What does God owe all sinners?

All have sinned (Rom. 3:23) and have earned the wages thereof which is death (Rom. 6:23). Therfore, God owes all death.

But he does not immediately deliver that punishment to all who deserve it. Rather he bears with great patience the objects of his wrath, so as to make his wrath, power and grace known to the objects of his mercy (Rom. 9:22,23). During that time, "he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked" (Luke 6:35). It is clear from the immediate context that Christ would say that in a certain sense God does good to his enemies since Jesus commands us to do good to our enemies on the premise that if we do so "we will be sons of the Most High,..." and to "be merciful, just as your Father is merciful" (v.36).
In Matthew the command to love our enemies leads to the conclusion "that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his son to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous." (Matt. 5:44,45).

Although the extent of God's benevolence to unrighteous enemies who deserve nothing but death is ulitmately limited by the exercise of his just wrath upon them, the kindness and mercy shown by God to these enemies in this life is explicitly taught by Jesus and we cannot and must not deny it. To deny that blessings extended to the reprobate sinners are expressions of God's kindness and mercy is to let our theological reasoning trump an explicit Scriptural statement, which is an error we should never commit.

Since mercies are like grace in that both are blessings one receives contrary to that which one deserves, one might call these blessings received by the wicked a limited kind of grace (especially when compared to the grace the believer receives). I do not believe, however, that Scripture ever uses the term "grace" to describe them. If it does, the term "common grace" is fully appropriate to describe them. But if Scripture never uses "grace" to define mecies received by unbelievers, we may legitimately avoid the possibility of confusion and equivocation by describing them as "common mercies" since "mercies", as has been shown, has explicit Scriptural support.

But whatever term we use, we must recognize that these gospel passages do teach that God shows that he is, to a real, if limited extent, truly kind, merciful and loving to his enemies, even though that presents us with a theological confict that we must resolve. Those who deny the term "common grace" for the mercies unbelievers receive must never deny the reality of God's kindness, mercy and love expressed to unbelievers in God's common benevolences. For Scripture will not let us do so.

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In Christ's love and service

Mr. Tim Cunningham, Dip. CS (Regent College)
Member, First Baptist Church
Vancouver, BC

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"The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar of 1500-year-old, 200 proof grace—a bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the gospel—after all these centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your own bootstraps—suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home-free before they started. Grace was to be drunk neat: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale." – Robert Farrar Capon