What are the results of salvation?

Its effects are life and peace for the believer: eternal life by believing in the Son of God, and peace with God, yea, joy and peace in believing. His life is bound up with Christ; for God has given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son, so that "he that has the Son, has life." And having believed in God, Who in His love delivered up Jesus for our offences, and in His power raised Him from the dead, he is justified from all that he has done, and his peace is just as solid and settled as is the work that has procured it, even the work of Him Who has made peace by the blood of His cross. Wherever a full gospel has been preached and received (i.e., believed), these will be the unfailing results, viz., eternal life as bound up with the person of the Son of God, in Whom he has believed, and peace with God, a peace procured and bound up with the work of His Son.

Lastly, let us ask, (6) What are the results of it? The verses we were just now looking at supply the final answer. First, our sins (offences) are all gone; for the One who was thus raised had been delivered for them; i.e. on account of them and for their putting away, and He having been raised up they can no longer have a place before the God who has righteously dealt with them, that He might be just, and yet have the joy of being Justifier of him that believeth in Jesus. Second, having been justified, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Peace is eternally established. between us and Himself! Third, "Being now justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him." The first has to do with the past, for my sins were blotted out by His blood; the text with the present, for it is now that I have peace with God; and the last with the future, for the wrath is the wrath to come; and I am assured, on divine testimony, that I am so cleared before God, and so accepted and established in love, that I am entitled to "have boldness in the day of judgment." (1 John 4:17.)

There are many aspects of salvation. In Matthew 1:21 we read of Jesus coming to save His people from their sins; and in Luke 1:71 Zacharias spoke of Jesus coming “that we might be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all that hate us.” The death of Christ has saved us from the consequences of our guilt, from the power of sin, from the power of Satan, and from the fear of death. Soon, at the coming of the Lord, we shall be saved from the judgment that will overtake a world that knows not, and desires not, God and His Christ, a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time (1 Peter 1:5).

The earlier part of this epistle has dwelt exhaustively upon the wonderful results of the work accomplished by the Lord Jesus Christ at His first coming. The "redemption that is in Christ Jesus" is expounded in all its bearings upon the individual believer. It has resulted in his complete SPIRITUAL emancipation, so that he stands in the unclouded favour of God as a justified man; he is animated by the brightest hopes of glory; and, further, he is liberated from sin's dominion though sin itself is still in him. He possesses the Spirit of God, and consequently he not only is a child of God, but he knows that he is. He has the consciousness of the relationship.

What a salvation! How complete! How glorious! The darkness, the distance, the bondage, the enmity, the condemnation, the fear: all gone, and gone for ever. The light in which our souls live is the light of God, the light of His eternal love. The life, the salvation, the righteousness, the relationships, the heavenly position; all are set before us in Christ where He is in the presence of God for us, and to whom we are as certain to be conformed as we are certain that He has taken us up at all: for “whom He justified, them He also glorified.”

Believing sinners are the house of Christ. It is by faith that they become so. It is by the power of God, through faith, that they are thus preserved. The first effects of simple faith are confidence and joy. For "peace with God" is witnessed by the Spirit as the first result to the believer of the finished work of Christ (Rom. 5:1). He stands in grace, without his sins, before the presence of the living God. For he has access with confidence by the faith of Jesus to that now no longer dreaded presence. But the certainty of his deliverance is likewise the beginning of his hope. He finds himself an heir of heavenly promise — a partaker of the heavenly calling. He knows himself to be forgiven. He finds himself to be in Christ prepared for glory. To rejoice in hope of the glory of God is thus the natural right of those whom grace already has made heirs. Christ is Himself within them as the Hope of glory. He is known as such by the witness of the Spirit, who is the abiding seal and earnest of that hope. By rejoicing in the bold confession of their hope, believers show themselves to be the genuine household of the Son. For what soul ever truly tasted Christ that did not find both confidence and joy in Him?

But salvation is also viewed in Scripture as a present thing, for we are spoken of as being already saved. In 2 Timothy 1:9, we read of “God who has saved us, and called us with an holy calling,” and in Titus 3:5, “according to His mercy He saved us,” and in Ephesians 2:5, “By grace ye are saved.” There is therefore a present aspect of salvation contemplated in Scripture, and this I take to be the emancipation of the soul from the oppression and bondage of every adverse and ruinous power, whether it be death, Satan, sin, the flesh, or the world. We find deliverance from death, and the Devil as the one who has the power of death, by faith in that which answers to the dividing of the Red Sea; and from the working of sin in the flesh, by that which answers to the brazen serpent; and from the world, by that which answers to the passage of the Jordan.

T. Certainly it does. But this is not peculiar to salvation. Other blessings of the gospel are spoken of in the same way. John says that He who believes in the Son has life eternal, but Paul speaks as in the hope of it (Titus 1:2). The righteousness of God is upon the believer (Rom. 3:22), but in Philippians 3 he counts everything in which he could glory in the flesh as rubbish, that he might be found in Him, not having on his own righteousness, but the righteousness of God by faith. Every blessing of the gospel is ours now in the grace of God, and in the power of the Spirit, but for the completeness of all blessings we await the coming of Christ. It is so with salvation. In 2 Timothy 1 we read, “Who has saved us, and called us with an holy calling;” and in Titus 3, “According to His mercy He saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and the renewing of the Holy Ghost.” Present salvation is the deliverance of the soul from the judicial consequences of its sins, from the dominion of sin, from the fear of death, from the power of the devil, and being brought into right relations with God in Christ.

All this is a picture of the salvation that the believer on the Lord Jesus has today. We have been redeemed to God by the blood of Christ. The power of sin and death has been broken in the death and resurrection of Christ. We have a new life in Christ, with a new power for living in the Holy Spirit, so that we can now serve God acceptably in this world.

According to His mercy He saved us. Our sins are gone in His death. His blood has washed them all away, and we are justified, cleared from every charge that was against us. The power of the oppressor has been broken, death annulled, and Eternal Life is in view. He "has saved us, and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works,but according to His own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began, but is now made manifest by the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ, who has abolished death, and has brought life and immortality (incorruptibility) to light through the gospel." Death has lost its terror for us. No believer is afraid of it as the judgment of God. He may have, and ought to have, a physical shrinking from it, but as the judgment of God upon us on account of our sins, it no longer exists. The devil, as the one who has the might of death, we shall never see again. We may have to meet him as the roaring lion (Amalek), and as the power of wickedness in the heavenlies (the seven nations in the land of promise), but as Pharaoh, the oppressor of the people of God—never again. Well may each of us sing in the joy of full deliverance— "Rise, my soul, thy God directs thee, Stranger hands no more impede; Pass thou on, His hand protects thee, Strength that has the captive freed."