For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no-one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Ephesians 2:8-10 NIVUK
‘Saved! What a great save!’
Football (or soccer for my friends across the Pond) is not a sport in Scotland, it's a national obsession. It’s a religion. There are parts of the country where even wearing the wrong colours will provoke dirty looks.
So most people associate being saved to an acrobatic catch from a goalkeeper. And since Scotland is quite good at producing goalkeepers, any other meaning is obscured by a pair of gloves with rubber panels, a gawdy t-shirt and a man who catches footballs with little regard for his own safety.
Being saved – salvation – in the Bible is something quite different. And it is a concept that our world struggles to get its head around.
Ephesians 2:8-10 provides us with a very good explanation.
Firstly we see that it is undeserved – we are saved by grace. The Greek word for ‘grace’ is charis, from which we get the English word ‘charity’. Grace is something extended to the needy but undeserving – to those who have not achieved but need help.
This is a most important concept for every Christian. We are not saved by what we do (Romans 11:6), we are saved by what Christ does – as Paul emphasises in this verse. We cannot earn or pay for our salvation. Salvation is a priceless treasure we cannot afford. We receive it from God instead, because Jesus Christ paid for it on the cross (Romans 3:22-24).
This truth is the single greatest leveller mankind has ever known. It is the answer to racism, sexism, genderism, colourism, xenophobia and any other means of categorising and dividing human beings that had ever been used across all history. All have sinned. All stand equally as condemned before God. All need grace.
Secondly, see that it is unachievable, because we are saved. The reality of needing to be saved implies that you are unable to save yourself. For example, why to people call 999, 911 or 112? Apart from those deranged prank callers who think it's funny to block a line that someone else could use in an emergency, people call these numbers because they are in a bad situation and can’t resolve it themselves. They need to be saved.
This is the very notion that trips up many on our society. We have been bred to be independent, to succeed our own, to not depend on anyone.
But if you need to be saved, by definition, you are depending on someone else.
The Bible teaches this. It says that before we were saved we were powerless to save ourselves (Romans 5:6).
Secular thinkers have long alleged that Christians are weak people who need a crutch. But tell me this – who is stronger: the one legged man with a crutch that makes him stable, or the one legged man who spends his life trying to balance on one leg?
It isn’t weak to admit that you need to be saved. At least you're strong enough to admit it – unlike many others who can’t bring themselves to do it.
But if salvation is both undeserved and unachievable, how can we obtain it?
This is the question that vexed the rich young ruler, and he received a response he didn’t expect or want (Mark 10:17-22; Luke 18:18-23).
It is a serious question. So how can it be obtained?
The answer to this question is different for Christians than it is for any other religion or belief system in the world: by faith and faith alone.
Faith is like the wires that bring electricity ro our houses, or the pipes that bring water, or the cables that bring internet. In and of itself, it does nothing. It needs to be connected. Faith is the connection to God that saves us.
But why faith?
Consider a bridge. I have seen some beautiful bridges in my time, for instance, the Glenfinnan Viaduct in the Scottish Highlands. Every day hundreds of passengers cross this bridge, some of them even in similar steam trains to the one that featured in the famous ‘Harry Potter’ movies.
Each one of those passengers expresses faith when they board the train. And not just faith that the train will get them to their destination. If the viaduct was to collapse, they would plunge a hundred feet (thirty metres) in a fast moving train to their death. They are expressing a great deal of faith in the architect who designed the bridge and the engineers who built it, especially as those passengers will likely not know them, and some of them will never have crossed the bridge before.
Faith is like that. It is not just what gets us from ‘A’ to ‘B’ – from perdition to salvation. It is also an expression of trust in the God who designed the solution – a God whom we can’t physically see. As Jesus said to Thomas:
‘Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’
John 20:29 NIVUK
Faith is absolutely necessary to be saved – we must believe in and trust that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross was enough (John 3:16; Galatians 2:15-16). Without faith we cannot even make God happy, as the writer to the Hebrews explains:
And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.
Hebrews 11:6 NIVUK
Paul then explains to the Ephesians what this means. In essence, nothing we can ever do will save us – only what Jesus did. If anything we could do could save us, it would detract from what Jesus did on the cross and give us reasons to boast, taking glory from Him.
But this doesn’t mean we have a licence to do whatever we want:
For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people. It teaches us to say ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope – the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.
Titus 2:11-14 NIVUK
In other words, because we are saved by faith and not what we do, we should seek to please God, as Paul also explained in Ephesians 2.
All this leads to a verse in Acts that is shocking for our modern culture, but that doesn’t stop it being true:
Salvation is found in no-one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.’
Acts 4:12 NIVUK
You see, if we are not saved by the things we do, but instead by the One we believe in, then every religion in the world is fundamentally wrong and only Biblical Christianity is right.
If we are saved by grace, then where is the grace – the unearned, undeserved favour – in any system where salvation (however it is presented) is a quid pro quo?
Much, much worse: how can anyone stand in front of the broken, blooded, scarred face of the crucified Christ and say that what He did was good, but we think we have a better way to be saved?
What an insult! What an incredible insult!
When Christians state that only Jesus Christ can save, they are not making a bigoted, exclusivist statement that makes them look good. Far from it. The fact that only Jesus can save makes Christians look bad because we are unable to save ourselves. Believing that we are only saved by Jesus Christ is a massive insult to human dignity because it is a clear statement that nothing we could ever do is enough.
But why is this important?
For this reason:
For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.’
Luke 19:10 NIVUK
Jesus Christ came to earth to bring this salvation to us. If we are to truly be His followers, we will seek not only to be saved, but to bring this salvation to others.
And before we do that, we need to understand what it means.
Questions
1. Why is it so important that our salvation is both unearned and unachievable? Could this explain why Jesus turned the rich young ruler away? Why?
2. Why is faith so important for us to be saved?
3. What effect should our salvation have on us? Why? Does your salvation have this effect on you?
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