Common Grace, 1.60

This post is part of a series walking through the first volume of Abraham Kuyper’s Common Grace.

Common grace is both a doctrine and a history. The history is its unfolding from paradise (Eden) to the coming paradise (the Kingdom of God).

So what connection does common grace have with end times? The Apostles taught that we should both wait with eager anticipation and assume delay in Christ’s return. But what is this connection between history and common grace?

Certainly, without common grace–or with a weakened common grace–we’d be back in the pre-Flood position. The end result would have been hell on earth. Had particular grace attempted to operate under these circumstances there would have been no room for the church and the elect would have been lopped off at the root. Their lives would have had no further effect on the world, and no reason for its continued existence. There would have been no Israel and no external means for the Holy Spirit’s work. Likewise there would have been no unfolding of church history, no sphere for God’s demonstration of his long-suffering and mercy outside of election.

Common grace likewise restrains and focuses ultimate lawlessness into one man, rather than letting it spread without restraint through the whole world. Even now it facilitates killing and other mass sins. referencing the Franco-Prussian War, Kuyper notes that

“…on the one hand only common grace has brought about this finer human development in knowledge and skill, but that, even as it has blessed, it has also increased a hundredfold the means of annihilation and destruction in crime as well as war…” (530)

We are becoming better at sinning. Civilization and progress multiples our sins, ending in the “self-deification of men” as an absolute “then it is finished.” And then Christ wins. Until then, common grace both makes life better and enables better expressions of our sins:

“Common grace always continues raising the standard of our social life, enriching our knowledge, multiplying our human skill, refining our way of life, making life easier, more enjoyable, freer, and through all of this our power and dominion over nature ever keeps increasing. But also, by the same measure, common grace better arms sin, making it more ingenious in its devising, more multifaceted in its manifestation; the mystery of lawlessness has ever more means at its disposal in every realm of life, cloaking itself in forms that increase the power and allure of sin immensely.” (532)

Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO