Common grace is the life-sustaining, fructifying love of God which brings everything into being, endows every creature with purpose and significance, and makes of the cosmos a showcase of beauty, wonder, delight, power, mystery, and wisdom. Common grace reaches to everything in the cosmos, because God created everything and everything belongs to Him. And because God is love, His stewardship of everything He has made is characterized by love as well.

Hence, the love, or grace of God, reaches to everything, all the time – common grace.

An alternative belief

Over the past 200 years practitioners of the theory of evolution have evolved another explanation of the cosmos, one that dispenses with any need for God and, thus, with God Himself. According to evolutionary theory the cosmos continues to exist on the energy of a great, long-ago cosmic explosion, the effects of which explain the existence and continuance of all things, including life.

It should be obvious that this view of cosmos and everything in it cannot be proved; it must be accepted by faith. But if we begin using reason from this starting-point, everything we examine will only prove our initial premise – that we don’t need “God” or any spiritual realities to make sense of the world around us.

This faith has become the secular religion of our generation, carried forward by determined advocates and enforced by law, especially in the schools of this land.

But do the laws of physics and the powers of the material cosmos necessarily exclude the existence or involvement of God? That is, just because we can demonstrate consistently, over and over again, that matter and energy behave in certain kinds of ways, as though the properties causing them to behave in these ways were inherent in the cosmos itself – because we can demonstrate this consistently, does this of necessity witness to the fact that the cosmos is its own explanation, and God does not exist?

Not so fast

Not according to Robert C. Bishop and Joshua Carr. In an important article in the Spring, 2013 issue of Christian Scholar’s Review, Bishop and Carr demonstrated the religious way in which evolutionists employ reason to “prove” their a priori assumptions about the nature of the cosmos. Beginning with the belief that God is not necessary and non-existent, evolutionists then “demonstrate” the “truth” of that assumption by performing all manner of scientific experiments which, they insist, show that the universe runs by itself, awaiting the mind of man to explain it. Science leads us to discover things that cannot be denied – the physical laws and operations of things, for example – and it exposes as untenable things that cannot resist the evidence clamoring for their denial. The authors write, concerning this process, “Not surprisingly, [evolutionists] find God not to be among those things resisting denial.”

In other words, start with the assumption that God does not exist and is not necessary, and all your most sophisticated reasoning and scientific analyses will only reinforce that basic belief. All reasoning is circular, and if your powers of reason are bounded by an anti-supernaturalist conviction about the nature of what is real, you will always reinforce that bias through all your uses of reason.

But what if we start at another place in our reason? What if, Bishop and Carr suggest, we begin our examination of the cosmos with the idea that God does exist, and the He is sovereign over all He has made by the operations of common grace? To what then does the cosmos witness?

The authors explain, “the Christian, who trusts the intuition that such things as beauty, morality, and purpose are real (perhaps even more fundamental than the material phenomena that bear them), quite naturally finds their existence to hinge on God’s, so that modes of inquiry besides the natural sciences are needed to generate fuller accounts of reality.”

Put another way, if we start our examination of the material cosmos from the revelation of God in Scripture, trusting that God’s Word is right and true and reliable in what it tells us about the material cosmos, just as we find it to be true and reliable concerning spiritual matters, then we will see that the cosmos itself bears witness to God as almighty, all-wise, all-loving, all-sufficient, all-and-everywhere present and working – a God of power and grace, common grace.

The Apostle Paul insisted that God was bearing witness to Himself in the operations of plants and soils and the gifts of culture, and this is because God is present in and through such things by His wisdom, goodness, and love. The world is what it most beautifully and wondrously is because of the common grace of God, not because of any inherent properties of powers. This is the witness of common grace.

Next steps

Paul observed a cultural practice common to human beings – agriculture – and declared that it bore witness to God. In what ways? And what about other cultural practices? Do they also bear witness to God? Raise this point and these questions with an unbelieving friend.

Additional Resources

Download this week’s study, Common Grace.

Sign up for ViewPoint Leaders Training and start your own ViewPoint discussion group.

For a deeper study of God’s grace, order a copy of T. M.’s book,I Will Be Your God, from our online store.

Men, download our free brief paper, “Men of the Church: A Solemn Warning,” by clicking here.

Except as indicated, Scripture taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.