Salvation

                  Defining Salvation

                  Salvation may well be the most commonplace yet deeply cherished word in the Christian’s vocabulary. Lamentably, though, this beautiful biblical term has suffered distortion by those who have sought to redefine not only the nature of salvation but also the Christian faith in general. Thus, for many, “salvation” is now little more than self-realization or attaining some vague sense of personal authenticity. What we are “saved” from is low self-esteem, meaninglessness, aimlessness, or anomie (uprootedness caused by a breakdown in social values). Others would point to the need for greater education to save us from ignorance. Some conceive of salvation as cultural refinement. One man said of the impact of his wife in rescuing him from loneliness and despair: “She was my salvation.”

                    The meaning we give to the notion of salvation clearly depends on what we perceive to be our greatest threat personally and corporately. In other words, the idea and experience of salvation will never have the right effect on our lives until we grasp what we are saved from and to.

                  The Scriptures consistently speak of our desperate plight apart from Christ. We are alienated from God (2 Cor. 5:18–21), subject to his righteous wrath (John 3:36; Eph. 2:1–3), and hostile to him (Rom. 3:9–18). We are, in fact, his enemies (Rom. 5:10) and under the curse imposed by divine law (Gal. 3:13–14). As urgent and pressing as the many psychological, financial, and personal predicaments we face are, the most immediate and eternal danger to the welfare of individual persons is the judgment of God we all rightly deserve because of sin and idolatry. Salvation, therefore, is primarily deliverance or rescue from the penal consequences incurred by our rebellion against the Creator. In sum, it is “from the wrath to come” that Jesus has saved us and set us free (1 Thess. 1:10).

                  But there is much more to the way the language of save and salvation is used in Scripture that warrants our close attention. In the NT, the verb to save and its cognates are used with three primary senses.

                  Salvation Is Spiritual Rescue

                  First, forms of to save most often refer to our spiritual rescue from well-deserved damnation. Jesus used the language of salvation in this way (Luke 7:49–50; 8:12), as did Paul. Perhaps the most well-known text using the terminology in a redemptive or soteriological sense is the apostle’s declaration in Ephesians that “by grace” we “have been saved through faith” and not because of “works” (Eph. 2:8–9; cf. Rom. 5:9–10; 1 Cor. 1:18, 21; Titus 3:4–5). Paul also makes it clear that although we are saved apart from works, we are not saved without them. That is to say, whereas human moral effort is by no means the foundation or meritorious cause of salvation, grace-empowered works are the fruit and consequence of it. “We are his workmanship,” says Paul, “created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10). Indeed, the “grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people” (Titus 2:11). But this “salvation” is not without any regard to works, for it is designed to train us to “renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age” (Titus 2:12).

                  A more expansive examination of this doctrine of salvation reveals that several interrelated truths are entailed, each of which serves in its own way to magnify the mercy shown to sinful men and women.

                  Regeneration, more popularly known as the new birth or being born again, is the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit in which new life is imparted to those who were “dead” in their “trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1, 5; cf. John 3:1–8). This inner renewal is wrought through the preaching of the gospel (James 1:18; 1 Pet. 1:23–25) and issues in repentance from sin and saving faith in Christ.

                    The NT refers to this work of the Spirit in terms of the divine call of God by which the elect are effectually drawn to Christ (John 6:44; Acts 2:39; Rom. 8:30; 1 Cor. 1:9). Whereas all humankind is externally invited to embrace the saving benefits of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection (Matt. 11:28–30; 22:14), only the elect of God are the undeserved recipients of the internal call by which they are brought to spiritual life and enabled to see the glory of God as revealed in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:6). Awakened to the reality of their sin, the elect repent of it and embrace by faith the offer of full and final forgiveness of sins secured for them through the atoning death of Christ on the cross (Eph. 1:7). At the moment of their conversion, God imputes the righteousness of Christ to them and declares them forgiven and forever justified in his sight (Rom. 3:21–25; 2 Cor. 5:21). Salvation, therefore, becomes an experiential reality for the elect through faith in the alien righteousness of Christ, a faith God graciously supplies (Eph. 2:8–9).

                  Those whom God thus effectually calls to faith in Christ are blessed with adoption as the spiritual sons and daughters of their heavenly Father (John 1:11–13; 1 John 3:1–3). In redeeming for himself a people, God sanctifies them both definitively, in setting them apart and consecrating them unto himself as his unique possession and eternal inheritance (1 Cor. 6:11), and experientially, by inaugurating through the Spirit a process by which they are progressively conformed to the image of Jesus himself (Rom. 8:29; Phil. 2:12–13; Heb. 10:14). Assurance is repeatedly given in Scripture that those whom God in this way chose, called, regenerated, justified, and is sanctifying will in fact be preserved indefectibly for the consummation of salvation in the glorification of their bodies (Phil. 1:6; 3:20–21; 1 Pet. 1:5).

                  Such is the breathtaking complexity of God’s saving work in and through Jesus Christ. But the NT language of salvation does not end with our reconciliation to God. There are two additional senses in which one may be saved.

                  Salvation Is Rescue from Peril

                  A person may also be saved from perilous circumstances, be it political oppression and tyranny, famine, plague, or the many and varied threats posed by natural catastrophes. The disciples cried out to Jesus in the midst of a life-threatening storm on the Sea of Galilee: “Save us, Lord; we are perishing” (Matt. 8:25). In Philippians 1:19, Paul took comfort that the Philippians were praying for him while he sat in prison: “I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance” (that is to say, his release from incarceration and the ever-present threat of execution). The word translated “deliverance” is the Greek noun sōtēria, salvation.

                    Salvation Is Healing

                  Finally, a third way the words to save and salvation are used is with reference to healing of the body. This concept of salvation is found frequently in the gospel narratives in conjunction with the ministry of Jesus to the diseased and demonized. The woman with the discharge of blood was “made well” (lit., “saved”; Matt. 9:21–22) when she reached out in faith and touched the hem of Christ’s garment (cf. Luke 17:19).

Salvation Is Holistic

                  These many ways in which the salvation word group is used point to the fact that the salvation secured for us in Christ is holistic. God in his grace holds forth for all believers the prospect of complete restoration in body, soul, and spirit, that the whole person might live joyfully in his presence forever.

                  A mistake frequently made by Christians is to think of salvation as deliverance or rescue from the physical body and from the earth. Christ’s coming, so they think, was designed to facilitate the release of the soul from the body so that believers might live eternally in an ethereal, immaterial, and altogether spiritual heaven. This concept is due far more to the influence of Greek philosophy and Gnosticism than to Scripture. The Bible never speaks of the body as inherently evil or as a prison from which one should seek escape but instead promises that our physical frame will be transformed to be like the “glorious body” of the risen Christ (Phil. 3:21). Likewise, this earth will be set free from the curse consequent to the sin of Adam and will, in a very real sense, be “saved” as a holy habitation for God’s people into eternity (Rom. 8:18–25; 2 Pet. 3:10–13; Rev. 21:1–4).

                  The Blessings of Salvation

                  Finally, we should not overlook the many and varied blessings that come with salvation. That is to say, Christ delivers us from both spiritual and physical destruction and brings us to God (1 Pet. 3:18). We are his beloved children (Rom. 8:15–17) in whom the Spirit abides as an indwelling and empowering presence (Eph. 2:22). We have been saved unto an abundant life (John 10:10) and the knowledge of God (John 17:3). Thus salvation is not only from divine wrath but also into the experience of love for Christ and a joy that is inexpressible and full of glory (1 Pet. 1:8).

                    It is, then, “to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ” that we should ascribe “glory, majesty, dominion, and authority” because he is “able to keep” us “from stumbling and to present” us “blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy” (Jude 24–25).