paul and laura respectably married? why, that would make you see grace as a way back to the sovereignty of the law - grace as a mere one- or two-shot remission of guilt whose chief purpose was to suspend the rules for a while and give a second chance to people who now, having run out of chances, had best get back to the business that God really has in mind for them - namely watching their step. for at the roots of our fallen being, that is what we really think. our pride drives us to establish our own righteousness. we strive all our life to see ourselves as keepers of rules we cannot keep, as loyal subjects of laws under which we can only be judged outlaws. yet so deep is our need to derive our identity from our own self-respect - so profound is our conviction that unless we watch our step, the watchbird will take away our name - that we will spend a lifetime trying to do the impossible rather then, for even one carefree minute, consent to having it done for us by someone else...
we need more than than an occasional suspension of the rules. we need GRACE. and grace is not the offer of an exception to the rules; it is a new dispensation entirely. it says nothing about the rules (indeed, it leaves them intact); it simply says that since, because of our weakness, the rules can never be the basis of our existence. God is not going to make them such anymore. accordingly, in my view, there is nothing in my presentation of grace via a story of two people who have excused themselves from the received sexual ethic that is not, mutatis mutandum (perhaps even pari passu), in Jesus' presentation of himself as a sabbath-breaking Messiah. i am guilty as charged, and find myself in very good company indeed.
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