Salvation: What God Does, What We Do, Part Two

Getting the Story Right

When we speak of “salvation” in theology, we are talking about a rescue: God’s ultimate rescue plan.  But, it is more than simply “fire insurance,” which means it is more than securing eternal reservations in heaven instead of hell.  God’s redemptive work is initiated by God, as we have already discussed, and by grace we are able to respond, though we were “dead in transgressions and sin,” as the Bible says (Ephesians 2:1-5).  

God speaks “first”, meaning that God takes initiative, and then He gives us the ability to respond.  But the work of God does not stop there.  It is not as if God says, “I demonstrated great mercy to you through Jesus and through the calling of the Holy Spirit, so if you now grasp this salvation you can keep it with you until I see you in heaven.”  

Instead, salvation refers to a much greater kind of rescue.  By accepting the Divine invitation to join God in a relationship, we are then given opportunities to allow this relationship to deepen.  The deepening of this relationship with God becomes a deliverance from former ways of living, thinking, measuring, and choosing that once kept us from fully experiencing the love and peace that God longs to give. 

Some versions of the story of redemption go something like this: God used to have a place for us, we sinned, God became angry and even disgusted with us, in His frustration He sent Jesus to take our punishment, and by saying “yes” to Jesus’ work on our behalf we can hide behind Jesus when God looks at us so that God will not destroy us or wish to destroy us anymore. 

This is a popular version of the story, but it is not the story.

The story of salvation/redemption, according to Scripture,  is more along these lines:

•   God, who is always and has always been completely loving created us as a way to share in that great love,
•  We, given the opportunity by God to choose, chose our own way,
•  God, who is always and has always been completely loving, continued, of course, to love us, and therefore reached out in ways that sought to restore our relationship with God,
•   God, in an ultimate attempt to clearly demonstrate His love for us, sent Jesus – God and God’s love “in the flesh” – to reach out to us with an invitation to restore an intimate relationship,

·         Because of the clarity of love we see and experience in Jesus Christ - His teachings, His life, His death, and His resurrection - we receive the clearest opportunity and message of forgiveness. We are therefore able to most clearly respond to God’s quest to share in a loving relationship with us.

Then What?

Sin involves choosing our own way instead of God's ways.  Removing the barrier of sin and allowing us to continually be led by God’s Spirit and reminded by God’s Spirit of God’s ways, we are transformed.  Also, by confronting the resurrection of Jesus – the ultimate example of God’s defeat of death – the fear of death (the ultimate existential angst, as the philosophers have called it!) is replaced by the experience and peace and freedom in God that allows our lives to be motivated by love instead of fear. 

God certainly “sees us differently” in a sense, because of our surrender to His ways as found in Jesus Christ.  But more than that, God continues to communicate with us; to invite us to become more and more transformed into all that God intended for us to be, despite our past (and present and future) failures and weakness.

 

The Rescued Community

We then become participants in a new community: a community of those who also believe and seek to follow God as seen through Jesus Christ.  This group is nicknamed (first by Jesus in Matthew 16) the “Church.”  The Church is a gathering of people, locally and globally, who are on a journey of rescue or deliverance.  We are consistently experiencing and sharing the good news of rescue with each other (worship) and with those who have not yet had this encounter with God (evangelism/mission).  

It is a deliverance from old, self-centered, fear-based ways toward a way of living that is “rooted and established in love” (Ephesians 3).  Along the way, unique and personal moments of awakening and growth occur (sanctification, which I will address in Part III). But even these personal and unique moments are designed to deepen our fellowship with the Church and to bring us into greater involvement in the overall mission of God (missio Dei) in the world.