Hard Words: Salvation
This sermon series is called “Hard Words,” and it's true that some words are harder than others. Last week we looked “Hell,” which gives each of us pause. It's unpleasant to think about. We're saturated with hellish imagery and language and we simply don't know who is destined for Hell and who is destined for Heaven. So it makes us uncomfortable. And, I'll be honest here – because I'm not a fire-and-brimstone kind of guy and I don't preach on Hell very often – last week was something of a novelty for me and I think I had a little bit too much fun putting that sermon together.
But today we're going to be looking at two words, actually – salvation, which, we presume, saves us from Hell. And it's counterpart, damnation, which is definitely an icky word to think about.
“Salvation” is not a word that usually makes us feel icky, the way that “Hell” or “damnation” do. Salvation makes us think of God's promise, of being loved and cared for. That gives us hope.
But it's also a word that a bit fuzzy around the edges. We're not entirely sure we know what it means, even if we find comfort in it.
When we talk about Hell, we talk about damnation. But is salvation merely the opposite of that? Or is it something more?
What does it mean to be saved?
What does it mean to be damned?
In talking about Hell last week, we saw a few of the different words the scriptures used – Sheol, abyss, Hades, tartarus, yet also saw that the word Jesus used in the Sermon on the Mount was Gehenna. Unlike the other words, which were abstract concepts for an underworld afterlife, Gehenna was a real, tangible place that the people of Israel knew.
That was the word that Jesus used to make Hell real to them.
When we talk about salvation and damnation, those are abstract words, that we can maybe conjure up a mental image of; we have an idea of the consequences of each of them, but they're still something we can't really put on fingers on and hold in our hands.
When we think of salvation and damnation, we often assume that we're talking about our spiritual selves. And, indeed, since the time of the New Testament, this has been the predominant understanding; that God's intercession in our lives is at its most compelling when our lives are ended and we meet our judgment. That's when our salvation or damnation is determined; it's for the sake of our souls.
Yet this wasn't always the case.
The way people understood God and salvation in the Old Testament, and even into New Testament times as well, was that salvation was something that God could deliver to us physically, in our lifetimes, to save us not just in soul but in body as well.
That is God's promise and, in fact, what God does in the Book of Exodus. In Exodus 3, God tells Moses, “... I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, and land flowing with milk and honey...”
That's not just a spiritual salvation, although it's certainly that as well, but a tangible, physical saving of the Hebrew nation.
God delivers physical salvation to his people again, in the anointing of David, who slew Goliath and turned back the Philistines. When King David wrote the 37th Psalm, he wrote “...the salvation of the righteous is from the Lord; he is their stronghold in times of trouble.” And he meant that literally – that God would prove a physical obstacle to Israel's enemies.
God delivers physical salvation to Jerusalem in the first Assyrian invasion, when he declares in 2 Kings 18, “I will defend this city and save it,” and the scriptures say that an Angel of the Lord put to death 185,000 in the Assyrian camp.
That's not the abstract, other side of the veil, salvation from hell into heaven. But the immediate salvation of life from death. That God manifested the exodus of a nation, the anointing of kings, the destruction of armies... When the ancient people of Israel thought of salvation, that's what came to mind.
That's not necessarily the case with us.
I think it's fair to say that our experiences with God have been a little more hands-off.
This is not to say that God isn't active in our lives, or that his intervention isn't real. But simply that it tends to be a bit less dramatic than the experiences described in the Old Testament.
It's something that Jesus himself talks about during his earthly ministry. At a time when people are expecting their Messiah to lead a divine intervention against the Roman occupiers, Jesus says no. The salvation he brings isn't that.
I won't say that Jesus never concerns himself with our earthly fortunes; with the here and now, because he does. Specifically in how we're to treat each other, especially the less fortunate, more vulnerable among us. But when it comes to our salvation he speaks in terms of our immortal souls, not our mortal bodies.
In the Gospel of John, chapter 5, when Jesus is being persecuted for doing healing work on the Sabbath, he tells the gathered crowd, “Very truly, I tell you – whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged, but has crossed over from death to life.”
Those are not the words of a man who sees salvation in the saving of his own skin.
They are the words of a man who sees far beyond the bounds of this world, into the realms of the next. And wants to tell us how to get there too.
That's salvation. That's the result of the saving work Christ does for us. That yes, we pray for interventions, we pray for healing, we pray for peace, we pray for forgiveness and reconciliation and for an end to our brokenness, and we are right to do so. But that more than that, so much more than that, when we pray for our own salvation we are praying for so much more than the preservation of our physical selves, but to be welcomed into the everlasting love of God's embrace.
Without that love. With Christ's mercy. Without the faith that God himself gives to us. We are condemned. And that condemnation doesn't mean that armies will besiege us, illness will befall us, or bad fortune will follow us. It means that we will be damned to leave this life and go into the next with nothing. No hope. No means of grace. Nobody to welcome us, to ease our way, to prepare a place for us. Without God, we are damned. And we are lost.
And so we consider ourselves lucky.
We are fortunate.
Because we do worship a loving God. A God who does care enough to offer us salvation. Perhaps it's not the form of salvation that we'd necessarily expect. Or the sort we'd think to ask for on our own. But it is a saving grace that is worth so much more than any corporeal blessing we could receive.
We may think of salvation as a ticket to heaven, but it's so much more than that. It's an invitation from our God to be at peace with him. To be at one with him. To never live in doubt, absent from his presence, fearful of Hell. Because when Christ declares us to be saved – an act of grace that comes from God alone, and not by any choice we make or act we commit – but when Christ declares us saved, we are assured of our place in God's home, at God's table, in everlasting love.
This salvation we are freely given is to God's own glory, and not our own.
Let us pray.
Gracious and everlasting God, we pray in gratitude for your Son, Jesus Christ. He is our Lord, our Savior, the one who binds us to you in this life and the next. We are thankful for those times you intercede in our lives, and look forward to your greatest intercession when your judgment on us comes with the promise of your forgiveness. Help us to be reconciled to you and to each other, we pray in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
This sermon series is called “Hard Words,” and it's true that some words are harder than others. Last week we looked “Hell,” which gives each of us pause. It's unpleasant to think about. We're saturated with hellish imagery and language and we simply don't know who is destined for Hell and who is destined for Heaven. So it makes us uncomfortable. And, I'll be honest here – because I'm not a fire-and-brimstone kind of guy and I don't preach on Hell very often – last week was something of a novelty for me and I think I had a little bit too much fun putting that sermon together.
But today we're going to be looking at two words, actually – salvation, which, we presume, saves us from Hell. And it's counterpart, damnation, which is definitely an icky word to think about.
“Salvation” is not a word that usually makes us feel icky, the way that “Hell” or “damnation” do. Salvation makes us think of God's promise, of being loved and cared for. That gives us hope.
But it's also a word that a bit fuzzy around the edges. We're not entirely sure we know what it means, even if we find comfort in it.
When we talk about Hell, we talk about damnation. But is salvation merely the opposite of that? Or is it something more?
What does it mean to be saved?
What does it mean to be damned?
In talking about Hell last week, we saw a few of the different words the scriptures used – Sheol, abyss, Hades, tartarus, yet also saw that the word Jesus used in the Sermon on the Mount was Gehenna. Unlike the other words, which were abstract concepts for an underworld afterlife, Gehenna was a real, tangible place that the people of Israel knew.
That was the word that Jesus used to make Hell real to them.
When we talk about salvation and damnation, those are abstract words, that we can maybe conjure up a mental image of; we have an idea of the consequences of each of them, but they're still something we can't really put on fingers on and hold in our hands.
When we think of salvation and damnation, we often assume that we're talking about our spiritual selves. And, indeed, since the time of the New Testament, this has been the predominant understanding; that God's intercession in our lives is at its most compelling when our lives are ended and we meet our judgment. That's when our salvation or damnation is determined; it's for the sake of our souls.
Yet this wasn't always the case.
The way people understood God and salvation in the Old Testament, and even into New Testament times as well, was that salvation was something that God could deliver to us physically, in our lifetimes, to save us not just in soul but in body as well.
That is God's promise and, in fact, what God does in the Book of Exodus. In Exodus 3, God tells Moses, “... I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, and land flowing with milk and honey...”
That's not just a spiritual salvation, although it's certainly that as well, but a tangible, physical saving of the Hebrew nation.
God delivers physical salvation to his people again, in the anointing of David, who slew Goliath and turned back the Philistines. When King David wrote the 37th Psalm, he wrote “...the salvation of the righteous is from the Lord; he is their stronghold in times of trouble.” And he meant that literally – that God would prove a physical obstacle to Israel's enemies.
God delivers physical salvation to Jerusalem in the first Assyrian invasion, when he declares in 2 Kings 18, “I will defend this city and save it,” and the scriptures say that an Angel of the Lord put to death 185,000 in the Assyrian camp.
That's not the abstract, other side of the veil, salvation from hell into heaven. But the immediate salvation of life from death. That God manifested the exodus of a nation, the anointing of kings, the destruction of armies... When the ancient people of Israel thought of salvation, that's what came to mind.
That's not necessarily the case with us.
I think it's fair to say that our experiences with God have been a little more hands-off.
This is not to say that God isn't active in our lives, or that his intervention isn't real. But simply that it tends to be a bit less dramatic than the experiences described in the Old Testament.
It's something that Jesus himself talks about during his earthly ministry. At a time when people are expecting their Messiah to lead a divine intervention against the Roman occupiers, Jesus says no. The salvation he brings isn't that.
I won't say that Jesus never concerns himself with our earthly fortunes; with the here and now, because he does. Specifically in how we're to treat each other, especially the less fortunate, more vulnerable among us. But when it comes to our salvation he speaks in terms of our immortal souls, not our mortal bodies.
In the Gospel of John, chapter 5, when Jesus is being persecuted for doing healing work on the Sabbath, he tells the gathered crowd, “Very truly, I tell you – whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged, but has crossed over from death to life.”
Those are not the words of a man who sees salvation in the saving of his own skin.
They are the words of a man who sees far beyond the bounds of this world, into the realms of the next. And wants to tell us how to get there too.
That's salvation. That's the result of the saving work Christ does for us. That yes, we pray for interventions, we pray for healing, we pray for peace, we pray for forgiveness and reconciliation and for an end to our brokenness, and we are right to do so. But that more than that, so much more than that, when we pray for our own salvation we are praying for so much more than the preservation of our physical selves, but to be welcomed into the everlasting love of God's embrace.
Without that love. With Christ's mercy. Without the faith that God himself gives to us. We are condemned. And that condemnation doesn't mean that armies will besiege us, illness will befall us, or bad fortune will follow us. It means that we will be damned to leave this life and go into the next with nothing. No hope. No means of grace. Nobody to welcome us, to ease our way, to prepare a place for us. Without God, we are damned. And we are lost.
And so we consider ourselves lucky.
We are fortunate.
Because we do worship a loving God. A God who does care enough to offer us salvation. Perhaps it's not the form of salvation that we'd necessarily expect. Or the sort we'd think to ask for on our own. But it is a saving grace that is worth so much more than any corporeal blessing we could receive.
We may think of salvation as a ticket to heaven, but it's so much more than that. It's an invitation from our God to be at peace with him. To be at one with him. To never live in doubt, absent from his presence, fearful of Hell. Because when Christ declares us to be saved – an act of grace that comes from God alone, and not by any choice we make or act we commit – but when Christ declares us saved, we are assured of our place in God's home, at God's table, in everlasting love.
This salvation we are freely given is to God's own glory, and not our own.
Let us pray.
Gracious and everlasting God, we pray in gratitude for your Son, Jesus Christ. He is our Lord, our Savior, the one who binds us to you in this life and the next. We are thankful for those times you intercede in our lives, and look forward to your greatest intercession when your judgment on us comes with the promise of your forgiveness. Help us to be reconciled to you and to each other, we pray in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.