What is salvation! Isaiah 65:17-25, Luke 19:1-10

Sarah came to me a while ago and asked an interesting question: “Am I saved?” She told me that some friends had approached her with the question and she hadn’t really known how to answer. I smiled. I pointed out that such a question has a narrow individualistic answer and a much broader biblical answer. “It depends on whether you mean, am I saved in the past, present, or future tense,” I said. Sarah looked puzzled. Can I try and explain I offered?

If you mean ‘am I saved?’ in the sense of has God already done all that is necessary to take me into his heart and value me as one of his children, then I want to emphatically say ‘yes!’ God I believe knows each on of us by name and God’s love surrounds us and will not let us go. Whatever it takes to reach out in love to us, God has done it. For us as Christians the high point of this reaching out is seen is Jesus the Christ.
If you mean ‘am I saved?’ in the sense that I presently live in a saving relationship with God’, then I guess I can only speak for myself but emphatically I answer ‘yes I am!” I look for Gods guidance in my life, and I value deeply my journey with God. I love my Lord Jesus.
If you mean, however, ‘am I saved?’ in the sense of have I already become all that I am destined to because then I’m afraid, I have to say I don’t think so. I struggle to be the complete person God created. The world around me is far from the place God desires it to be. Poverty, ignorance, injustice, hunger abounds. God’s salvation has not yet filled the earth.

Sarah still looked puzzled. I’m not sure what you’re talking about because I thought being saved was all about what happens when we die. It is all about if we get to heaven. She went on to talk about a picture that she remembered from Sunday School days of a cross laying over a great chasm, and it was only by walking across that cross that you could go to heaven. I too could recall similar images [example]
The problem, I explained to Sarah, is that I don’t see this image of salvation as a bridge to the afterlife as a prominent teaching in the Bible. We need to take our scriptures seriously and while we can find verses to support many ideas, we need to look more deeply at the key themes in our Bibles. I could see no other way but to launch into a bit of Bible study.

If you look at the Old Testament one of the realities you have to understand is that in most of the books there is no mention of an afterlife. Salvation is talked about often in these books but it is not in relation with whether we have an afterlife or not. One of the key stories associated with salvation is the story of the exodus from Egypt. The people were being abused, mistreated, literally worked to death by the Egyptians, and God heard their cries and rescued them. Salvation was something that actually happened in their lives as God led them through the wilderness to a new land. I’m sure you remember the dramatic scene of the fleeing slaves trapped between Pharaoh’s army and the sea, facing death and capture but God makes a path through the sea and allows the Israelites to escape while the pursuing chariots of the army get trapped in the sea and the army drowns. We are told simply “thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the Egyptians”, and the people sang, “the Lord is my strength and my might, and God has become my salvation”. Throughout the Bible God is called ‘saviour’ because he led the people out of slavery in Egypt to find a new life in the Promised Land. Salvation wasn’t the promise of an afterlife, but was finding a new life where the people could live in freedom. Salvation was freedom to shape a new community in God and freedom to worship their God. Salvation was closely associated with another word ‘liberation’ – liberation from slavery and oppression. .

The prophet Isaiah also talks a lot about salvation. He is talking of God receiving people from exile and leading them home again. I want go into details but there is a wonderful picture of what this salvation looks like in Isaiah 65. You should read it sometime because it’s a picture of life on earth made whole. If you like it’s a picture of heaven on earth. God has rescued the earth or saved the earth from sin. There will be no more weeping, everyone will live to a ripe old age, people who work hard to build their own homes will get to live in them, and those that plant vineyards will harvest the fruit. The wolf and the lamb will lie down together. The lions will eat straw and snakes will not harm anyone. Salvation is about rescue from a world gone wrong, and the coming of a wonderful new way of life where everyone gets a fair go, and all creation lives in a wonderful harmony or peace. There’s a great Hebrew word that describes this time of salvation and it’s called Shalom.

“It’s certainly a very different picture to my Sunday School picture”, said Sarah. So God rescues people who are oppressed, or hurting, or leading meaningless lives and leads them to find a new life now?”
Yes, that’s a better picture of what the Bible is talking about, I responded. Salvation in the Bible is focused on this world, not on the next. And it actually fits the meaning of the word ‘salvation’ which comes from a Latin word which means ‘wholeness’ or ‘healing’. In its broadest sense, salvation means healing what has become sick and broken and distorted.

“But doesn’t salvation have something to do with my heart and my life as an individual?” Sarah asked. “I mean that’s what my friends were getting at”.
Indeed it does Sarah. Do you remember the story of Zacchaeus? We are not sure who was small, either Jesus or Zacchaeus, but Zacchaeus climbed a tree to see Jesus. Zacchaeus was the chief tax collector in Jericho and was very rich. He was hated by nearly everyone because he was collecting taxes to pay the Romans – the money wasn’t even collected for the good of the citizens, but to pay for foreign soldiers who made life hell. What’s worse was that Zacchaeus got rich by ripping people off and keeping some for himself which he used to build a fancy house. Can you imagine how that went down? Anyway, Jesus didn’t care for the labels people had. He noticed that Zacchaeus wasn’t happy and that he had no friends, so he invited himself to have dinner with the lonely rip off artist. We don’t know how but Zacchaeus’ life changed that day. He caught hold of a new vision for his life. “ I’ll give half my possessions to the poor and those I’ve ripped off I’ll repay four times”, he announced, and Jesus said simply, “today salvation has come to this house”.
It must have taken real guts to announce the changes to his life and to begin giving everything away, but Zacchaeus’ heart was sure changed. He had a new vision on which was no longer about making money, but about building a good community. In my eyes, God had embraced him and he had embraced God and it sure showed. He put his trust in God and took some mighty big and radical steps of faith. He was a changed man. I don’t think Jesus was talking anything about an afterlife when he said salvation had come to Zacchaeus, but he was talking about a wonderful new relationship with God which showed itself in the radical new way of living now.

Sarah looked as if a light had dawned for her. I think she said I see something of what you’re talking about. It’s actually about the transformation of ourselves and our world in relationship with God. I yearn for the world to be a better place, and I yearn for my life to be better too. That yearning is a yearning for salvation.

“It sure is,” I responded.

Dugald Wilson 16 October 2011