If we are trying to make salvation clear, with salvation being defined as we did in Chapter 2 – eternal life, justification, forgiveness of sins, reconciliation, peace, righteousness, redemption – and we are trying to figure out when it is that salvation is delivered to us living in the 21st century, we would be wrong to look towards Exodus chapter 14 to find a salvation verse and then say that we can be saved today based off of that Old Testament passage. This is due to the very simple reason that the salvation we were analyzing within the Exodus 14 passage is not the salvation that saves us today. The book of Exodus does not provide us a salvation that reconciles us to our Creator, and it does not inform us how it is that we can gain a salvation that is eternal.
When do we have salvation? We are not asking “when are we delivered from our enemies at the Red Sea?” We are asking about the solution to our sin problem. There are plenty of salvation stories within the Bible that are not speaking to the eternal salvation that we hold so dear. When does a man get his sins forgiven so that they are not a problem to him any longer? When does a man get his death penalty paid for so that he no longer has to suffer the condemnation and judgment that is guaranteed to those who are not reconciled to God? When is man’s fallen standing before God restored permanently? That is the salvation that we are interested in.
At the beginning of this chapter, I claimed that the “when” of salvation within the Bible is, unfortunately, the most confusing subject for Christians to recognize. What Christians need to understand is that within the Bible, salvation is either finished, complete, and possessed by the individual, or it is promised to them as something that they can obtain in the future. Those are the only two options available for salvation.
Within all the pages of Scripture, you either have salvation finished, complete, and possess it, or you are waiting for it to come. There are no other options. What most Christians realize is that the salvation that they are provided is a salvation that is finished, complete, and in their possession. I used the word “most” because there are those Christians that believe that one can lose their salvation. This minority group’s error comes from not rightly dividing the Scriptures and through their applying of verses that speak to Israel’s salvation as opposed to rightly applying verses that speak directly to members of the Church, the body of Christ.
For the Christian, there is no such thing as almost saved, partly saved, sort of saved, or kind of saved. As a person living within the dispensation of the grace of God, you either have salvation or you do not. Once an individual has salvation, they cannot, by definition, lose it. Thus, when asking the “when” question concerning salvation and the Christian, the answer is “now”. Outside of one exception, if one were to search for the two words “are saved” within the Bible, they would find that the statement “are saved” is only used in Paul’s epistles. Just through exploring these two words (“are saved”), we can gain an appreciation for the finished, complete, and possessed salvation that the Christian enjoys: