What is genuine salvation?

But then, in turning from her accusers to herself, the Lord changes His voice. The fruit of forgiveness may be, and is, love, but the root and spring of forgiveness is faith. It was not her love, ardent and self-surrendering as it was, which had saved her. Her faith had gone before her salvation, ere this scene had opened; love now comes after it, as we have been seeing. And according to all this, when He now turns from her accusers to herself, He says, "Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace." No mention of love or what love had done, in company with salvation. Salvation is of grace, in company with the blood of Christ and the faith that apprehends and leans upon that blood. Salvation is too high a thing to stand on a level with the works of man. It is God's work, and it comes "to him that worketh not," as saith the Apostle. "It is of faith, that it might be by grace."

I was very much struck lately with a passage in the eleventh of Romans: "Even so then at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of grace. And if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more of grace. But if it be of works, then it is no more grace: otherwise work is no more work" (Rom. 11:5-6). How then am I saved? By pure sovereign grace. So wrote the apostle Paul to the Ephesians: "By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast" (Eph. 2:8-9). It is the blessed, precious, sovereign grace that has come to all of us in the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ. What we need, as sinners, is salvation. That salvation the grace of God has brought to us. If grace then has brought salvation, what have I now to do? I have to avail myself of that which God brings to me in the Person, and through the work, of the Lord Jesus Christ, — in plain language, I have to accept, by faith, the eternal salvation which grace brings to me.

But let us inquire what is included in the salvation which the grace of God brings? The answer is, Everything. Salvation is a precious box containing all I want for time and eternity. It includes salvation from the future consequence of sin and from its present power. To be a divinely-saved person — a person saved by the grace of God, saved by the blood of Christ as every believer is — involves entire deliverance from wrath, from hell, from Satan, from everything that could possibly be against me. A man whom God has saved is surely safe from all. There is nothing doubtful about God's salvation; it is all settled. There is no delay; it is all finished. We have neither to wait for it nor to add to it, but to receive it now and enjoy it forever. The mighty tide of grace rolls down from the very throne of God and bears upon its bosom a full salvation for me. I receive it as a free gift; I bow my head and worship, and go on my way rejoicing.

In connection with the above subject the question to consider in the first place is what is involved in salvation, or what it really consists in. What I understand by it is that the soul is delivered from that ruinous and destructive power under which it was held, and also from any evil to which it may be liable. The latter was exemplified in Noah and his house, and the former in the deliverance accorded to the children of Israel at the Red Sea. As to Noah and Israel, their salvation was temporal and did not necessarily involve new and eternal relationships with God as the salvation of our souls does, but to my mind the salvation that was accorded to them illustrates the two-fold character of the salvation which is ours in Christ Jesus. There may be other aspects of salvation, but they do not occur to me at this moment. I desire to look at the salvation under these two aspects.

The salvation, the glad tidings of which we have heard, is the deliverance or transfer of the person out of the old state and place in which we were in Adam into an entirely new place and relationship with God in Christ.

Salvation is a very large word. It comprehends forgiveness, and deliverance, and peace, and the knowledge that I am justified. It is not only the knowledge that the Lord died for me, that He put away my sins, but that when He died I died, and when He rose I rose. What a blessed thing to have Jesus as your Saviour, to belong to Him, to have God's salvation, and to know it! It was after the Lord had saved Israel that they sang: and were they not entitled to sing? And what is the burden of their song? "I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider has he thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength and song, and he is become my salvation;" etc. (Ex. 15:1-2). It is all coupled with a person, the person of the Saviour. He who possesses Christ has God's salvation.

Accordingly then this is the great truth taught in Ex. 14; and it is here that God takes the place properly of Saviour-God. Salvation always means a great deal more than that my sins are judged in the death of Christ. Salvation means that I am brought consciously to know God in the triumph of redemption by Christ for me. Hence it will be found that in the doctrine of the New Testament there is never the allowance of such a thought as that salvation is only the beginning of the blessing. People not imbued with scriptural truth are often apt to talk of salvation in a slighting or at least superficial way. They speak of a person perhaps as "not happy; but at any rate he is saved." Never do we meet with language like this in the New Testament. Salvation means known conscious deliverance. It is not merely a good hope of being delivered, but that the person himself by grace has no doubt about it. Of this people often lose the true force by an unscriptural phraseology. Indeed the denial of salvation as a present status is part of the current coin of Christendom, and the truth is opposed in one way or another by the parties who otherwise oppose each other. Arminianism naturally resists it, as its doctrine causes salvation to turn largely on man's deserts; while Calvinism would consent to salvation in "the purpose of God" or some jargon of the kind, while meanwhile the object of it may have no comfort, nor solid footing whatever for his soul. Far removed from both is the truth and the language of scripture; and to scripture we must hold.

Salvation then is no outward work, though based on Christ's work entirely outside ourselves; nor is it any mere deliverance by power, but personal and inward, "through a washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost." There is a total change of position in Christ, a new place which is given to the believer, as well as another state subjectively. This is expressed by the washing and renewing. Old things are passed away, all things are become new. For now the believer is in Christ. As a man he was in Adam. Faith is now entitled to know that we all stand in Christ by God's mercy, and altogether independently of what we did ourselves. Thus the evil is gone before God and for the conscience; for Christ is risen, the full expression of the state into which the Christian is brought by grace.

The truth is, the salvation of God is a perfect salvation, a work worthy of Himself. It is not a patchwork of the old order; there is no tinkering with the old nature, no attempt to disinfect the evil from the flesh: it is new birth, new life and nature; sins put away, and the nature that the sins sprang from condemned in the unsparing judgment of the cross; it is life, relationship, and being, in the last Adam the heavenly Man, with the Holy Spirit given to dwell in us, as the power by which all our new and eternal relationships with God are enjoyed.

She must be exposed in the presence of God. She must see that she is nothing but a poor corrupt sinner, and that only mercy can save her from the judgment to which her guilty life had made her liable. It is in the light that we get salvation; and in one sense salvation is by the light, for salvation lies in the knowledge of God. The word to Christ is: “I have set Thee to be a light of the Gentiles, that Thou shouldst be for salvation unto the ends of the earth” (Acts 13:47). Salvation, as known at this present time, is the emancipation of the soul from every evil thing that held it in bondage, so that the subjects of salvation may be at liberty to serve the living God. “Let My son go, that he may serve Me,” was the word of God that was sent by Moses to Pharaoh. This salvation was realized by the people at the Red Sea, when the proud host of Egypt was overwhelmed by the waters, and Israel was brought to God in the wilderness. But that salvation was temporal and governmental, and was a deliverance of flesh and blood from the domination of flesh and blood, whereas our salvation is the salvation of the soul, and is spiritual and eternal. The work of the cross is, I need scarcely say, the foundation of all God’s dealings with us in grace, but practical salvation lies in the knowledge of God; and therefore is Christ both light and salvation.