Christianity Explained by David Pawson

Author:David Pawson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Religion, Religion: Christianity, Christian Theology, General
Publisher: Anchor Recordings Ltd.
Published: 2014-04-10T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

WHAT DOES ‘SAVED’ MEAN?

Three coal-miners are trapped by a rock-fall several thousand feet below the surface. There may be poisonous gas; there may be an explosion. At the surface every available man, and every obtainable mechanical device, is pressed into service. Television cameras, arc lights, the anxious relatives at the pit-heads— we have all seen it on our screens. And then, after many anxious hours, the miners are brought up alive. They have been saved.

Or there is the familiar holiday incident. A swimmer gets into difficulties several hundred yards from the beach. His struggles are noticed by an alert life-guard, who dashes out into the surf and swims powerfully to the spot where he last saw the drowning man. By now he has stopped struggling. He is lying just below the surface, motionless. The life-guard pulls him to the shore, and begins mouth to mouth resuscitation. Half an hour later the first breath of life animates the man’s chest. He is alive. He has been saved.

In situations such as those it is natural to use the word ‘saved’. Someone was in peril, at the point of death. And by the efforts of a third party they were rescued from their plight … saved. Yet when we use the same verb in talking of a religious experience, or ask ‘Are you saved?’ it seems in some way artificial. After all, these pleasant, respectable, law-abiding people in the pews — where is the need for them to be ‘saved’? The word seems too stark, too extreme.

And so does the word ‘salvation’, which has the same root with such words as safe, saved and salvage. It is a very ‘big’ word, with many shades of meaning, and it is at the very heart of what we believe. So we are going to examine seven factors involved in ‘salvation’, in ‘being saved’.

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