I need her to build My kingdom. Be gone!” Mary breathes for the first time the breath of life. She now knows what friendship means. She feels a strange sensation welling up and tickling her throat. It’s called laughter. And now, for the first time, she knows what it means to be human. More than all the other disciples, Mary Magdalene remains singularly committed to Jesus. None of the male disciples of Jesus are as unshakably sold...

I think many Christians are willing to put up with social outcasts and misfits, but this isn’t grace. It’s tolerance. Where there’s no pursuit, no stubborn delight, there’s a superficial Christianese grace (“bless this food to our bodies”), but it’s not charis. God aggressively and delightfully values and uses thugs and misfits to build His glorious kingdom: abrasive, thickheaded people like Peter, hotheaded racists like James and John, violent brawlers and extortionists like Simon and Matthew, and mentally deranged bag ladies like Mary Magdalene. He doesn’t give them a bowl of soup and shuffle them out of the church. He gives them responsibility—the hallmark of genuine value—and trusts in the God who uses the weak to shame the strong.

Performing random acts of kindness doesn’t change the world. Doing nice things for nice people doesn’t change the world. Returning a wallet to the one who left it at the restaurant is a kind gesture, but it won’t change the world. Jesus wants to change the world. Only unconditional, stubborn love toward your enemy produces ripple effects strong enough to change the world.