Revisiting Common Grace

It’s mid-September here in Michigan. The much-anticipated, season-changing cold front has gone through, the mornings have become crisp and clear, and the first smells of Autumn have started to fill the air. And this week my son and I are observing a little-celebrated but highly anticipated local holiday: the start of small game season.

By coincidence I am also teaching this week on the topics of natural revelation (in Systematic Theology I) and natural law theory (in Ethics), so it seems that everything in my life this week is converging on God’s “general” or “common” activities in his universe. Hence my blog topic.

Scripture makes much of these general, divine activities and common graces, and though we are constantly reminded that these are not final or comprehensive vehicles of divine disclosure, they are still true and valid means to the knowledge of God and a necessary backdrop to the special revelation of God that has climaxed in the revelation of his Son (Heb 1:1–4 cf. Psa 19; Rom 1:18–2:16). We recognize the voice God who speaks because we have seen from infancy the hand of God who shows.

And so I invite all of you, at a time of year when the change of seasons causes the mind to drift to God’s common gifts, to revisit them for what they are—common graces that appear to all but can be fully appreciated only by those who have been recipients of God’s redemptive grace. And to facilitate that end, let me put a couple of verses of song into your mind to serve as pointers to the sometimes neglected but eminently praiseworthy common graces that we experience daily:

This is my Father’s world, the birds their carols raise,

The morning light, the lily white, declare their Maker’s praise.

This is my Father’s world: he shines in all that’s fair;

In the rustling grass I hear him pass;

He speaks to me everywhere.

and

Heav’n above is softer blue, earth around is sweeter green!

Something lives in every hue Christless eyes have never seen;

Birds with gladder songs o’erflow, flowers with deeper beauties shine,

Since I know, as now I know, I am his, and he is mine.