2. Exploring Salvation: Why Holiness Is Necessary
Exploring Salvation:
Why Holiness Is Necessary
But we ought always to thank God for you, brothers loved by the Lord, because from the beginning God chose you to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth. He called you to this through our gospel, that you might share in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.
2 THESSALONIANS 2:13-14
Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to God’s elect, strangers in the world . . . who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling by his blood: Grace and peace be yours in abundance.
1 PETER 1:1-2
Diseases and Delusions
I opened my eyes to find myself lying on my back in a strange bed. Because my head was raised, I could see into the semidarkness beyond the bed. My first thought was that I was in New York’s Grand Central railroad station at night. (I had recently seen a photo of the huge Grand Central hall at night, and thought I was recognizing that location.) Then I saw, sitting on the left-hand side of the bed, my mother. She was wearing the big flowered overalls and dusting-cap in which she used to clean the house. She did not speak, but smiled and gave me a cold drink through the spout of what looked like a small white teapot. Afterward they told me that I went straight back to sleep.
In fact, as I learned when I woke next, I was nowhere near Grand Central station. I was in the hospital in my English hometown, having had surgery for a depressed fracture of the skull, which was thought to have damaged my brain. What I saw was partly a delusion, for the ward did not really look like the Grand Central station of the photo either by day or by night. The person keeping vigil by my bed had been a nurse in uniform, wearing a frilly headdress, blue frock, and white apron. I saw what I saw (if I shut my eyes I can see it now), but I was not seeing what was there. My shocked and battered brain was playing tricks on me. Reality was different from what I thought it was.
All of that happened in 1933, when I was seven years old. Why do I now hark back to it? Because it illustrates two truths that I find I have to stress over and over again when talking to Christians today.
First Truth
We are all invalids in God’s hospital. In moral and spiritual terms we are all sick and damaged, diseased and deformed, scarred and sore, lame and lopsided, to a far, far greater extent than we realize. Under God’s care we are getting better, but we are not yet well. The modern Christian likes to dwell on present blessings rather than future prospects. Modern Christians egg each other on to testify that where once we were blind, deaf, and indeed dead so far as God was concerned, now through Christ we have been brought to life, radically transformed, and blessed with spiritual health. Thank God, there is real truth in that. But spiritual health means being holy and whole. To the extent that we fall short of being holy and whole, we are not fully healthy either.
We need to realize that the spiritual health we testify to is only partial and relative, a matter of being less sick and less incapacitated now than we were before. Measured by the absolute standard of spiritual health that we see in Jesus Christ, we are all of us no more, just as we are no less, than invalids in the process of being cured. The old saying that the Church is God’s hospital remains true. Our spiritual life is at best a fragile convalescence, easily disrupted. When there are tensions, strains, perversities, and disappointments in the Christian fellowship, it helps to remember that no Christian, and no church, ever has the clean bill of spiritual health that would match the total physical well-being for which today’s fitness seekers labor. To long for total spiritual well-being is right and natural, but to believe that one is anywhere near it is to be utterly self-deceived.
It is not always easy to grasp that one is ill. I remember how in the hospital in 1933 I was, so to speak, kept in cotton wool for several days by doctor’s orders, since nobody knew how much harm might have come to my brain. I also remember how hard it was to think of myself as a sick boy, since at no stage did I feel any ill effects at all. For slipping out of bed to wander round, and for standing on the bed to see how springy it was, I was tongue-lashed, I recall, by the nurse who upbraided me with Welsh eloquence for, in effect, putting my life at risk. After this I remained dutifully bedbound, according to instructions—but still without any conviction inside me that it needed to be that way. (Seven-year-olds can be as opinionated as any adult, and I certainly was.)
In the same way, Christians today can imagine themselves to be strong, healthy, and holy when, in fact, they are actually weak, sick, and sinful in ways that are noticeable not just to their heavenly Father, but also to their fellow believers. Pride and complacency, however, blind us to this reality. We decline to be told when we are slipping; thinking we stand, we set ourselves up to fall, and predictably, alas, we do fall.
In good hospitals, patients receive regular curative treatment as well as constant care, and the treatment determines in a direct way the form that the care will take. In God’s hospital the course of treatment that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the permanent medical staff (if I dare so speak), are giving to each of us with a view to our final restoration to the fullness of the divine image, is called sanctification. It is a process that includes on the one hand medication and diet (in the form of biblical instruction and admonition coming in various ways to the heart), and on the other hand tests and exercises (in the form of internal and external pressures, providentially ordered, to which we have to make active response). The process goes on as long as we are in this world, which is something that God decides in each case.
Like patients in any ordinary hospital, we are impatient for recovery. The question that forms the title of Lane Adams’ wonderful little book on God’s sanctifying therapy, How Come It’s Taking Me So Long to Get Better? is often our heart-cry to God.1 The truth is that God knows what He is doing, but sometimes, for reasons connected with the maturity and ministry that He has in view for us, He makes haste slowly. That is something we have to learn humbly to accept. We are in a hurry; He is not.
Second Truth
We are all prone to damaging delusions. On my first night in the hospital, the place was not where I thought it was, and the person by my bed was not whom I thought it was: I was in a state of delusion. The next day I felt well and could not think of myself as ill, but that was delusion too. In the same way believers are often deluded about Christian faith and living.
There are the delusions of direct theological error about God’s nature and character and ways and purposes. In liberal and modernist and process theology, to look no further, these abound.
There are the delusions of doubt and unbelief. Something horrible happens, and at once we conclude that God must have forgotten us or turned against us, or perhaps gone out of existence.
There are the delusions of self-confidence. We think we have finally licked some particular sin or weakness by which we were previously dragged down. We relax, and a sense of well-being, security, and triumph creeps over us. Then comes the double whammy of fresh external pressure and a renewed inner urge, and down we go again.
There are also the delusions that disrupt relationships. We misunderstand each other’s motives and purposes. We blame others for causing the tensions and generating the hostility, and are blind to our own part in provoking the difficulties.
There are delusions too, resulting from failure to distinguish things that differ—for example, equating the biblical gospel with Jesus-centered legalism, Jesus-centered lawlessness, Jesus-centered socialism, or Jesus-centered racism; equating secular psychological counseling with biblical pastoral direction; or equating inner passivity as a formula for holiness with the biblical call to disciplined moral effort in the power of the Holy Spirit.2 All such delusions spell disaster.
And then there are delusions about the Christian life—that it will ordinarily be easy, successful, healthy and wealthy, excitingly punctuated by miracles; that such acts as fornication and tax evasion will not matter as long as nobody finds out; that God always wants you to do what you feel like doing; and so on, and so on. Satan, the father of lies and a past master at deluding, labors constantly to mislead and muddle God’s people, so that humble self-suspicion, and the commonsensical hardheadedness that used to be called prudence, and the habit of testing by Scripture things hitherto taken for granted, become virtues of very great importance.
Throughout this book, I shall be appealing to Scripture constantly. It is the only safe way, for we are all as vulnerable to delusions about holiness as we are about anything else.
God’s Prescription for Us
The sort of physician I appreciate (and you, too, I expect) takes the patient into his or her confidence and explains his or her diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. Then he or she tells you what the prescribed medication is meant to do. You are put fully in the picture, and so you know where you are.
Not all physicians behave this way, but the best do—and so does the Great Physician of our souls, our Lord Jesus Christ. His therapeutic style, if I may express it this way, is communicative from first to last. The Bible, heard and read, preached and taught, interpreted and applied, is both the channel and the content of His communication. It is as if Jesus hands us the canonical Scriptures directly, telling us that they are the authoritative and all-sufficient source from which we must learn both what we are to do in order to be His followers and also what He has done, is doing, and will do to save us from the fatal sickness of sin. Think of your Bible, then, as Jesus Christ’s gift to you; think of it as a letter to you from your Lord. Think of your name, written in the front of it, as if Jesus Himself had written it there. Think of Jesus each time you read your Bible. Think of Him asking you, page by page and chapter by chapter, what you have just learned about the need, nature, method, and effect of the grace that He brings, and about the path of loyal discipleship that He calls you to tread. That is the way to profit from the Bible. Only when your reading of the written Word feeds into your relationship with the living Word (Jesus) does the Bible operate as the channel of light and life that God means it to be.
Scriptural Framework
The aim of this present chapter is to profile from the Scriptures the whole work of divine grace in the individual, first to last, so that we grasp the frame of reference within which God’s summons to holiness is issued. When we see what God through Christ and the Spirit is doing for us and in us, we shall be better placed to understand what it is that He calls us to do for Him and with Him. Here the distinction between justification and sanctification becomes important. As far as concerns the making of atonement for our sins, and the consequent pardoning and justifying of our person, the work is entirely and exclusively God’s. When we confess ourselves lost sinners and cast ourselves on Christ to save us, we are acknowledging by our action that we contribute nothing to our new relationship with God save our need of it, and this is the exact truth. We get into God’s favor, not by paying our way, but by accepting His gift of a blood-bought amnesty. However, in sanctification, which is the work of God within us from which our holiness flows, we are called to cooperate actively with God. In order to do this as we should, we need to have some overall awareness of His purpose and strategy for our lives as a whole.
So I offer now a Bible-based account of God’s way with us as our Creator and Redeemer, an account built around the questions concerning God and ourselves that all of us ought to be asking (whether or not we actually are). I want this account to function as a hiker’s map is meant to function, that is, as a help to determining where we are at the moment and seeing which way we should go. The map is admittedly small-scale (what I pass over in review here fills hundreds of pages in theology textbooks). But small-scale maps are sometimes best for getting clear on the overall lay of the land, and I hope it may be so in this case.
If my attempt to clarify everything at once makes the chapter tough going for you, I apologize, but I beg you to stay with it all the same. It is basic to everything else I shall say.
Defining Salvation
First question then: What is salvation?
This is not a hard question to answer. Anywhere that we open the New Testament, we find that from one angle or another salvation is being explained, displayed, and discussed. Salvation is the New Testament’s master theme in all of its twenty-seven books. If we compare and correlate their contents, we find that the understanding of salvation that is presented is uniformly clear and virtually unanimous. The idea conveyed by the salvation language is nowhere in doubt. Salvation always means being rescued from jeopardy and misery, so that one is now safe. Thus, in the Old Testament, God is said to have saved Israel from Egypt, Jonah from the fish’s belly, and the psalmist from death (Exod. 15:2; John 2:9; Ps. 116:6).
New Testament salvation, however, is salvation from sin and its consequences. It is the work of the God who reveals Himself as triune, the God who is Father, Son, and Spirit, in clear personal distinction, though in equally clear unity of being and purpose. The New Testament is explicit that the Savior-God whom it proclaims is Yahweh (Jehovah), the covenant Lord of the Old Testament. But it is no less explicit in displaying Him as tri-personal—revealing Him to be them, if we may so express it. The God who saves from sin is, so to speak, a team. Part of the glory of each divine person is that of being a team player. The New Testament writers speak out of their own experience of being saved by the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, working together. They expend their strength going over the various aspects of this salvation in the hope of helping their readers to get a better grasp of it, and so to enter into it more fully. Those who do not see this, do not understand the New Testament at all.
New Testament salvation has three tenses: past, present, and future. It is salvation:
• from sin’s guilt (the past aspect: exposure to penalty is gone);
• from its power (the present aspect: sin no longer rules us); and
• ultimately from its presence (the future aspect: sin will one day be no more than a bad memory).
Salvation, in other words, is an ongoing process that is currently incomplete. Already Christians have been saved:
• from the wrath of God (from judicial retribution: see Rom. 5:9; 1 Thess. 1:10);
• from eternal death (Rom. 6:21,23);
• from the dominion of sin (Rom. 6:14,18);
• from the life of fear (Rom. 8:15); and
• from controlling habits of ungodliness and immorality (Titus 2:11-3:6).
And one day, beyond this world, Christians will be fully conformed to Jesus in both body and moral character (Phil. 3:20; 1 John 3:2). Then sin will not be in them anymore.
At this moment, however, we who are Christians are very conscious of not yet having reached that happy state. We live joyfully in God’s favor, serve and worship Him out of gratitude for His grace, and battle with the down-drag of indwelling sin through the energy granted us by the indwelling Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:1; 8:5-14; 12:1; Gal. 5:16). We often have cause to thank God for fresh victories won, but like Paul we long for the day when the war within will be a thing of the past (Rom. 7:24ff; 8:23).
We desire perfect holiness and reach out after it, but for the present our reach exceeds our grasp. God’s salvation is from sin: we are into salvation, but salvation is not yet fully into us. The foretaste is ours now; the fullness remains future. That is where I am as I write these words, and where I shall assume that you are too as you read them. I am right, am I not?
In New Testament salvation, Jesus Christ the Savior, who is both God and man (John 1:14; Col. 1:13-20; 2:9), is the key figure. Salvation is through Him, in the sense that our forgiveness, justification, reconciliation, pardon, acceptance, access, standing, and fellowship with God (all these terms are used3) rest on His death as a sacrifice for our sins—a sacrifice guaranteeing that believers will never come into condemnation, nor be deprived of the communion with the Father and the Son that is now theirs (John 5:24; Rom. 8:32-39).
Salvation is also in Him, in the double sense that we are both in solidarity with Him as our representative head, who once suffered as our sin-bearer, and now intercedes on our behalf, and are also in vital and vitalizing union with Him by faith through the Holy Spirit. Thus He becomes truly our life-giver, who animates us for holiness in a way to which we were strangers before (see Rom. 5:12-19; Eph. 2:1-10; 4:20-24; Col. 1:27; 3:4). Natural life is supernaturalized as the Holy Spirit makes Christ present to us, and reproduces in us the God-oriented desires, aims, attitudes, and behavior patterns that were seen in Christ’s own perfect humanity when He was on earth. All Christians who can recall their life before they were converted can point to specific ways in which their mindset in Christ has now become different from what it was before.
Salvation as the Joint Effort of the Trinity
New Testament salvation, as was hinted above, is the joint work of a divine trio, a team consisting of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is, indeed, in the process of expounding the cooperative saving action of the holy Three that the New Testament brings out their personal distinctness within the unity of God. The truth of the Trinity thus emerges as part of the doctrine of salvation. Their roles are set forth as follows. The Father, who planned everything (Rom. 8:28-30; Eph. 3:9-11), sent first the Son and then the Spirit into the world to carry out His saving intentions (John 3:17; 6:38-40; 14:26; 16:7-15; Rom. 8:26). The Son, whose nature and joy it is to always do the Father’s will (John 4:34; 5:19; 6:38; 8:29), became man in order to die for us, rise for us, reign for us, and one day return for us to take us to the place of happy rest that He has prepared for us (John 10:14-18; 14:2,18-23). In the meantime, He mediates mercy and help to us from His throne (Heb. 4:14-16; 7:25). The Holy Spirit, the self-effacing divine executive who engineered creation (Gen. 1:2) and now engineers the new creation (John 3:3-8), has been at work since Pentecost imparting to believers their first installment of heaven’s life in and with their Savior (Rom. 8:23; Eph. 1:13). In addition, the Holy Spirit is changing believers progressively into Christ’s image (2 Cor. 3:18).
Salvation is thus the threefold activity of the triune God. Just as mutual love and honor are revealed as the occupation of the Three-in-One (John 3:35; 5:20; 14:31; 16:14; 17:1,4), so loving and honoring the Trinity become the eternal vocation of those whom the Three-in-One have saved—starting now! One mark of the saved, therefore, is that they currently give themselves to worship, and they want to go on doing so literally forever. This appears in the joyful anticipation of heaven’s eternity described in the hymn “Amazing Grace”:
When we’ve been there ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we first begun (emphasis mine).
Salvation’s Purpose
Second question: Why did we need salvation?
Why, because we were sinners! And, as such, lost! This has been said already, but the assertion needs now to be amplified.
We were sinners: sinners in practice, because we were sinners by nature. Sin is a universal, trans-cultural reality; an infection from which no human being anywhere, at any time, is exempt. What is it? Formally, it is what answer fourteen of the Westminster Shorter Catechism says it is: “Any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God.”
But it is also an energy, an obsession, an allergic reaction to God’s law, an irrational anti-God syndrome in our spiritual system that drives us to exalt ourselves and steels our hearts against devotion and obedience to our Maker. Pride, ingratitude and self-gratification are its basic expressions, leading sometimes to antisocial behavior and always, even in the nicest and most honorable people, to a lack of love for God at the motivational level. The religious practice of unregenerate mankind, whatever its form, may be and often is conscientious and laborious. It always proves, however, on analysis to be self-seeking and God-exploiting, rather than self-denying and God-glorifying, in its purpose.
Both Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek have a wide range of words for “sin,” picturing its nonconformity to God in a variety of different ways:
• as rebellion against our rightful owner and ruler;
• as transgression of the bounds He set;
• as missing the mark He told us to aim at;
• as breaking the law He enacted;
• as defiling (dirtying, polluting) ourselves in His sight, so making ourselves unfit for His company;
• as embracing folly by shutting our ears to His wisdom; and
• as incurring guilt before His judgment seat.
The Bible, functioning as a mirror for self-knowledge, shows us ourselves as playing God, by making ourselves, our wishes and advancement, the center of everything; as fighting God, by refusing to submit to Him and defying His revealed will; and as hating God in our hearts for the claims He makes on our lives. “The mind of sinful man is death . . . the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God” (Rom. 8:6-8).
Lost Sinners
As sinners, we were lost in the way that stray sheep are lost: cut off from our true home and out of touch with our true master. We had nothing to look forward to save misery without end. We merited nothing but exclusion and banishment from the presence of the living God whom we had already excluded from our lives. Perhaps we did this through preoccupation with the quest for pleasure and profit, position and possessions, and perhaps even by sheltering behind a smokescreen of religiosity. One way or another, however, we did it, and it is nothing more than justice for God now to shut us out of His life in the way that we shut Him out of ours. Made by God for God, and so made that at the deepest level we cannot find contentment save in a love-relationship with God, we were thus “without hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12). This is the universal human condition. All Christians know in their heart that everyone in whom fallen nature runs its course is naturally in that lost and hopeless state, and each believer glories accordingly in the “Amazing grace . . . that saved a wretch like me.”
Do all sinners know that they are sinners? Yes—and no. The distinction, important throughout theology, between the order of being and the order of knowing applies here (the distinction, that is, for those who like technical terms, between the ontological and the epistemological dimensions). The death-dealing dominion of sin over us is a reality from birth. It is only known as God’s light shines into our hearts, exposing our lack of love for God, and lack of believing obedience to His word. This light shows us how self-focused our real motives are, and how we regularly omit to do what we should do, and instead do what we should not. But such exposure is painful, and we shrink from it. Our first reaction to what the light shows us of our own inner badness is like the common first reaction to a diagnosis of terminal cancer, namely denial.
All have, however, some rudimentary knowledge of God from which these things may be learned. In Romans 1:18-32 Paul tells us that all mankind “knew God”—they were (and are) aware to some extent of His reality and requirements through His universal self-disclosure via creation to everyone’s mind and conscience. The entire human race, therefore, is “without excuse” for its embrace of idolatry and immorality. All the non-godliness of the non-Christian and post-Christian world is actually ungodliness and anti-godliness in the Creator’s world. It is sin against light, and deep down people know this, though many are so out of touch with themselves that if asked, they would affirm that they do not.
Those, however, who have been instructed in God’s law and gospel, as found in the Bible, will ordinarily have a more vivid awareness of their sinfulness, and of their particular sins, because the divine light that shines on them from Scripture to show them to themselves is brighter. This is one reason (there are others) why converted Christians regularly experience deeper conviction of sin after their conversion than they knew before, and why one dimension of spiritual growth, as we shall shortly see, is growth downward into a more thorough humility and more radical repentance. Though not much is said about this nowadays, a deepening sense of one’s sinfulness remains a touchstone of the genuine Christian life.
God’s Plan for Salvation
Third question: What is God’s strategy in salvation? What sequence of steps and stages has He followed, and will He follow, in order to carry through His saving purpose in each Christian’s life, and so complete the “good work in you” that He has started (Phil. 1:6)? From Scripture we may formulate an answer to both parts of our question. As with the previous question, the biblical answer has been hinted at already, but needs now to be expanded.
History of Salvation
First, then, how did God bring me into the salvation that I now enjoy? The Bible tells me that at the start of the first century of our era, in Galilee, the northern part of Palestine, “when the [appointed] time had fully come” (Gal. 4:4), the divine incarnation took place. The Son of God, without ceasing to be God the Son, became Jesus of Nazareth through the virgin birth (see Luke 1:29-35; John 1:14; Gal. 4:4). As the God-man, Jesus’ vocation was to be the mediator between His Father and ourselves (1 Tim. 2:5), revealing His Father to us, teaching and modeling the way of godliness, communicating mercy and help from God to people in need, and finally making Himself a sacrificial ransom for our sins (Matt. 26:28; Mark 10:45; 1 Tim. 2:6).
At the close of His three-year ministry, after announcing the kingdom of God and giving the announcement credibility through miraculous works of grace, mostly healings, Jesus was crucified as a political subversive (which He was not). On the cross the penal retribution due to us for our sins was laid on Him and became His experience, by His Father’s own action. By thus suffering as our substitutionary sacrifice, He redeemed us from evil, reconciled us to the Father, and quenched forever the Father’s judicial hostility (wrath) towards us (see Rom. 3:21-26; 5:6-11).
The historic Anglican Prayer Book celebrates Jesus’ atoning death on the cross as “a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.” This magnificent phrase expresses a magnificent truth: because Christ suffered in our stead, our sins may be forgiven and we be saved—“saved by his precious blood” (His precious sacrificial death, which is what the New Testament means whenever it speaks of the blood of Christ). As Calvin expressed it, in a manner beyond our understanding God loved us even when He hated us. The measure of His love was, and is, the gift of His Son to die for our sins (John 3:16; Rom. 5:8; 1 John 4:8-10).
Jesus’ death was not the end of the story. On the third day after His crucifixion, He was raised from the dead by His Father’s power. He left the tomb in a body with mysteriously enhanced capacities. In that body, mysteriously once more, He came and went in moments of ministry to His disciples for the next forty days. Then He ascended to the Father (John 20:17; Acts 1:1-11; Eph 4:10), being taken from human sight by an upward movement into a cloud. C.S. Lewis somewhere speaks of His being withdrawn through “a fold in space.”
From that day forward He has been exercising dominion over the created order in His Father’s name and on His Father’s behalf. (That is why He is called “Christ”: the title designates Him as God’s anointed Savior-King.) As an initial act of His dominion, both demonstrating and furthering it, He poured out the Holy Spirit on His disciples at nine o’clock on Pentecost morning, some ten days after He had ascended to His throne (Acts 2:1-21,33). Ever since then the Holy Spirit has been active in the world, witnessing to Jesus by prompting and blessing human testimony to Jesus’ saving ministry, and drawing people to Jesus by His work of new creation and new birth (John 3:3-8; 2 Cor. 5:17; Titus 3:4-7). This means that He renews them at the core of their personhood, so that they come actively to trust Jesus, obey Him, and love Him as their living Savior, divine King, and heavenly Friend. It is through this activity of the Holy Spirit that you, I, and all the Christians that have ever been, became believers as we did.
What happens here is that through the Spirit’s work in people’s hearts, once the message that invites them to faith in Christ has gotten into their heads, they become certain that Jesus Christ is fact, not fancy; that He lives to save those who turn from sin to be His; and that there is no salvation save through personal trust in Him. So they do in fact actively and deliberately commit themselves to Him, not only because they know they need to but also because they find themselves so changed that they want to.
For some, like the present writer, this commitment occurs as a clear and conscious break with an unconverted past. For others, it emerges as a focusing of what has been implicit in their life for some time, perhaps from infancy. But that difference makes no difference to the reality of what takes place. One way or another, out of changed hearts there issues a commitment to live changed lives, while the Spirit within us witnesses both to Jesus’ reality, as the mighty Savior who is there for us, and to our own renewal, as penitent sinners who have now made Him the object of our wholehearted loyalty.
New Life
The New Testament goes on to explain to us the newness of our life in Christ as a real and radical alteration of our personal being. It tells us that believers have been united to Christ, and are now “in” Him, having died (finished with their old life) and been raised (started off in a new life) with their Lord (Rom. 6:3-11; Eph. 2:4-10; Col. 2:11-14). In Christ they enjoy a new status. They are:
• justified (pardoned and accepted);
• adopted (made God’s children and heirs); and
• cleansed (fitted for fellowship with their holy Creator).
All aspects of their new status become real by virtue of Christ’s suffering for them on the cross (see Rom. 3:21-26, 5:1, 8:15-19; Gal. 4:4-7; John 15:3; 1 John 1:3-7). This is momentous. To be justified means that, by God’s own judicial decision, I stand before Him now and forever “just as if I had never sinned.” To be adopted means that now I may call my Creator-Judge “Father,” in the intimacy of His beloved family, and know myself to be an heir of His glory—“heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:17). To be cleansed means that nothing in my past imposes any restraint on my fellowship with God in the present.
Nor is that all. In Christ believers are also involved in a process of character change. The Holy Spirit (through whose agency faith was engendered in them) and Christ (through whom the new life was won for them, and became consciously real to them) now indwell them to transform them “into his [Christ’s] likeness with ever-increasing glory” (2 Cor. 3:18). Christ and His Spirit empower them to put sinful habits to death and bring forth in them the new behavior patterns that constitute the Spirit’s “fruit” (see Rom. 8:9-13; 2 Cor. 3:18; Gal. 5:22-26). This, too, is momentous.
We who believe have to wake up to the fact that the ministry to us of the Father and the Son through the Spirit has turned us into different people from what we were by nature. Our present task is, as it is sometimes put, to be what we are—to live out what God has wrought in, expressing in action the new life (new vision, motivation, devotion, and sense of direction) that has now become ours. Or, as Paul puts it, “Live a life worthy of the calling you have received” (Eph. 4:1). The thought is the same.
The hearts of saved persons will always affirm that their conversion, or new birth, or renewal (different people use different words at this point) was the work of God from first to last. All the searching and struggling that went into it will be felt to have been no less divinely orchestrated than were its final stages of conviction, commitment, and assurance. Ever since the fifth century, Western Christians have used Augustine’s term for God’s initiative of life-giving love within the soul, giving thanks for His prevenient grace: grace that moves in as a renovating force to make the spiritually blind see, the spiritually deaf hear, and the spiritually dumb speak. (“Prevenient” means “coming before”—coming to one, before one is spiritually alive, in order to impart life.)
God’s Purpose
The sense that God has thus invaded one’s own darkness and lostness in order to bring salvation naturally prompts the question that was poignantly posed in a modern gospel song—“But, Jesus, why me?” The New Testament faces and answers this question by pointing backward and upward to an eternal purpose of sovereign divine love to sinful individuals, a purpose that has its source in God’s own free decision. It is manifested by the prevenient grace that brings each one to faith and salvation, and guarantees their final glory. New Testament writers do not tell me why God chose to save me. They only tell me to be thankful that He did.
Here is Paul celebrating God’s loving purpose as he summons the Gentile believers at Ephesus to join him in doxology:
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us. . . . And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession—to the praise of his glory (Eph. 1:3-8,13-14).
This is how he formulates the same eternal purpose for the encouragement of Christians who face suffering and feel themselves weak:
We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified (Rom. 8:28-30).
Jesus Himself has precisely this purpose in view when He says:
All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. . . . No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day. . . . Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him comes to me (John 6:37-40,44-45).
God’s plan to save individual sinners through His work of sovereign grace is sometimes seen as a theme for anxious debate. The truth that God has such a plan is thought to threaten those who do not yet believe, by implying that should they turn to God they might find that He has no mercy for them, because they are not among His elect. But this fear is unreal, for no one ever turns to God—“no one can come to me,” says Jesus—apart from the sovereign grace that implements God’s merciful plan.
In actual fact, all are invited to enter God’s kingdom, with the assurance that if they seek enabling from the Holy Spirit to repent and believe they will find it. Prevenient grace—the Holy Spirit, already in action—stirs whatever positive response the invitation brings. Believers, as we saw, know for sure that without prevenient grace they would not be believers, and that prevenient grace touched their lives because of God’s plan to save them. So it is no wonder that in the New Testament God’s plan appears not as a matter for debate and doubt, but for doxology—directing those who now believe to humility, homage, and hope, and imparting to them both determination and delight as their minds dwell on it. Article 17 of the Anglican 39 expresses this in a clear (if lumpy) way:
The godly consideration of Predestination, and our Election in Christ, is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons, and such as feel in themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ, mortifying the works of the flesh, and their earthly members, and drawing up their mind to high and heavenly things, as well because it doth greatly establish and confirm their faith of eternal Salvation to be enjoyed through Christ, as because it doth fervently kindle their love towards God. . . .
God’s Saving Plan
The question as to how God brought me into the salvation that I now enjoy is thus fully answered, so we move to our next question about God’s saving strategy: What will God go on to do, here and hereafter, in order to finish what He has begun and complete the salvation He has in store for me? To establish the proper perspective for answering that question, I quote Thomas Binney’s well-known hymn:
Eternal light! Eternal light!
How pure the soul must be
When, placed within thy searching sight,
It shrinks not, but with calm delight
Can live and look on thee!
The spirits that surround thy throne
May bear the burning bliss;
But that is surely theirs alone,
Since they have never, never known
A fallen world like this.
O how shall I, whose native sphere
Is dark, whose mind is dim,
Before the ineffable appear,
And on my naked spirit bear
The uncreated beam?
There is a way for man to rise
To that sublime abode—
An offering and a sacrifice,
The Holy Spirit’s energies,
An advocate with God.
These, these prepare us for the sight
Of holiness above;
The sons of ignorance and night
May dwell in the eternal light
Through the eternal love.
God’s Future Plan of Salvation
The lesson to be learned here is that our thinking about the future part of God’s saving plan must start where Binney starts: namely, with recognition that the triune God is light. This means that He is holy—pure and perfect, loving all good and hating all evil. Also, it means that He constantly searches out all that is in us, so that “everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account” (Heb. 4:13). (The exposing of what would otherwise lie hidden in darkness is one of the thoughts that the biblical image of light regularly conveys: see John 3:19-21; Eph. 5:11-14.) So no unholiness in us will go unnoticed.
The triune God who is light is also love—holy love (see 1 John 1:5; 4:8,16). What does this mean? It means that only what is actually holy and worthy can give God actual satisfaction. As the love that binds spouses in a good marriage is an evaluative love that appreciates the excellence of the loved one, so the love that binds Father, Son, and Spirit is an evaluative love whereby each delights in the holiness of the other two, and in the holiness of the holy angels. That love will not have full joy of us who are Christ’s until we are holy too. Nor can we fully love God, and fully enjoy Him as we love Him, while we know ourselves to be still in the grip of moral weaknesses and perversities. To know oneself, here and now, to be, in Luther’s phrase, simul justus et peccator—a justified sinner, right with God though sinning still—is a wonderful privilege. But the hope set before us is yet more wonderful, namely to be in the presence of God, seeing Him and fellowshipping with Him, as one who is a sinner no longer. What God plans for us in the present is to lead us toward this goal.
So the divine agenda for the rest of my life on earth is my sanctification. As has already been hinted, I have been raised from spiritual death and born again in Christ so that I might be changed into His moral likeness. “You were taught,” Paul tells me (for I, like all other Bible-readers, stand with the Ephesian Christians at this point), “with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self . . . to be made new . . . and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:22-24; see also Col. 3:9-10). The detailed moral directives in each of Paul’s letters show me that he means this in the most literal and down-to-earth sense.
Increasing conformity to the image of Christ—to His righteousness and holiness, His love and humility, His self-denial and single-mindedness, His wisdom and prudence, His boldness and self-control, His faithfulness and strength under pressure—is the sum and substance of the “good works” for which Christians have been created (that is, re-created) in Christ (Eph. 2:10). It is also the “good” for which in all things God works in the lives of those who love Him (Rom. 8:28). The God in whose hands I am, willy-nilly, and whom I have in fact gladly and penitently put in charge of my life, is in the holiness business. Part of the answer to the question that life’s roller-coaster ride repeatedly raises, why has this happened to me? is always: it is moral training and discipline, planned by my heavenly Father to help me forward along the path of Christlike virtue (see Heb. 12:5-11).
Many years ago a wise man explained to me that the Christian life—meaning, as we have just seen, the life of growth into Christlikeness—is like a three-legged stool, which can only stand if all three legs are in place. He spoke of the three legs as D, E and P—doctrine, experience and practice.
• Doctrine: This refers to the truth and wisdom that we may constantly receive from God through Bible study, Bible-based meditation (not the same thing, be it said), and the ministry of the biblical Word.
• Experience: This means the many-sided fellowship with God to which divine truth and wisdom lead when brought to bear on our lives: the faith, the penitence, the renewed sense of sin, the restored joy of salvation, the distress at our repeated failure to be for Christ all we wanted to be, the sorrow we feel at others’ need and misery as we pray for them, the delight we feel when others are blessed. It also includes the moments of strong assurance and longing for heaven, the learning of new lessons about God’s way through the pain and distress of suffering, the fear of proving oneself to be an unconverted hypocrite after all, the deeper awareness of God’s reality that a heart-to-heart exchange with another believer will impart, the vivid sense of Christ’s closeness that comes through corporate praise, particularly through serious sharing in the Lord’s Supper, and so forth.
• Practice: This involves setting oneself to obey the truth and follow the path of wisdom in one’s relationships, one’s day-to-day self-management, one’s family involvement, one’s church commitment, one’s role in the community, one’s wage-earning employment, and so on.
The teaching is true. A Christian who comes short in D, E or P is inescapably in trouble, one way or another. Where people are ignorant of God’s truth and wisdom, or have no conscience about giving it practical expression, or omit to seek God constantly in terms of it and deal with Him on the basis of it, there the Christian life has come to grief. The stool has fallen down. Distorted development is thwarting God’s plan for healthy spiritual growth.
Renewal of the Church
It seems clear that at least part of God’s purpose in movements of church renewal is always the recovering of D and/or E and/or P in individual lives. Such movements are not truly perceived and realistically assessed until this is seen. The Reformation movement, for instance, is often viewed as a technical theological conflict, rarefied and remote, expressing nothing nobler than nationalistic passion. But its leaders saw it, and vast numbers experienced it, as a grass roots revival of pure religion. More obvious examples are: the devotional revival embracing both Counter-Reformation Catholicism and Protestant Puritanism in the early seventeenth century; the British Methodist revival and New England’s Great Awakening in the mid-eighteenth century; and the so-called “holiness revival,” with its many mutations of Methodist motifs, that touched the entire Protestant world between 1850 and 1950. A current illustration is the ongoing Holy Spirit renewal of our own time.
What should one say of the worldwide charismatic movement of the past thirty years? Laying aside matters of detail,4 I believe God has generated it in order to counter and correct the death-dealing fashions of thought which, starting with theologians and spreading everywhere, for the past century have done damage by demurring at the truth of the Trinity, diminishing the deity of Jesus Christ, and for practical purposes discounting the Holy Spirit altogether.
To deal with these theoretical errors, and the spiritual deadness to which they have given rise, God has raised up this movement of uninhibited and flamboyant Holy Spirit life, whereby the truth of the Trinity is vindicated (D), fellowship-union with the divine Christ through the Spirit as the focus of spiritual life is freshly explored (E), and the thought of Christianity as a supernatural life in the Spirit, singing, sharing, and serving, has again become respectable (P). Those who maintain the errors mentioned are thus comprehensively outflanked, not to say upstaged. How wise is the strategy of God!
Signs of Spiritual Growth
With regard to the future of Christians much is mysterious. Spiritual growth, like its physical counterpart, is ordinarily a gentle and imperceptible process. One neither sees nor feels it happening. The most that can be said about the subjective side of it is that every now and then, believers realize they are different in this or that way from what they once were. The long-term effects of particular insights, experiences, chastenings, moments of shock, sustained routines and ongoing relationships cannot be calculated in advance.
Some Christians change at surface level far faster and more dramatically than others, but how much corresponding change takes place at a deep level cannot be monitored either by the agent or by any human observer. Only God knows, for He alone can search hearts down to the bottom. The spotlight of consciousness enables us to know only a small part of ourselves. The Holy Spirit’s transforming work reaches deep into that large part of ourselves to which we have no access. No wonder, then, that we constantly misconceive and misjudge what God is and is not doing in us, with us and for us, just as we constantly err when we try to assess what God is doing through us in ministry to others.
Further factors hide from us the work of God within us. In all of us, the body and the soul (the principle of conscious personal life) are closely linked, more closely than we can ever understand, and the influence of each on the other further obscures the Spirit’s sanctifying action. I think here of a wide range of afflictions in which a physical condition adversely affects the mind, from depression and schizophrenia to Down’s syndrome, senile dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Then death, the departure of the person from his or her physical embodiment, comes at different times and in different ways to different people. The complaint that no rhyme or reason appears in the way that one Christian is taken while another is left is all too familiar. God has already fixed the time and manner of our death. Beyond death He will finish eliminating sin from our system and conforming us dispositionally to Christ. Our transformed and reconstructed selves will in due course be given resurrection bodies to match, and through them we shall be able to express all that we then shall be as fully renewed persons. This is a certainty, but a certainty of faith, not of sight. What it will mean for us we cannot at present imagine. We must be content to wait and see.
Two things, therefore, must be said together with regard to the future work of God that will complete our salvation. The first is that we know the formula. We have reviewed it earlier. It is crisply summarized for us in the following extract from John Stott’s comment on 1 John 3:2: “Now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” Stott writes as follows:
Already the image of God, marred by the fall, has been stamped on us again. The new man, which we assumed at our conversion, was “created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:24, RSV; cf. Col. 3:10). And since that day, in fulfillment of God’s predestinating purpose that we should be “conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom. 8:29), the Holy Spirit has been transfiguring us “into his likeness from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:8, RSV; cf. 1 John 2:6).
In this latter passage the transformation is said to be due to the fact that we are “with unveiled face beholding the glory of the Lord;” so it is understandable that when we shall see Him as He is, and not our face only but His too is unveiled, we shall be finally and completely like Him, including our bodies (Phil. 3:29; cf. 1 Cor. 9:49). “Vision becomes assimilation” (Law). This is all John knows about our final, heavenly state. Paul concentrates in his Epistles on the truth that in heaven we shall be “with Christ” (2 Cor. 5:8; Phil. 1:23; Col. 3:4; 1 Thess. 4:17; cf. Luke 23:43; John 14:3, 17:24). It is enough for us to know that on the last day and through eternity we shall be both with Christ and like Christ; for the fuller revelation of what we shall be we are content to wait.5
The second truth, however, is that although we know the formula we do not know the scenario. We can state in theological terms what awaits us, according to God’s revealed will of purpose. But we cannot say in circumstantial terms what awaits us, according to His secret will of events. A song of my youth had this line in it: “Anything can happen, and it probably will”—and that is the truth about the Christian life. We do not know what a day may bring, hence we have to be ready for anything. That nothing whatever can separate us from the love of Christ, and that God makes absolutely everything work for our spiritual good (see Rom. 8:28,35-39), is certain. That we face the possibility of encountering “trouble . . . hardship . . . persecution . . . famine . . . nakedness . . . danger . . . sword” is also certain (see again Rom. 8:35). So, for every Christian everywhere facing the unknown future, the word of wisdom is the Boy Scouts’ motto, which is also the good mountaineer’s maxim: be prepared!
What does being prepared involve? In a word, God-centered realism about living—and actual holiness of life. Following the statement, “We know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is,” John writes, “Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure” (1 John 3:2-3). And again: “No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. . . . He who does what is sinful is of the devil. . . . The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work . . .” (1 John 3:6,8). Those who cope best with pressures and difficulties will ordinarily be those whose life-quest is to be holy, imitating the Son to the glory of the Father both from gratitude for the tri-personal love that has brought them from spiritual death to spiritual life, and from a desire to be ready every moment to meet the Lord Jesus and give account to Him, should He choose that moment to return, or to summon us into His nearer presence. If we want to live and die in peace, holiness is in truth a necessity.