What is progressive revelation as it relates to salvation?

Seeing God’s different dispensational dealings with mankind helps us appreciate that each of us was, by nature, hopeless and without hope, and hence undeserving of anything other than God’s judgment, and that this was and is the case for every human being in each way in which God has regulated His dealings with mankind. It also magnifies God’s patience with mankind, and proves that the way of salvation has always been by grace on God’s part and through faith on the part of individuals. Godly men in Old Testament times knew this (see e.g. Ps. 51:16–17). God passed over their sins because, when the fulness of the time was come (as explained in earlier articles), the Lord Jesus would come and His work at the cross would atone for those sins (Rom. 3:25). Their faith may have been different from ours in that they could only trust in what God had revealed about Himself prior to or in their dispensation. However, in every dispensation the just live by faith (Hab. 2:4; Rom. 1:17; 3:26–28; Gal. 3:11).

Therefore you get the Apostle speaking of the age of law as “Before faith came,” and of the present time as “After that faith is come” (Gal. 3:25), though faith characterized every saint of God from Abel onward (Heb. 11) to the present time, and will as long as the world lasts. But until this dispensation it was never revealed as the principle upon which men were in blessed relationship with God. Up to the flood the testimony seems to have been approach to God by sacrifice. In this way we have the righteous and the wicked set forth in Cain and Abel. After that, in the Patriarchal day, we have promise, and God linking His name up with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Next we have the law given by Moses, and Israel told that “The man that does these things shall live in them” (Lev. 18:5; Gal. 3:12). When we come to the present dispensation it is “FAITH.” In Christ we find the One who has offered the one infinite and acceptable sacrifice, the One in whom all the promises are yea and amen, the One in whom we have righteousness, life, salvation, and inheritance; and faith is the principle upon which every one of these blessings is made ours. It is in this way the Apostle speaks of faith having come. It is not meant that it never was in the heart of man in previous dispensations, but that it never had been the declared principle upon which men were in relationship with God. The Gospel is the power of God to salvation to all them that believe (Rom. 1), the righteousness of God is upon the believer (Ron. 3), he that believes on the Son has eternal life (John 3), being justified by faith we have peace with God, we receive the promise of the Spirit through faith, and we are all the sons of God by faith (Gal. 3). The blessings of the Gospel are set forth on the principle of faith, and the man that believes has them.

Circumstances may vary: Israel may have been driven out of their land, etc.; but, after all, God does not change; and if the means vary, the end (that is His own glory) is ever the same. As to salvation, for instance; God has always saved upon one principle. For Abraham and every saint, to the most distant ages, is only saved, as we, by blood.

In the calling out and separating a people for Himself, beside the unity of His Godhead, God was in grace, on the principle of faith, bringing man into communion with Himself, into loving and obedient relationship. Faith was the only moral way in which this could be accomplished. So the first lessons are of subjective faith. In the ritual which accompanied the law it is objective faith; that is, Christ presented in His varied offices and work, and, above all, in the holiness of His person. We upon whom the ends of the ages have come have before us this rich store, first, of the power of faith, as seen in Abraham; and then, the all-sufficiency of Him who is presented to us as faith's sole object; in types and shadows then, but now seen in all their import, because the True Light now shineth. Bat throughout all the dispensations of God, faith, viewed either in its objective character, or in its subjective power in the heart, is the grand moral means by which the power of Satan over the soul is destroyed; modified according to the character of each dispensation, but the same principle; for "without faith it is impossible to please God." And again, "By faith are ye saved."

To you I need hardly say, that all doubtless who have been saved in all ages have been saved by grace through faith; but there is a wide difference between the testimony and dealings of God before the crucifixion of Christ, and since that event. Until that event took place God's dealings with mankind were one continued trial, so to speak, of whether there be in man anything whereby he can, under any circumstances, retrieve himself. Not that such trial was needed for God. He knew from the beginning, yea, from before the foundation of the world, what man's course would be, and how he would demonstrate the utter hopelessness of his condition, if left to his own will, with every possible inducement to act aright. But this was to be demonstrated to man himself, and hence the trial. I would not at present dwell upon man's trial in Eden. He was then tried as to whether he could maintain his innocence, by withstanding temptation from without. There was then no tendency to evil within. But when man had fallen — when the great deceiver had succeeded in poisoning all the springs of moral action in man's nature — God neither summarily cut off the offender, nor at once sent the Saviour. Wrapping up a promise of a Saviour in the curse pronounced upon the enemy, he left man, now driven out of Eden, to multiply and fill the earth, and make manifest, without the restraint of an express law such as Adam had been under, what the bent of his will was, the promise all the while affording a resting-place for faith, wherever there was a heart, (such as Abel's, Enoch's, or Noah's,) opened to receive it.

Nothing in Scripture is more clearly and simply declared than the fact that God in His unfathomable grace has through the death of His only begotten Son opened up a way of salvation for the whole human race, and that the force and virtue of this work was retrospective, the righteous basis upon which God acted in grace from the beginning (Rom. 3:25). But as in the wisdom of God it was necessary to place man under trial, in order that it might be demonstrated that there is no power in the creature to effect his own recovery, this work which was the intervention of God in the sinner’s behalf could not be undertaken until the trial was over. It was when we were manifested as without strength that Christ died for the ungodly (Rom. 5:6). Hence it was not until the world had been four thousand years under sin and death that this mighty work was undertaken. But the ground upon which God always received the penitent was the blood of Jesus. Today this fact is declared, the love of God to all has been manifested, forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to all, and the soul who believes the gospel is saved. But in all dispensations, and in every part of the world there was always enough to guide the seeking soul back to the bosom of his Creator.

From the time when sin entered the world, and God gave the promise of the serpent's overthrow by the woman's seed, there have always been those who have been "saved by grace through faith." Abel, Seth, Enoch, and Noah, in the antediluvian period; since then, Abraham and others, patriarchs, prophets, priests, and kings; besides multitudes whose names have not been transmitted to us, but who are noticed in Heb. 11 as having lived in faith and died in faith, looking for a better resurrection, are proofs that God never left Himself without a witness, even in the darkest times. But these believers of other days were never incorporated into one body. They were never formed into an assembly inhabited and ruled by the Holy Ghost. Enoch walked with God. Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness. Isaac and Jacob followed in the pilgrim steps of their father Abraham. Joseph was enabled through grace to maintain his integrity in circumstances of most terrible temptation. Moses had close converse with God for forty days and forty nights on the summit of the mount. Joshua led the victorious armies of Israel into the promised land. Samson, Jephthah, and others, were used of God as instruments of deliverance to Israel. Samuel was the chosen instrument and channel of renewed blessing after the ark had been carried away, and the Louse of God at Shiloh had been overthrown. David, the man after God's own heart, served his own generation by the will of God, and fell asleep. Others might be mentioned, Elijah, Elisha, and multitudes besides. But all these are presented to us in God's Word, as individual servants of His — not as members of a body. They were men of faith. Their devotion and obedience shine brightly on the pages of the inspired record. But there is not such a thought suggested by all that is said of them, as that they were members of "the body, the Church." They were beyond all doubt quickened by the Spirit. By virtue of the foreseen sacrifice of Christ, they were forgiven and saved. They will all have part in the first resurrection, and partake of heavenly glory. There can be no question as to any of these things. But no one of these things, no, nor all of them together, constitute the Church. The Church shares these things — life, justification, resurrection, and heavenly glory, with the saints of Old Testament times; but what constitutes the Church is something distinct from, and beyond, all these things. It is the actual living unity with Christ, and with each other, of those who, since Christ's ascension, are formed into this unity by the presence of the Holy Ghost come down from heaven. Was there anything like this in Old Testament times?

So ever since the fall every believer looked for the One that was coming, the woman's Seed. They did not know much of Him. It was not yet said that He was to be called Jesus, nor that God would raise Him from the dead. But they heard from God that He, the Seed of the Woman, should bruise the Serpent's head: a work altogether beyond man as such. In due time God Who said thus much said more; but the little He said from the first, faith received; and those who believed were blessed. God in the blood of Jesus showed His righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime in the forbearance of God. Thus was His grace in all past ages vindicated by the same death of Christ, which is the ground of the gospel now sent to every creature under heaven. Those who received what God said, be it less or more, of the coining Saviour got the everlasting profit all through, even as Abel had witness borne to him that he was righteous, God testifying on the ground of His gifts. By faith he offered unto God a sacrifice according to His mind. He believed in the bruised Seed of the woman, and brought to Jehovah a sacrifice on which death passed; whereas Cain never rose above the reasoning of nature or the resource of his own wretched self.

Peter then, with this new-born conviction in his soul, reads the prophets with entirely fresh light and other eyes. Full of the truth himself, he speaks with the utmost simplicity to Cornelius, who with his household hears the blessed word. "To him give all the prophets witness." It was one concurrent evidence. "To him give all the prophets witness, that through his name whosoever believes in him." There is no question of a Jew, but "Whosoever believes in him." Alas! the Jews did not believe in Him; but whosoever did, let him be Jew or Gentile, "shall receive remission of sins." This precisely Cornelius had not known, nor could any one have known it till the work of redemption was done. The Old Testament saints were just as safe before the work of Christ as they were afterwards, but this work put them on a ground of conscious salvation before God. It was not a question of being saved in the day of judgment; nor is this the meaning of the term "salvation" in the New Testament. Salvation means that the heart enters into deliverance by grace as a present known public standing in the world. Nobody could have this till the gospel, and even after its publication God Himself sent specifically to the Gentiles; for He has His ways, as well as His times and seasons. God will always be Himself, and cannot be other than Sovereign.

We see, on the one hand, how the Old Testament handed on its disciples to the New, and how the New, also, was needed in order to give its full power to the older revelation. Thus, while he says that the sacred Scriptures he had known were able to make Timothy wise unto salvation, he adds: "through faith that is in Christ Jesus." In fact salvation, in all that is implied in it in the New Testament, is plainly something additional to the Old Testament. Men could not speak before Christianity of being saved, in the same way in which now we commonly speak of it. Salvation was, in general, even where we find the word, a deliverance from dangers or from circumstances of trial, from the power of the enemy, no doubt; but scarcely anywhere a proper salvation from sin; yet how important the witness of the old revelation when the new was being announced, and to us, also, to whom it has been announced! Nothing that God has given but has a permanent value which remains for us to all time. "All Scripture is inspired of God, and profitable for doctrine."