Of course, love is the highest concept in Scripture. The Bible even tells us that God is love.

He who does not love does not know God,
for God is love.
1 John 4:8

But we humans have such a distorted understanding of love that we often confuse it with other things—romance, lust, tough love, and so on. Our understanding of who God is has so often been tainted by the broken relationships we’ve experienced. The truth is, we don’t really understand what true love looks like.

But grace? That’s another matter. We love grace. When we begin to recognize and appreciate God’s grace toward us, we begin to understand what true love looks and feels like.

We can describe this same concept using other important biblical terms. Righteousness by faith, for example. It is perhaps the most sublime concept in all of Scripture: God takes broken, wretched sinners and, through His own work, saves them and gives them eternal life.

And it’s not simply that we get heaven. It’s that heaven gets us.

Long ago, man walked out of Eden. But today, even if you could put man back into the heart of Eden, you couldn’t put Eden back into the heart of man. Yet that is precisely what God, through His love, through righteousness by faith, through grace, accomplishes. He does it all. He takes sinners and recreates them in His own image. He not only brings us back to the heart of Eden;

He puts Eden back into our hearts. And He does this. Not us.

That’s grace.

So, as I suggested at the beginning, you could easily argue that grace is the greatest concept in Scripture because it illustrates, as perhaps nothing else can, what God’s love looks and feels like.

Let’s explore grace a little further by looking more closely at what the Bible tells us about righteousness by faith. Rather than relying on our own definitions, let’s allow Scripture itself to define grace for us.

Perhaps the clearest single chapter explaining grace is Romans 5.

Verse 1-2
1 Therefore, having been justified by faith,
we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
2 through whom we also have obtained our introduction by faith
into this grace in which we stand;
and we celebrate in hope of the glory of God.

Verse 6-8
6 For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.
7 For one will hardly die for a righteous person; though perhaps for the good person someone would even dare to die.
8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Verse 15
But the gracious gift is not like the offense. For if by the offense of the one the many died, much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many.

Verses 19:
For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous.

Let’s summarize what Romans tells us about grace:

1. We are helpless to save ourselves through our own goodness or efforts (v. 6).
2. God offers grace as a free gift (v. 15).
3. We receive that gift through faith in Jesus Christ (vv. 1–2).
4. The result of grace is righteousness (v. 19).

Look at these four points. Can we bring them together in a single statement?

The gift of grace results in our righteousness by faith.

Now that we have a clearer understanding of grace, can we find a teaching or tradition in Scripture that serves as the ultimate symbol of this gift? Such a symbol would need to accomplish four things:

1. Acknowledge that we are helpless to save ourselves.
2. Point us to the free gift of grace offered by God Himself.
3. Direct us to place our faith in Jesus.
4. Illustrate the transformation of sinful humanity into the righteousness of God.

Agreed? If these points make sense, and if they help clarify what grace, or righteousness by faith, really means, then we have established the criteria for identifying its ultimate biblical symbol.

We are now ready to search the Scriptures and discover what that symbol might be.