Biblical salvation is like a fine diamond: it’s multidimensional in its beauty and makeup. Like a precious diamond, salvation can be appreciated in various ways by being viewed from different perspectives. True salvation in Christ has several glorious realities that should be understood and appreciated by the believer. But too often this is not the case.
Many professing Christians tend to have a one-dimensional understanding of salvation. As such, they focus too much only on one perspective and so neglect the other salient truths about being saved and end up losing balance in their theology of salvation. Lacking balance in the doctrine of salvation is fundamentally dangerous. A key distinctive of true biblical salvation is that it is three-dimensional, and all three dimensions need to be held in balance.
Past Salvation
This first article will focus on the first of the three dimensions of salvation along with its blessed implications. Simply stated, biblical salvation has past, present, and future dimensions–so it is three-fold. Here we examine our “past” time salvation. There are two main realities about the past time dimensions of salvation: one is from God’s initiative and the other one is from our response, which is the human perspective. God and humans both participate in the past reality of salvation of the believer. With respect to God’s doing of past salvation, there is the doctrine of election. God chose and selected us unto salvation before the world was created. He chose us to be saved before we were even born! God said in the Book of Ephesians that “He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world” (1:3) and that He also “predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself” (1:5). And that election was on an individual basis. Some Bible teachers deny this personal reality of election unto salvation teaching instead that election only refers to some generic, undefined “corporate” election. But Scripture says otherwise. Election, when describing God’s predetermined deliverance of an individual sinner, is very personal. Scripture says of believers, “God has chosen you from the beginning for salvation” (2 Thess 2:13).
God is infinite and eternal, so He is greater than the confines of time. He created time (Col 1:16), so He transcends the temporal limitations we experience as humans. God knows what happens before anything happens. God determines history before it happens (Isa 46:8-11). God planned our salvation in eternity past. As such, salvation is all of God. He is the Author of salvation. Or as Jonah confessed while in the belly of the great sea monster, “Salvation is from the LORD” (2:9). In addition, because God is the Author of salvation, having planned it in eternity past, that means it is guaranteed! This is great news for us. Our salvation is eternally secured in His divine decree and will.
In addition to God planning our salvation in eternity past, we participate in salvation by believing His gospel. When a sinner repents and believes in Christ, God’s ancient plan of election to salvation is realized in time by us on personal, human, temporal level. When a sinner believes, in that moment he or she is born again or “saved” spiritually. God saves the repentant sinner from many evils, including the penalty of sin, from their old, rebel life, from the devil, and from the sinful worldly system. This salvation happens in an instantaneous moment of time upon belief. It is a one-time, unrepeatable, supernatural, invisible transaction accomplished by the grace and power of God. From God’s point of view, this salvation is a legal transaction, and so is called “justification” (Rom 3:24; 8:29). In that moment God adopts the sinner into His family and reconciles the sinner to Himself. He also in that moment puts His Holy Spirit inside the new believer as He regenerates their once dead soul.
If you are a Christian today, then this glorious transaction of “past” salvation happened to you. It happened at some specific previous point in your life (Eph 2:1)…whether you remember the exact day and time or not. This is what we mean by “past” salvation. Past salvation refers to the exact moment in your life when you were rescued, redeemed, and delivered by God, and adopted into His family. It is also the day, or moment, that that He baptized you with the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 12:13), forever placing you into the Body of Christ. It is this past reality of salvation that Paul describes when he reminds the Christian, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph 2:8-9). So, every true Christian has already been saved. And the point of emphasis here is that you have been legally pardoned of all your sins based on the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.
Along with this reality of salvation that is now for us a past tense reality, is the biblical teaching that says every Christian can have full certainty and assurance about this past salvation. Because of the promises of God and the indwelling Holy Spirit, every Christian is expected to be confident in the salvation they secured through Christ in the past. God wants you to know with certainty that you are saved. And He tells us how we can have such certainty, now in this life (1 John 2:3-6). One clear statement on this is when Jesus and the apostles said if you believe in Christ then “you shall be saved” and possess “eternal life” right now (John 3:16; Acts 16:31). Eternal life lasts forever, and Scripture says we possess it now, upon believing.
Wrong Views of Past Salvation
Despite the Bible’s clear teaching on past salvation, there are some common wrong views about the reality of past salvation that cause great confusion. The Catholic Church has a wrong view on this biblical truth. The Catholic Church formally teaches that no one can know in this life if they are saved (Trent, 6th Session, Ch. XII). They deny any kind of one-time, definitive past salvation work of God in a person’s life. The Roman Church condemns to eternal Hell (i.e., “anathema”) anyone who would claim with confidence, “I have eternal life now, in this life.” For them, salvation is not accomplished or known experientially until the future, in the afterlife, after long ages of suffering through the fictitious process of purgatory. I was told explicitly back in the day as a Catholic teenager that I could not know or claim to be saved in this life. I was not allowed to have the certainty of salvation. As a result, I always had guilt hanging over my head.
Catholics aren’t the only ones who hold aberrational Christian views about past salvation. Some Protestants and Evangelicals do as well. For example, a popular Protestant view of salvation holds the opposite of the Catholic Church about past salvation to an extreme. They say all that matters is past salvation, giving no merit or due attention to present salvation or future salvation. This manifests itself typically in what can be called “easy believeism.” The idea is that complete salvation amounts to an emotional event in one’s past when you walked down the aisle to be saved, or raised your hand, or signed a card, and then that’s all there was to salvation. The error comes when one who holds this view equates all of salvation with a one-time, superficial, past time profession of belief…usually in the young childhood years. Ongoing discipline, confession, repentance, denial of sin, good works or other Christian virtues are not required or relevant to complete salvation or to grow in salvation. An extreme of this view is when a professing Christian routinely engages in immorality or some kind of sinful compromise on a large scale or for a long time, but then justifies their sin by saying, “I got saved when I walked the aisle at age nine, so I’m saved forever, no matter how I live now as an adult.” Such a professing Christian fails to understand the other two dimensions of salvation that the Bible teaches: present salvation (or ongoing salvation, also known as sanctification) and future salvation.
As Christians, we possess a complete salvation with respect to forgiveness of sin and having a personal relationship with God now. That reality is based on our past salvation. But at the same time our salvation is not finalized because there are two other areas God promises to rescue us, at which time our salvation will be total and final. Those two dimensions are present salvation and future salvation which we will examine in future articles.
