Salvation is too great a thought for the heart of man to suggest. God must provide us with it. The religious mind of man resents it as inconsistent with the obligations he owes to God, and with the relationship and responsibility under which he stands to Him. The moral sense resents it as being no security for practical life and righteousness. How deeply at fault they both are! How unequal is the best human tiling to reach the divine! While neither man’s religion, nor man’s morality gives toleration to the idea of salvation, God, as we see, is occupied with it from first to last. The mention of it, the history of it, the gradual display of it, the exercise of it, illustrations of it in one sinner after another, stretch along the whole volume. He dispenses it now, and calls on us to enjoy it; He will perfect it by and by, and will call on us to celebrate it.
Having begun to tell of itself as soon as it was needed, that is, as soon as sin entered, in the very first promise; and having given further and various notice of itself in patriarchal, Mosaic, and prophetic ages; when the Son in due time was manifested, when the Word was made flesh, salvation, so to speak, was presented in a Person. God in flesh was named “Jesus;” and this because “he shall save his people from their sins.” Jesus is the imperishable name. “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever.” It is the name which abides in bloom and freshness, the unfading title which eternity has no power to efface. Time wears away the rocks; eternity will do nothing with that name, save to celebrate it. “Jesus,” or Savior, was the first word written by the finger of God in the record-book of this world of sin, and it has ever since been kept, like the bow in the cloud, in the freshness of its first hour. It is the unchanging, unchangeable, name. God’s salvation, the anointed Savior, Jesus Christ, is the enduring, pervading, commanding thought. It is not the unutterable, but it is the imperishable name. Israel under the law found the divine name to be too high, too distant, too sacred for human lips. It was the unutterable name. But the sinner under grace talks of the divine name now, and will forever.
Salvation comprehends a wondrous system of high and glorious privileges, which are all ours, through the faith of Jesus. In the Epistles especially we get an account of this great comprehension. As for instance, we there learn that divine righteousness, sonship, and the spirit of adoption, the indwelling Spirit, the glorified body, translation in the hour of the Lord’s coming, share in the kingdom, and place in the house of the Father, acceptance in the Beloved, the confidence and friendship of the Lord, and inheritance of all things with Him, His own eternity—these are among the high conditions of those who are in the salvation of God.
But while it comprehends all this and more of like excellency, that on which it rests is simple as it can be. It is satisfaction—the satisfaction which God has found in the sacrifice on Calvary. This sustains everything. Call our good things by what name we may, justification, acceptance, grace, peace, glory, sanctification, sonship, reconciliation, redemption, or whatever description in name it may carry, all rests on the simple fact that Christ has satisfied God, in that which He has done for us sinners. The rent veil and the resurrection, His seat in the highest heavens, and the presence here of the Holy Ghost, are the blessed witnesses of this satisfaction; such august and wondrous witnesses as none can gainsay them on the side of our accuser, and none can exceed them as from God Himself. We are to accept salvation from God because He has accepted satisfaction from Christ.