The last counterfeit in this series wears the best word in the Bible. That is what makes it the hardest to spot. Nobody argues against grace. The whole gospel hangs on it. So when a teaching comes along that talks about grace constantly, warmly, with tears in its eyes, most believers lower their guard.
Jude did not. He said certain men had crept in unnoticed who turn the grace of our God into lewdness. Same word. Different thing.
For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present age.
Titus 2:11-12, NKJV
The genuine article
Read Titus 2:11 and stop after the word appeared. Grace showed up. It is not a doctrine Paul is defining but a Person who arrived. The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared, and every reader in Crete knew who that meant. Grace has a face.
Now read the next word. Teaching. Grace teaches. Paideuo, the word for training a child, the word for discipline that shapes a person over years. Grace is not a pardon slipped under the door. Grace moves in and starts raising you.
| Term | Original | Strong’s | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| charis | χάρις | G5485 | grace, unearned favor, the kindness of God that acts |
| paideuo | παιδεύω | G3811 | to train, to instruct, to discipline as a child is raised |
| aselgeia | ἀσέλγεια | G766 | lewdness, licentiousness, unrestrained indulgence |
And what does it teach? Denying ungodliness. Living soberly, righteously, and godly. Paul does not say grace teaches us that sin no longer matters. He says grace teaches us to say no to it. The same grace that forgave you is the grace that is changing you, and the two cannot be separated because they are the same Person doing both.
Romans 6 says it the other way around. Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not. How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Paul does not answer the question with a rule. He answers it with a death. You died. The old man was crucified with Him. Grace did not lower the standard. It raised you from the dead so that you could meet it.
The counterfeit
Counterfeit grace keeps the forgiveness and drops the training. It says, since you are forgiven, nothing you do matters anymore. Since there is no condemnation, there is no correction. Since it is all covered, stop worrying about it. The pardon is real. The rest is a lie built on the pardon.
Jude’s word for where it ends is aselgeia. Lewdness, or as the older translations put it, licentiousness. Unrestrained indulgence. It is the word for a person who has stopped caring who sees. Jude says these men turn grace into that. They take the kindness of God and use it as a permission slip.
The pattern is easy to recognize once you know the shape. Counterfeit grace talks about what God has done for you and never about what He is doing in you. It is loud about the cross and silent about the resurrection life that follows. It treats every call to holiness as legalism, every warning as condemnation, every command as a return to the law. And it produces people who are very sure they are forgiven and not noticeably different from anyone else.
Grace did not lower the standard. It raised you from the dead so you could meet it.
How to tell them apart in the hand
Ask what the grace is producing. Titus 2 says grace teaches sober, righteous, godly living. If a teaching about grace produces people who are more careless about sin than they were before, it is not the grace Paul was describing. Real grace is known by its fruit, and the fruit is a changed life.
Ask how it treats the commands. The genuine article says the commandment is holy and just and good (Romans 7:12) and that Jesus said if you love Me, keep My commandments. The counterfeit treats every imperative in the New Testament as a threat to grace, and there are hundreds of them, so it ends up at war with most of the epistles.
Ask what it does with conviction. We spent a whole post on this. Real grace welcomes the Spirit’s conviction because conviction is how grace trains. Counterfeit grace calls all conviction condemnation and teaches you to ignore it. That is not freedom. That is a child who has decided his Father’s discipline is abuse.
Where the series lands
Seven counterfeits ago we said the way to know a fake is to handle the real thing. So here is the real thing, one more time, because every counterfeit in this series was a counterfeit of Him.
The grace of God appeared. He is fully God and fully man, and He is the point, and He is enough. He convicts because He loves you, and He never condemns. He speaks, and His written word is the standard for every other word. He seated you with Himself so that you would never have to climb. He asks you to test everything, and He is glad when the test comes back gold. And having saved you by grace alone, He is raising you by that same grace into someone who looks like Him.
Know that Jesus. Read Him, pray to Him, obey Him, stay in Him. Handle the real thing until it is the most familiar weight in your hand. Then let the counterfeits come. They will feel wrong before you have looked at them, and you will set them down and go back to Him.
Going deeper
Read Titus 2:11-14 and list everything grace is said to do. Then read Romans 6:1-14 and notice how Paul answers the question in verse 1. Finally read Jude 3-4 and ask what it means that these men crept in unnoticed.
The last exercise. Go back through the eight posts and write one sentence for each pair, the genuine article and the counterfeit, in your own words. Keep the page. It is your teller’s training, and you will need it again.
Discussion questions
- Why is counterfeit grace harder to spot than the other counterfeits in this series?
- What has grace taught you, in the Titus 2 sense, in the last year?
- Which of the eight pairs do you most need to keep handling, and why?
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