Salvation

The following text includes my thoughts on Chapter 7 of Batsell Barrett Baxter's book, The Family of God.

Salvation is redemption.  God has bought our freedom from sin with the life of His dear Son.  It is justification, an acquittal from paying the penalty for sin.  It is reconciliation, in which we are restored to a loving family relationship with God.

Romans 5:11 paints a picture of a redeemed soul, reconciled to God and rejoicing over it.  People love this snapshot image of a Christian, and why not!  It is uplifting, encouraging, and immediately positive.  It should be noted, and will be proven in this lesson, that the rejoicing comes after one responds in faith to God's grace and enters into the relationship with God that can be described as reconciliation or salvation.  How can we get there?  Read on.

The story is told about a soldier who learned just a little karate and killed himself while trying to give a salute.  In a similar way, casual students and even some skeptical scholars of the New Testament might come to an incorrect conclusion that James 2:14-26 means something just the opposite of Ephesians 2:8-9.  To get a better perspective, the first thing we can do is include all of Ephesians 2:4-10 in that comparison.

Then God's message becomes apparent:  We are saved (1) by grace, (2) through faith, (3) for the actions or deeds of faith known as good works.  If we have faith, it will show up in our deeds.  If it does not, we must ask ourselves if it is real, because God's grace cannot be accepted by a person whose faith does not exist or cannot be evidenced as real.  Voila!  The two passages are truly in harmony, and not just because your teacher says so.

Baxter mentions the difficulty we have accepting grace as God's free gift.  We want so badly to rack up a good score, so that we can "make the cut" and earn a spot in God's kingdom.  More study reveals that good works will never accomplish that.  Good works are the evidence of our gratitude for God's grace, which is unearned and undeserved.  That is because there is none good but God alone, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and if we say we have no sin, we are not telling the truth.  All this is in Romans 3 and 1 John 1.

Not only the New Testament but Jesus Himself says that not everyone will be saved, but only those who do the will of God.  So, there is a will of God, and we would do well to find out what it is.  That path to salvation is even called the narrow way.  How can that be, if grace is God's free gift?  Because we must actively accept God's grace in faith.  Jesus discusses the matter in Matthew 7:21 and 24-27, and His words pack quite a punch.  How can we ignore His teaching and reduce our faith response to a simple mental assent?  We cannot.

Faith is an active acceptance, not a passive assent.  Baxter says that grace is like fresh air, and God provides both freely to all.  We can't get fresh air unless we actually breathe, even though it is freely available.  We don't earn air by breathing, but we must breathe to live.  What a thought-provoking analogy!

If you have heard most of this material before, you can still learn something by paying special attention to what Baxter observes about the timing of grace.  It is not something that will be handed out at judgment.  It is here now, and it came in the form of Jesus Christ.  Going back to our thoughts on rejoicing, we can rejoice for someone that Christ came and made the sacrifice for us, but rejoicing for our own reconciliation to God can only come after the relationship becomes real and evident.

At this point you might be thinking the same thing as the people in Acts 2, when they asked, "...what shall we do?"  How do we go from talking the empty talk to walking the saving walk?  In a word, obedience.  We do what the Bible says people must do to be saved.  We don't spend our time trying to prove that we are saved by doing nothing.  Remember, this is the Bible itself we are looking at, not some creed book.

Adding up all the examples of conversion \ aka becoming a Christian \ aka "putting on Christ" in the New Testament, we can see that listening to the gospel message and believing it are the places where it all starts.  In our breathing analogy, we have already taken two significant breaths at this point.  Life changing or repentance from sin is then mentioned, and it is not merely suggested but commanded in the Bible.  Speaking and showing (aka confessing) your belief that Jesus is the Son of God, a fact which was hotly debated during the formation of the church, is most certainly included, and you would not want to skip over it and then read Romans 10:8-10, which would apply to you as a Christian.  Finally, in every single example of putting on Christ, without exception, there is baptism by immersion in water for the forgiveness of sins.

Some people can see that baptism is clearly part of becoming a Christian.  Others might ask why the Bible says that it works that way.  1 Peter 3:21 probably sheds more light than any other single verse on this question.  Bible teachers may come and go, but God's will undeniably remains, and the obedient faith response that brings salvation is crystal clear in the examples of putting on Christ in God's word.  Even if we spend months debating how immersion in water works for the forgiveness of our sins, we still find it there, and we must yield to the authority of inspiration.  Then comes the rejoicing and a life of grateful service.