It’s a basic principle in Christian theology, at least within Reformation churches, that there is a grand gulf between God’s holiness and our fallen, corrupted souls.

It was a common refrain in the Evangelical Explosion materials I learned in my teens, and sewn up front into the basic Four Spiritual Laws tract so many of us witnessing ones used when talking to others about the basic model of human holiness.

According to the Bible, the Believer’s guidebook, man was stranded at the Fall across an infinite canyon from God in His glory. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”, the cited verse from Romans says (Romans 3:23). And no matter his efforts or his knowledge or his zeal or his penitence, man cannot cross that grand gulf on his own.

Human works cannot lift a soul into God’s holy presence.

Hence, the unimaginable kindness in the work of the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the God-Man.

In death, Jesus took on all of the imperfections and impurities of humanity, and bore the penalty for those spiritual imperfections before a holy Father for anyone who would ask and allow Him too. In resurrection, Jesus dispatched those faults and failings and offenses, with death, into destruction. In resurrection, He exchanged our sins- once and for all- for His life within us, and erased our imperfections and replaced them with his righteousness and holiness before His Father.

Jesus crossed the grand gulf to bring life to the dead, and to remove death from the living- from those who accepted the covering of His singular spectacular spiritual work.

It is no surprise then that grace- God’s unmerited kindness- is like his Son’s salvific work.

It comes to us across the grand gulf, beyond ourselves and our abilities to summon or secure it, and offers itself to us, quietly, but without strings.

Such is the favor of God, authored and offered and delivered by the Holy One, across the grand gulf, for the enriching of His creation and His creatures.

You can’t beg Him for it, or accrue it by your efforts.

You can only see it and accept it, that gift from the One Who Gives All.

But realize that grace has come to you across a great distance.

Across the grand gulf of human self-satisfaction, self-righteousness, corruption and compromise.