Savior

Hi, Nathan W Bingham here. If you were with us last month for our national conference in Orlando, you had the opportunity to see the official announcement of Ligonier Ministries' new children's curriculum, Growing in God's Word. Over the course of a year, this new curriculum helps churches, families, and schools guide K through 5th grade children through an overview of the Bible. This 52-lesson curriculum is designed to help you nurture children in the Christian faith, that they may discover their place in God's story of salvation in and through the Lord Jesus Christ. Each lesson reinforces the truths of Reformed theology and the Bible's unifying covenantal framework.

You can explore this curriculum, join the waitlist, and request preview samples at growinginggodsword.org. Please pray for the upcoming release of Growing in God's Word. And that the next generation would be helped to be faithful to Christ. Now onto today's episode of Renewing Your Mind. Every sin that we commit adds to the burden of our guilt, and every sin that we commit that is not redeemed or not forgiven or not confessed piles up or heaps up, as the Apostle says, wrath against the day of wrath. We need a Savior, but since we need a Savior, it raises the important question, a Savior to save us from what? I'm glad you're joining us for this Thursday edition of Renewing Your Mind, as we conclude a four-day study of some of the names and titles of Jesus.

This week R.C. Sproul has reminded us that Jesus is Lord, the Son of Man, the Logos, and today he'll remind us that he is the Savior. But this is a 12-part series called Names of Jesus, and we'd love for you to have lifetime digital access to the entire series. Plus, we'll send you The Word Made Flesh, a Ligonier statement on Christology. For the final day, request this resource package when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. Who is this Savior, and what do we need saving from?

Here's Dr. Sproul. About 15 years ago I was in the hospital with a kidney stone and not feeling very pleasant, and it was during the Christmas season. And as I was in my hospital bed I turned on the television set. It was a Sunday, and a minister from Hollywood Presbyterian Church, at that time Lloyd Ogilvy, was giving a Christmas message taken from the famous passage of Luke chapter 2, and he read this text. He read the announcement that the angels had given to the shepherds in Bethlehem, where we read these words, Do not be afraid, for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord. And as I was lying in my bed listening to Dr. Ogilvy read this text, I thought to myself, I've heard this text how many hundreds of times and read it and so on, familiar with it, and yet in that announcement the gospel that was preached first to the shepherds was an announcement that unto them was born that day in the city of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord. And in my pain at the moment I thought, that's exactly what I need right now is a Savior. But of course I wasn't thinking in the spiritual sense, but I was thinking of physical relief, physical salvation. Now you may think that to contemplate Christ in those categories is to miss the whole meaning of His name, Jesus, which means Savior.

But what I want to do today is take some time to look at the significance of this title that is given to Jesus Savior because the initial announcement of the angels to the shepherds was that the one who was to be born was to be the Savior. Now in the study of theology we break systematic theology into various subdivisions or compartments, and we study Christology, which we're doing now, or we study pneumatology, which is the study of the person and work of the Holy Spirit, or we study eschatology, which is the study of the last things or future things. Now one of the other subdivisions of systematic theology is called soteriology, S-O-T-E-R-I-O-L-O-G-Y. And the concept of soteriology comes from the Greek word soter, S-O-T-E-R, which is the Greek word for Savior. Now the verb form, sotomai in Greek means literally to save.

So the study of soteriology involves the study of salvation or the study of redemption in which we examine the significance of the cross and the doctrines of justification and election and matters of that sort under the broader heading soteriology. I once gave a message to the Christian Booksellers Association where I made mention of an experience I had when I was teaching in Philadelphia at the Conwell School of Theology on the campus of Temple University. I had just had my lunch, and I was making my way back to the classroom building because I had to meet with my afternoon class in systematic theology when an energetic young man came up to me outside the classroom building, and he sort of pigeonholed me there, and he said to me, sir, I said, yes, he said, may I ask you a question?

I said, go ahead. He said, are you saved? Did you ever have anyone do that, stop you on the street that you've never met before and ask you that question, are you saved?

And I have to confess what went through my mind when he did that. I thought I wanted to say to him, saved from what? I'm certainly not saved from strangers accosting me on the street and asking me that question. And I really didn't have time to be engaged in a lengthy discussion, and I knew he was eager to evangelize me on the spot, and so I said, yes, I am. I'm a Christian. In fact, I have to teach a class on theology. God bless you. I'll see you later.

And I went and taught my class. But we throw this language around somewhat loosely when we talk about being saved. Saved. And we have to ask the question, saved from what? And as we apply it to this title for Jesus, Savior, or Soter, we have to ask the deeper question, in what sense does the Scripture speak when it describes Jesus as the Savior? Now here is where the meaning of the term Savior and the term salvation becomes a little bit complicated for us. The whole idea of salvation in the Scriptures is an idea that is exceedingly complex and has several different meanings in different contexts historically. And this is not unlike many other terms that we meet in Scripture where we will take a word that we find in Scripture like the word to sanctify, for example, and we examine the word and see all the ways and times that it is used on the pages of Scripture, and then we extrapolate from the occurrences of that word in Scripture a kind of abstract crystallization of the idea from which we then develop a full-blown doctrine. Now the danger with that is then every time we see the individual word sanctification, we fill it completely full with all of the depths of the meaning of the term in its ultimate sense. For example, the New Testament tells us, as Paul writes to the Corinthians, that the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the believing wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the believing husband.

And when we read a passage like that, we scratch our heads because we say, wait a minute, what does the apostle mean here? Because normally we think of sanctification as something that follows our conversion or follows our justification and presupposes our justification. Does the apostle mean here that the unbeliever is sanctified by the believing spouse?

Does that mean, therefore, that the unbeliever can be justified without faith? Well, of course not, because when Paul is speaking here of sanctification, he's not speaking of the doctrine of sanctification. He's talking about the more rudimentary sense of the term, which means to set apart and to consecrate. Now the same kind of thing happens repeatedly with the word salvation, or the verb to save. Likewise, the New Testament teaches that the woman will be saved through childbearing. Does that mean that there are now three ways of salvation? One is through faith in Christ, one is through marrying a believer, and the third is through having babies?

Obviously not. There's an example where when the verb to save is used, it does not mean the ultimate salvation of being reconciled to God. Now that gives us a little clue to the way in which this concept of salvation is used in the Bible. In the Old Testament, for example, if the army of Israel goes out into battle against one of her enemies, and it looks as if the enemy is going to vanquish the Jewish troops, and the people call upon the Lord for salvation, the salvation they're looking for is the salvation or the saving of the troops from defeat in battle. It's not talking about heavenly salvation, but rather rescue from a clear and present calamity, or clear and present danger such as the military defeat. And so if God delivers the enemy into their hands, He demonstrates Himself to be the people's Savior in the sense that He has spared them from military conquest. In like manner, when people are stricken with serious diseases or illness to the point of being on the brink of death and God spares their lives, rescues them from dying, they are said to be saved. Now that's important because in the New Testament, how many times do we see Jesus dealing with the lame or the blind or the sick, and He heals them and makes a comment to the effect that your faith has saved you?

Is Jesus saying at that point that their faith in trust in His ability to heal them of their diseases has translated them not only into good health, but into a sound relationship with God, and with their physical healing has come ultimate salvation and reconciliation with God? Well it may mean that, but it doesn't necessarily mean that because of this broader application of the meaning of salvation. In like manner again, if a person is rescued from economic calamity where their business is about to fail or the crops are threatened by drought or flood or whatever, and God is merciful to the people as they pray for rescue from this economic, commercial, or agricultural disaster, it is said of them at that time they have been saved. And so we can see through these many examples that the term to save in the Bible has the general meaning of to rescue from calamity or from some impending disaster.

And it doesn't always carry the full-blown meaning of the doctrine of salvation. And so in that regard, there were many saviors in the history of Israel. The judges, for example, whom God anointed and raised up and empowered to lead Israel into victory against their foreign enemies were, quote, saviors. But when we get to the person of Christ and we see the application of that title, soter, or savior, to Him, now we see the application of the word to save being filled to the brim with the most profound concepts of redemption that the Bible has to offer. Now, we have to ask the same question with respect to Jesus that I wanted to ask the fellow on the campus of Temple University. When the Bible says that Jesus is the Savior, we have to ask the question, Savior from what?

From what does He save people? Now, there are different answers to that question in the New Testament. The obvious answer is supplied frequently that Jesus saves His people from their sins. And when we talk about being saved from our sins, what are we talking about? Does this mean that we are prevented henceforth from ever falling into this human frailty of committing sin? Or does it mean we are saved from the consequences of our sins? That's the primary meaning of to be saved from our sins.

It is to be saved from the results of our sins. Now, here is where the New Testament gets more specific, that Jesus, according to St. Paul, is described as the one who saves us from the wrath which is to come. From the wrath which is to come. This is the ultimate sense of salvation in the New Testament and the sense that is often completely overlooked in the life of the church and the church today because this whole idea involves two other concepts that are foreign to our way of thinking today. What this statement, to save from the wrath to come, presupposes is this.

One, that God is a God of wrath and that God will in fact display that wrath at some point in the future. And of course, that point in the future of which Jesus speaks so often in the New Testament is at the last judgment. Now, this motif is so frequently found in the New Testament that it's a staggering thing to imagine that in the church, for example, people would struggle with the idea of a final judgment. But if Jesus, the teacher, taught anything theologically, he taught over and over again about the coming crisis. His coming itself was a crisis, and we've seen before that that that word crisis, which in the Greek is kresis, we get the English word directly from the Greek word kresis, and the Greek word kresis means judgment. Now, a crisis is something that occurs in this world that comes at us with great threatening gloom. And we've all had crises of various sorts that I presume we've survived to even be together on this day talking about crises. But the New Testament warns about the supreme crisis that the whole human race will face, namely the last crisis will be the crisis or the judgment whereby we are called before the final tribunal of God.

Now again, it mystifies me that this idea of a final judgment has sort of slipped away from our thinking in 20th century categories. We have a God who doesn't bring crises, a God who has no wrath, a God whom we are told loves people unconditionally. He's never upset, and He's going to just pat everybody on the back and usher all of us into the kingdom of heaven without any problem so that there's nothing to worry about in the future because if God ever did have any wrath welling up within Himself, He spent it all on the cross, and there's no wrath left. But as much as the New Testament speaks about the wrath of God being poured out on Christ on the cross, it still carries over this extra warning that particularly for those who do not avail themselves of Christ's satisfaction of the wrath of God will have to face another judgment and face the wrath of God that they have heaped up for themselves against the day of wrath. That's one of the scariest things in the whole New Testament when the Apostle Paul speaks of us as having an investment in future wrath where there is this compounded interest of divine fury. Every sin that we commit adds to the burden of our guilt, and every sin that we commit that is not redeemed or not forgiven or not confessed piles up or heaps up, as the Apostle says, wrath against the day of wrath. And the promise from the Old Testament days throughout is that the day of the Lord will be for many a day of darkness with no light in it.

And the warnings are so abundant we are mystified as how anyone could miss them. Now, if the Bible didn't even say anything about a future judgment, how could we as moral creatures with a conscience not expect one? Do we not have an inner sense of moral responsibility for our lives? And what the New Testament says is that there will be a time where every human being will be called into account for his or her life, and it's that rescue that Jesus is sent to give to those who put their trust in Him. If we come back to the original question, what does it mean to be saved, or to the question the young man asked me in Philadelphia, are you saved?

He was personalizing it as he directed the question to me. The question is, am I saved from the wrath that is to come? Well, the good news that was announced to the shepherds and that it's announced to you that unto you is born that day in the city of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord. His mission was to save His people from that wrath which surely will come. And so the most significant, really the most important question I can ever face in my life is that question that was stated to me, yes, in crass terms and in simplistic terms, but it is the question, are you saved? Are you in a state of redemption? Have you looked to the Savior to have Him take the wrath of God that you deserve? That's what the whole concept of redemption is in the New Testament, is that Christ as the Savior takes upon Himself the wrath that I deserve and that you deserve if indeed we put our trust in Him.

The whole message of the Bible boils down to that, doesn't it? You and I are sinful, Christ is perfect and holy, and the demands of the Father's justice are satisfied through Christ. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Thursday as we conclude a study of some of the names and titles of Jesus. Thanks for being with us. Today's message from R.C. Sproul is from his series, Names of Jesus, and when you give a donation of any amount before midnight tonight at renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800 435 4343, we'll unlock the series for you in the free Ligonier app. We'll also send you The Word Made Flesh, the Ligonier statement on Christology, along with its affirmations and denials.

This statement was crafted and released in 2016, and although you heard this on Monday's episode, here's the statement read again. We confess the mystery and wonder of God made flesh and rejoice in our great salvation through Jesus Christ our Lord. With the Father and the Holy Spirit, the Son created all things, sustains all things, and makes all things new. Truly God, he became truly man, two natures in one person. He was born of the Virgin Mary and lived among us, crucified, dead, and buried. He rose on the third day, ascended to heaven, and will come again in glory and judgment. For us, he kept the law, atoned for sin, and satisfied God's wrath. He took our filthy rags and gave us his righteous robe. He is our prophet, priest, and king, building his church, interceding for us, and reigning and reigning over all things.

Jesus Christ is Lord. We praise his holy name forever. Amen. Amen.

Amen. That was the Ligonier statement on Christology, written out of a desire to help people regain clarity regarding the person and work of Christ. We'll send it to you and unlock digital access to the Names of Jesus series when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, or when you use the link in the podcast show notes. An entirely digital edition of this resource package is available for our global audience and those who prefer it at renewingyourmind.org slash global. Thank you for helping take the truth of who Christ is to the nations. What do you live for? Who do you live for? I hope you'll join us tomorrow for a special conversation with Grant Castleberry, recorded live at last month's national conference about his new book, The Honour of God. That's Friday, here on Renewing Your Mind.