The Exegetical Systematician: Worse than Undeserving

We cannot think of sinners as merely undeserving; they are also illdeserving. The grace of God to sinners is, therefore, not simply unmerited favour; it is also favour shown to the ill-deserving, indeed to the hell-deserving. When Paul says, ‘justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus’ (Rom. 3:24), the grace in view must be understood on the background of the judgment of God referred to in verse 19—’that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God’. It is guilty men, and therefore hell-deserving men, that the justifying grace of God contemplates. —John Murray, The Grace of God