THERE IS NOTHING "COMMON" ABOUT GRACE (Santamaria)

The saying about rain falling on the good and the evil lives inside one of Jesus’ most needle-sharp commands: love your enemies. He does not try to win the point with a philosophical system or a sentimental appeal. He points to the sky and says, in effect, “Look at your Father’s habits. Then look at yours.”

The passage is Matthew 5:43–48, with the line in verse 45. In Greek, it reads with blunt simplicity:

ὅπως γένησθε υἱοὶ τοῦ πατρὸς ὑμῶν τοῦ ἐν οὐρανοῖς, ὅτι τὸν ἥλιον αὐτοῦ ἀνατέλλει ἐπὶ πονηροὺς καὶ ἀγαθούς, καὶ βρέχει ἐπὶ δικαίους καὶ ἀδίκους.

“His sun” rises. “He rains.” Present tense. Ongoing. Ordinary. Not a rare miracle but the daily rhythm of Providence. Jesus is not letting anyone pretend the world is an autonomous machine where God is only a distant name. The sun belongs to Him. The rain comes at His command. Even the weather is theology with mud on its boots.

But this is exactly where many modern readings veer off the road. Matthew 5:45 is often recruited to support a doctrine called “common grace,” as though Jesus were teaching that God has a saving kind of gracious favor toward all men alike, spread over the world like a spiritual mist. From an Old School Baptist standpoint, that category is a confusion. Scripture certainly teaches God’s providential goodness in the created order, and Scripture certainly teaches God’s saving grace in Christ. What it does not teach is that the ungodly, as ungodly, are partakers of “grace” in the gospel sense—grace as covenant favor, grace as redemption purchased, grace as the new birth applied, grace as justification and adoption and perseverance. If we take “grace” (as the New Testament uses it when speaking of salvation) and pour it into the same bucket as sunlight and rainfall, we muddy the Bible’s own distinctions until everything becomes “grace” and nothing is.

Jesus’ point is not, “God is gracious to everyone in the same saving way.” His point is, “Stop acting like petty kings whose love is a wage paid only to the friendly.” The command is enemy-love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:44, KJV). Then comes the ground: “That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven…” (v. 45). That line is not teaching that we earn adoption by moral performance. It is teaching family resemblance. Children look like their father—not by earning his paternity, but by sharing his life and bearing his likeness. Jesus is describing what fits the Father’s household.

Now notice what Jesus uses as the evidence of the Father’s character: not regeneration, not justification, not the cross (those are elsewhere and infinitely precious), but the public, undeniable generosity of God’s providence. God gives daily benefits in a world that does not deserve them. He feeds people who do not thank Him. He keeps hearts beating that blaspheme His name. He gives crops to hands that will use the harvest to finance more rebellion. That is real goodness, but it is not the same thing as saving grace.

Scripture itself speaks this way without embarrassment. God “did good” by giving rains and fruitful seasons (Acts 14:17). Paul speaks of God’s “goodness and forbearance and longsuffering” leading men toward repentance (Romans 2:4). Yet the same Bible also says God “hateth all workers of iniquity” (Psalm 5:5) and will judge the world in righteousness. These truths are not enemies. They are neighbors. The modern itch is to make them melt into one soft substance, so that providential kindness becomes a hint of divine approval. Jesus does not allow that. Rain is not a badge that says, “This man is accepted.” Sunlight is not a certificate of covenant love. They are simply gifts—real gifts—given by the sovereign Creator who owes salvation to none and who is free to do what He will with His own.

That distinction matters because it protects both the severity and the sweetness of the gospel. If “grace” is everything God gives to everyone, then grace becomes thin and cheap, and Christ’s cross becomes one generosity among many. Old School Baptists, with all their rough-edged insistence, are jealous to keep grace where the apostles keep it: grace is saving favor in Christ—electing love, redeeming blood, effectual calling, the Spirit’s regenerating work, forgiveness, adoption, perseverance, and final glory. That grace is not universal. It is particular. It is covenantal. It is invincible. And it is never confused with mere providential bounty.

So what is the “sun and rain” doing in Matthew 5? It is doing two things at once, and both are meant to humble us.

First, it rebukes our superstition that outward circumstance equals God’s verdict. The wicked can prosper for a time. The righteous can suffer for a time. The weather is not God’s moral scoreboard. Jesus will not let you look at someone else’s sunshine and conclude, “God must approve of them,” or look at someone else’s hardship and conclude, “God must despise them.” If rain falls on the unjust, then you cannot read God’s heart off a forecast.

Second, it dismantles our instinct to make kindness a form of repayment. We want love to be conditional, selective, tribal. We want a universe where our goodness is always returned and our enemies always starve. Jesus says the Father does not operate that way in Providence. The Father gives benefits even to those who shake their fists at Him. And if the Father’s public posture toward a rebellious world is patient generosity in the realm of Providence, His children have no excuse for a love that only reaches as far as convenience and payback.

This is where the passage becomes emotional in the honest way, not the performative way. Because enemy-love is not a cute virtue. Enemy-love is costly. It means you are refusing to let someone else’s evil edit your soul into a smaller and uglier thing. It means you can pursue justice without worshiping vengeance. It means you can name wickedness as wickedness and still pray that the wicked man would be stopped, humbled, and—if God pleases—made new.

And that last phrase is where Old School Baptists will plant their flag: if an enemy is ever truly turned, it will not be because sunlight softened him into salvation. It will be because God, by sovereign mercy, gave him a new heart. Providence can restrain, preserve, and expose; it cannot regenerate. Rain can grow wheat and weeds alike. It can fill a cup in a saint’s hand and in a blasphemer’s hand. But only the Spirit gives life. Only Christ’s blood secures pardon. Only God’s call raises the dead sinner. That is why we deny “common grace” as a saving category. It smuggles the language of salvation into the realm of mere providence and quietly blurs the line between being fed and being forgiven.

Yet denying “common grace” does not mean denying God’s real goodness to all in a creaturely sense. God is good in His providential government even to those He will judge. That goodness is part of His longsuffering and part of His sovereign ordering of the world in which His elect live, work, eat, raise children, worship, and suffer. He can keep the world standing, restrain chaos, and distribute daily bread without thereby placing every recipient inside His covenant love. If anything, this makes His goodness more awesome, not less: He is not bribed into kindness by human worthiness. He is free.

Then Jesus closes with the line that makes everyone squirm: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). In context, this “perfection” is not sinless flawlessness in your performance ledger. It is wholeness, maturity, completeness in love—the opposite of a fractured love that is warm to friends and cold to enemies, generous when repaid and cruel when crossed. The Father’s providential goodness is consistent. Jesus calls His disciples to a consistent love that reflects their Father, not the world.

So the mixed message of Matthew 5:45 is both humbling and bracing. Humbling, because it destroys our entitlement: you have received a thousand gifts you did not earn, and the sky has been preaching that sermon over you your whole life. Bracing, because it destroys despair: the world is not governed by human rage, and your enemies are not sovereign over reality. God gives rain where He will, and He can also stop the rain, stop the hand, stop the mouth, stop the heart. He judges righteously. He saves freely. And He teaches His children to love in a way that does not confuse providential gifts with saving favor, and does not confuse mercy with approval.

The rain falls on the just and the unjust. That is not a denial of judgment; it is a warning not to confuse timing with verdict. It is not a doctrine of universal grace; it is a revelation of sovereign Providence. And it is not an invitation to sentimental weakness; it is a summons to a love so strong it can pray under persecution without surrendering truth, without surrendering justice, and without surrendering the throne of God to the throne of your own anger.