WHAT IS SALVATION?

2 Timothy 1:9,10 “God has saved us and called us to a holy life – not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, we has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”

Christianity is a religion of salvation, that God has taken the initiative to save us, that he is called our Savior, that Jesus “came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15), the gospel is “the power of God for salvation” (Romans 1:16). The important question is “from what has God saved us?” The biblical understanding of salvation is often misinterpreted. What it is not.

First, salvation means more than psycho-physical health. It is not ‘wholeness’ despite healings being signs of the kingdom of God Jesus came to bring. Salvation may bring healing of mind and body but healing today is not salvation; for not until the resurrection and redemption of our bodies will disease and death be no more. Salvation is not a kind of psychological integration, the wholeness of a balanced personality. As the son of an eminent physician John Stott believed that the role of the doctor and the pastor can become confused. A physician can replace the pastor, or the pastor can see himself as an amateur psychologist and counselor. He quoted Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who gave up being a physician in order to become a celebrated preacher:

The Hospital does not, cannot, and never will be able to take over the functions of the Church! It is quite impossible for it to do so… The authentic task of the Church is not primarily to make people healthy… her essential task is to restore men to right relationship with God… Man’s real problem is not simply that he is sick, but that he is a rebel.

Salvation is a rescue from sin. It is moral not material. Sin is a chronic inward moral disease. The healings and deliverances from danger were illustrations of salvation, not promises of safety or health

Secondly, salvation means more than socio-political liberation. The emphasis of the social gospel was “the liberation from social and political structures of inequality and oppression. It reinterprets salvation as the liberation of deprived and disadvantaged people from hunger, poverty and war, from colonial domination, political tyranny, racial discrimination and economic exploitation, from the ghettos, the political prisons and the soulless technology of the modern world.” While these are desirable goals, pleasing to God the Creator for the God of the Bible is a God of justice and he hates injustice and tyranny, it is not what the Bible calls salvation.

John Stott quoted at length from A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutierrez, which confused Marxist categories with Christian theology. “It is to mix what Scripture keeps distinct – God the Creator and God the Redeemer, the God of the cosmos and the God of the covenant, the world and the church, common grace and saving grace, justice and justification, the reformation of society and the regeneration of men. For the salvation offered in the gospel of Christ concerns persons rather than structures. It is deliverance from another kind of yoke than political and economic oppression.” Deliverance from slavery, poverty, blindness and unjust imprisonment should provoke our Christian concern but it is not the salvation Christ died and rose to secure for us.

I can remember being in London in 1968 when the Soviet forces invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring when Dubcek opened the borders and let citizens travel to the West. We assisted the Czech students who were stranded in London and had to make a decision whether to return home to their families or stay out of the country. The church has to make a witness for justice and freedom but at the same time we must not confuse that with evangelism.

Salvation is freedom. It includes freedom from the just judgment of God on our sins, from our guilt and our guilty conscience, into new relationship with him in which we become his reconciled, forgiven children and we know him as our Father. It is freedom from the bitter bondage of meaninglessness into a new sense of purpose in God’s new society of love, in which the last are first, the poor rich and the meek heirs. It is freedom from the dark prison of our own self-centeredness into a new life of self-fulfillment through self-forgetful service. And one day it will include freedom from the futility of pain, decay, death and dissolution into a new world of immortality, beauty and unimaginable joy. All this – and more! – is ‘salvation’.

(Ted Schroder, JOHN STOTT: A SUMMARY OF HIS TEACHING, pp.49-51)