Listen to Jacques Ellul, on Grace:

"Grace. Do you think it is acceptable? To learn that we are the recipients of grace. It does not depend on me; I can do nothing. 'It is not of him that wills or runs.' Grace is odious to us. There is nothing pleasurable in finding out that we are like people condemned by nature to whom a kind of prince generously grants life for no apparent reason, for no realistic motive that we can understand. It is all so arbitrary: I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and merciful to whom I will be merciful. How can we seize or force or restrain God? No sacrifice, ceremony, rite or prayer can earn grace, precisely because it is purely and totally gracious and gratuitous. Am I happy about this? Not at all, for the whole principle of gift and counter-gift, of exchanging presents, is punctured by gratuitous, prevenient, sanctifying grace. If we are to believe the specialists, this mechanism of gift and counter-gift is truly decisive in human relationships and human 'nature.' Grace, then, is totally unacceptable from this standpoint."

Grace is unacceptable. If you think it isn't, ask any random group of people how they would feel about a predator of children receiving grace and forgiveness. How do you feel about that?

I have known heroin addicts who react in disgust to grace offered to crack addicts, because "those people are human garbage."

Grace offends. Read "The Grand Inquisitor" chapter from Dostoevsky's "Brother's Karamazov". It is one of the best descriptions of the outrage and absurdity of grace.

Grace should not be. It is not philosophically defensible. It upsets all of our systems. We find ourselves constantly in the position of trying to earn it by various means and methods.

Grace cannot be. Yet it is.

What are we going to do with this?