what is salvation to a christian

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.

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.

As in creation, so in the matter of salvation, the Son is the person Who works out the divine purpose to its appointed end. He came into the world to save sinners; yet men are not saved by His incarnation, but by His atoning death. The death of Christ has furnished God with an irrefragable ground of righteousness on which to act in His grace towards perishing men. Nothing is demanded from men but faith — simple confidence in God and His beloved Son. He who in his deep need turns his eye in faith to God and Christ becomes at once entitled to all the advantages of Christ's most costly sacrifice.

Salvation is presented in the New Testament in a threefold way. (1) It is a PRESENT thing, in the sense of acceptance with God. The Christian is now "in Christ," and is consequently beyond condemnation, justified and reconciled. He stands in the divine favour now and for ever, and is loved as Christ is loved. So we read in Eph. 2:8. "By grace ye are saved through faith." In 2 Tim. 1:9 also: "God who has saved us." The Spirit's use of the present tense in these passages should dissipate every unbelieving doubt and fear. Doubts and fears are an insult to the love of God and a dishonour to the work of the Lord Jesus.

There is no need of dwelling now on "salvation" as employed in the Old Testament, and in some parts of the New, as the gospels and Revelation particularly, where it is used for deliverance in power or even providence and present things. I confine myself to its doctrinal import, and the full Christian sense of the word; and I maintain that salvation signifies that deliverance for the believer which is the full consequence of the mighty work of Christ, apprehended not, of course, necessarily according to all its depth in God's eyes, but at any rate applied to the soul in the power of the Holy Ghost. It is not the awakening of conscience, however real; neither is it the attraction of heart by the grace of Christ, however blessed this may be. We ought therefore to bear in mind, that if a soul be not brought into conscious deliverance as the fruit of divine teaching, and founded on the work of Christ, we are very far from presenting the gospel as the apostle Paul glories in it, and delights that it should go forth. "I am not ashamed," etc.

Many are the aspects of the salvation that God has given us, but here our salvation is presented as in Christ Jesus (2 Tim. 2:10), a salvation that is linked with eternal glory. Paul had already said that God "hath saved us" (2 Tim. 1:9), for we do know salvation from the guilt of our sins, from the judgment of God, from the power of Satan, and from the fear of death as presently enjoyed. Again, we need salvation for every step of the journey home, and for this we have a risen, glorified Christ on the throne of God, a great High Priest, Who saves to the uttermost them that come to God by Him (Heb. 7:25). Then we look for salvation out of this world with all that is against us as God's saints, and this we shall have at the coming of the Lord to take us to Himself (Heb. 9:28; 1 Peter 1:5).

“I am the door: by Me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved.” That is the first thing—salvation. Was there any salvation in Judaism? That was a system of probation. Every single person that was tested failed, and every failure under the law must be fatal. “The soul that sins it shall DIE.” The meaning of probation is that you are under trial, whereas the meaning of salvation is that you have got a Saviour. This salvation carries with it the settlement of God’s wrath against sin, and our deliverance from it. When Christ came as the door God appeared not as Judge but as Saviour. And it also carries with it the thought of deliverance from all those untoward influences that surround us all through our life down here. There are temptations of the flesh, the world and the devil, and all the fearful power of the enemy arrayed against us. We want salvation from these things, and the Lord Jesus Christ is the One who can give it. Finally we need salvation in connection with our bodies, and the Lord Jesus Christ will not be content until He gives us that salvation. Our salvation is not complete until the word “redemption” is spelled out in full, and redemption is not spelt out in full until Christ comes to take us to be for ever with Himself. “Now is our salvation nearer than when we believed” (Rom. 13:11). Our salvation draws nigh, because the Redeemer is drawing nigh. The Lord is coming.

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.

To be saved, then, is to be brought consciously in the faith of the soul on to the ground of accomplished redemption through believing the glad tidings of the remission of sins. And this is accompanied by the Holy Ghost taking up His dwelling-place in the forgiven person.