If God had perceived that our greatest need was economic, he would have sent an economist. If he had perceived that our greatest need was entertainment, he would have sent us a comedian or an artist. If God had perceived that our greatest need was political stability, he would have sent us a politician. If he had perceived that our greatest need was health, he would have sent us a doctor. But he perceived that our greatest need involved our sin, our alienation from him, our profound rebellion, our death; and he sent us a Savior.
(D.A. Carson, Call to Spiritual Reformation)
Salvation in the Kingdom
In the last chapter, we explored one of the major headwaters of the Scriptural story which feeds into the smaller tributaries of doctrine. Namely, God’s covenantal desire to bridge the gap between the seen and unseen realms. In fact, the entire story of material reality has been predicated on this cosmic relationship, between God and man, from creation to incarnation. It’s precisely this relational overlap of God’s perfect heavenly realm with the corrupted worldly realm that is known as the Kingdom of God—a Kingdom that is characterized by redemption. In previous chapters, we have defined the Kingdom of God as “the range of God’s effective will”. It is His rule and reign, the place where His perfect plan is being enacted. The Kingdom carries with it all the implications of a reality being governed by the kind of God who acts redemptively to restore the seen realm to its original potential in relationship with Himself.
However, it is easy to make this kind of talk about the salvation of the Kingdom sound like a technical or clinical issue, as if humans were just bystanders watching some cosmic event at a distance. Indeed, the good news of the Kingdom has been made out to be this in more than a few contemporary theologies—like a shift in the spiritual climate, felt and observed by humanity though, in more ways than we grant, disinterested in us. This technical, top-down, highly objective view of salvation may be useful pedagogy to a point, but it finds little to no grounds in the biblical view of salvation.
The personal relational aspect of salvation in the Kingdom of God, like the Kingdom itself, cannot be relegated to any one aspect or category of the whole—personal relationship pervades and defines the thing itself. As we discussed briefly in the last chapter about Priestly Theology, the human’s personal experience of reality, however subjective we might judge it, is still of paramount importance to God and His redemptive plan. In fact, the petty realm of human events, frictions, dramas, and mundane everyday life—in a word, the seen, as we’ve called it—is the realm in which God chooses to interact with creation. Ironically, the tedious, time-bound seen is where our entire human experience of heaven and the unseen takes place, because as I said in the last chapter, they are not isolated realms, they were designed to interconnect—that is why the God who is spirit makes it His business to interact with the temporal existence of humans (Ps. 8:4; John. 3:31–24).
However, it is purely a biblical fallacy to say that God acts in spite of man, the way a scientist experiments on rats or even the way a doctor performs a surgery—outside and in spite of the awareness of the patient. The experience of the saints and the word of God in Scripture tell us that this understanding of God’s redemptive interaction with humans is wide of the mark. But equally wide is the idea that human beings achieve redemption in spite of God, as if they were outmaneuvering God’s wrath or finding some way to ascend to the tree of life on their own. As we discussed earlier as well, that is what Scripture knows as Babylon. Humanity’s uprootedness from the tree of life is exactly its curse and the foundation of all our good-intentioned governments, programs, and social movements, each climaxing in death and failure of one kind or another. We cannot achieve the life we were created to have without God making a way, and although God does make a way, He does not force us to go through it.
There is a delicate tension between the two, between God’s calling and human responding, which sets the stage for salvation. It is a meeting of God and man in covenantal union, an overlapping of the divine heart with the human, it is fallen humanity healing. But how exactly does this happen? It cannot be our willing it to happen so much as it cannot be God spontaneously zapping people with salvation. It must begin with, what Scripture calls, the birth from above.
The Birth from Above
Jesus seldom if ever actually used the term, salvation. In fact, in the gospels, Jesus is only recorded using the word twice. His language regarding the concept of salvation, which is irrefutably central to His message, tended to be more precise. Rather than being systematic in His theology, continuously relying on one categorical word to describe the kind of salvation He came to bring in the Kingdom of God, Jesus opted to say puzzling things like: being born again, inheriting eternal life, inheriting the kingdom of God, and being born of the Spirit (John. 3:3–7; Matt. 19:29; Matt. 25:34; John. 3:6–8).
John 3 carries with it a wealth of implications regarding, what Jesus calls, the birth from above. After Nicodemus engages Jesus with some flattering small-talk about His recent miracle of turning water into wine, Jesus immediately replies with: “unless one is born again [in greek lit. from above] he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (John. 3:3). As in every case, the primary end of the salvation Jesus brings is entry into the Kingdom of God—beginning life in the realm of God, the divine overlap, living under His supreme authority. But why does Jesus begin with being born from above? Jesus expounds on His previous statement after Nicodemus begins to lose the plot, “…unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You [in greek you is plural] must be born again’.” (vv. 5–7). Why shouldn’t Nicodemus be confused and marvel at what Jesus is talking about? Evidently, Jesus expected Him to know exactly what He was talking about. It’s because Jesus is, almost word-for-word, quoting the Torah.
This water and spirit language is not some spur of the moment metaphor. Jesus is speaking to a man whose profession is the Torah, and as a Rabbi Jesus commonly spoke in references He knew His Jewish listeners would understand. The water, while possibly indirectly related, is not referring primarily to Christian baptism. Jesus is referencing Ezekiel 36, specifically verses 25–28, but typically in these kinds of allusions the larger thought of the passage is in view. Ezekiel 36 has to do with YHWH’s people, His holy name, and the nations. In context, it has to do with YHWH’s plan to redeem the holiness of His name which has been profaned by Israel and the nations. The conclusion of His plan is that He will gather His people from out of all the nations and will set them in their own land (v. 24). Next, YHWH promises to “sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleanness, and from all your idols I will cleanse you.” (v. 25). What comes next should sound familiar to us: “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my just decrees.” (vv. 26–27; cf. Jer. 31:33).
If it feels like we’re getting into the biblical weeds, bear with me and see where Jesus’ train of thought leads. John 3 is replete with references to spirit and flesh, much like Ezekiel 36, and that because it echoes the same biblical theme of the seen and unseen overlapping—more precisely, the healing between the two in restored relationship with YHWH. At the end of John 3, the scene switches from Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus to John the Baptist speaking to His disciples. The setting is a dispute about purification (v. 25) in which John’s disciples come to him complaining that everyone is going to Jesus for baptism. John replies by assuring his disciples of the divine character of Jesus, but he does so in a very curious way. John says this about Jesus: “He who comes from above is above all. He who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks in an earthly way. He who comes from heaven is above all.” (v. 31). Jesus is not merely born from above, He is Himself the one who is from above. He is the means by which birth from above can even be possible. This is not only to diminish John’s own importance in the eyes of his disciples and to emphasize Christ, but it is also directing our attention to a very unique characteristic about Christ. He has knowledge from above, He has in fact seen the unseen as human beings never could.
That’s why, in the next verses, John says, “He bears witness to what he has seen and heard, yet no one receives his testimony. Whoever receives his testimony sets his seal to this, that God is true. For he whom God has sent utters the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure.” (vv. 32–34). When one receives Christ’s testimony of what He has seen and heard from above, one applies to themselves the base ingredient to a life genuinely fixed in the Kingdom of God—“that God is true” (v. 33). We forfeit any ‘truth’ that might oppose the word of Christ’s testimony and begin to reorientate our thinking to prioritize God’s truth, regardless of whatever dispositions we find pre-built into our thinking. The birth from above is, in fact, a new life predicated on God’s truth—it assumes the validity and reality of what God has said to be real and true (Rom. 3:3–4; 1 John. 5:9–10). More than this, it assumes these things wholeheartedly in the person of Jesus, who “utters the words of God” and through whom we receive “the Spirit without measure” (John. 3:34; cf. Ez. 36:27).
Christ, in this case, is revealed to be the one through whom the promises of Ezekiel 36 come to fruition. He is the one who will cleanse humanity from their uncleanness and idols. He is the one who will give them new hearts, new spirits, and finally His own Spirit. Lastly, He is the one who will “cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my just decrees.” (v. 27). All these things Christ implies to be part and parcel with the birth from above which is necessary to “see” and “enter” the Kingdom of God. In other words, complete and absolute transformation of the heart and spirit is not only necessary, but is anticipated for every believer who seeks to see and enter the Kingdom of God. There’s little room to hide from the radical implications of this reading. New hearts and spirits are not, as we might like to imagine, only “spiritual” things which will have little bearing on our everyday lives. They are unseen realities manifesting into our everyday seen world, and by that merit characteristically part of the Kingdom. You cannot have a “new heart” and not exhibit changed priorities, behaviors, and modes of decision-making (1 John. 2:4; James 2:18–20). Jesus came to offer a complete newness of life—heart, spirit, and body—for the whole person, beginning with their innermost selves working outward. In the end their goal remains the same, a return to the tree of life, with God’s way, His statues and just decrees as the natural outflow of their thoughts and actions—and all of this transformation from a life and vitality not their own but from above.
In this vein of thought, three points of cohesion stand out between John 3 and Ezekiel 36: 1.) receiving cleansing, 2.) receiving God’s own Spirit, 3.) believing and obeying the will of God. I’m not offering a step-by-step chronological guide to salvation here, but a short selection of themes which come along with Christ’s teachings on salvation in the Kingdom of God. A closer look at these connecting themes will help to uncover a clearer picture of what both Old and New Testament Scripture knows as salvation.
The Blood of Jesus
In the first case, it is of paramount importance to remember that cleansing is dynamic, meaning it is an act of God which also includes human participation—it is not all on God just as much as it is not all on us. We can return briefly to the illustration of the Tabernacle, and how, before entering the Holy of holies, the priests had to go through a series of ceremonial washings which were commanded by YHWH to do. The priests themselves had to do the washings—God would not do that for them—but the cleansing themselves could not clean them. Their ceremonial affect could not be chalked up to just getting the priest’s hands wet. In fact, most cleansings included animal blood, which if anything made the priest more physically filthy (Heb. 9:22). The cleansing itself came by divine act in collusion with the otherwise arbitrary actions of the priest. Although the mysterious sacrament of Christian baptism is not the same thing as priestly ceremonial washings, it does share a similar characteristic in this sense. It is an outward action, completely meaningless, if God is not acting through it. It is the special unseen action of God through the seen act which makes it powerful and a facet of the Kingdom.
If one element of our salvation is made rigorously clear to us in the modern evangelical church today, it is the biblical truth that Christ’s blood on the cross was the absolute climax of this kind of sin-cleansing. The whole weight of the triumphant voice of the New Testament places extreme emphasis on this essential part of our salvation, that “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses.” (Eph. 1:7). As the old hymn goes, “For my cleansing this I see—Nothing but the blood of Jesus! For my pardon this my plea—Nothing but the blood of Jesus!” No passion of our own can earn us the rank of one forgiven by God. It is, in fact, by the blood of Jesus that we have forgiveness of sins. It is the basis of, what our systematics call, our justification, which is described by Gruden as: “an instantaneous legal act of God in which he (1) thinks of our sins as forgiven and Christ’s righteousness as belonging to us, and (2) declares us to be righteous in his sight.” (Wayne Grudem Systematic Theology ch. 36 p. 723). For most of us today though, this is not a difficult pill to swallow. Our pallets have become very familiar with the taste of a gospel message centered on justification through Christ crucified (1 Cor. 2:2). However, as with all powerful mysteries in Scripture, the danger is to suppose we completely understand what we’re talking about.
Among evangelicals today, a prominent danger is to think we’re only talking about the forgiveness of sins when we’re talking about the blood of Christ. It can feel like quite a leap to go from actual physical blood to the forgiveness of our sins, but so does the ceremonial washings YHWH commanded of the Levitical priests, so we’re usually pretty willing to make that leap. But if that leap lands us only in the range of justification we’ve fallen dreadfully short of the distance Christ intended us to go. As I stated before, the salvation Christ offers is a whole salvation—certainly not limited to the forgiveness of sins by His blood. In both the Tabernacle and the cross, we must not overlook the key ingredient which transformed mere blood and washing into a powerful act of God—namely, the imparting of grace (Rom. 5:1–2; Eph. 1:7–8, 2:8–9; Titus 3:7).
If you recall our discussion about grace in chapter 10 of this book, it is “the divine influence upon the heart, and its reflection in the life” (Strongs G5485). To the Scriptures, grace does not have to do with our forgiveness of sins. If there had never been sin in the world people would still need God’s grace. Grace is “God acting in our life to do what we cannot do on our own” (Dallas Willard). In the gospels, a sizable percentage is spent, prior to the passion narratives, unraveling exactly what this view of grace means in the context of the body and blood of Jesus. In John 6, for example, Jesus speaks to the five-thousand followers He had previously fed. They’re looking for more bread, and are willing to make Him king over His lucrative bread-making ability, but Jesus is offering something far more valuable. “Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.” (John 6:35). There is a life more deep and satisfying present in the person of Christ than anything human beings can provide for their own bodily life. Indeed, since we already know humanity’s division from the life of God (sin) is the cause of human death, any life which conquers this death must first deal with the root of death which is sin. This is the nuts-and-bolts of what Christ’s kind of salvation is—new life in the grace of God.
But notice how little Christ talks about justification, or even sin for that matter, in this passage. Life is Christ’s primary concern in all that He is saying to these confused and dying people. But notice also, this kind of life is not something He can just give like He gave the loaves and fish. The people cannot be passive recipients of this new life. They must come to Him, and do so in an infinitely intimate way.
“So Jesus said to them, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.” (John 6:53–56).
The final goal of this kind of salvation is not the forgiveness of sin, or even never-ending life, it is life absolutely and irrevocably connected to the life of Jesus. Jesus was not being morbid with His choice of metaphors either—the metaphor of eating runs particularly deep. It is subsistence, second-hand energy—life underneath. Eating is something which we naturally desire by hunger and from which we survive and experience renewed life. It is how we live and, if it does not offend us too much, a significant part of our enjoyment of life. In the case of our feeding on the body and blood of Jesus, we derive our life—and very importantly, our delight in life—from the life and delight of Jesus, just as He derives His life and delight from the Father (John 6:57).
So, yes, we can sing boldly that it is nothing but the blood of Jesus!—and that because we have no life in us except the life which Jesus gives. It is by this second-hand life from Christ’s blood that we are rescued from the natural conclusion of our life divided from the eternal life of God. Paul put this idea in more succinct wording: “by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8). When we come to Christ for the alleviation of our sin-guilt, we will always find it, but never without the addition of an explosive excess of energy to do the will of God. That is the function of grace—it’s the divine rocket-fuel which moves the Kingdom of God to expand on the earth through people whose hearts beat in sync with Christ’s.
The new life in Christ knows nothing of the kind of practical complacency many well-meaning Christians apply to grace. It was never intended to be a kind of sin safety-net or spiritual 401K plan. The grace which comes with our salvation through Christ is as far from retirement as finding the fountain of youth. It is, in fact, the beginning of our lives—it is being born again, or more precisely, born from above as that is where our new life comes from.
The Cross and the Tree of Life
But where does this put the cross, you might be wondering? The cross, in this rendering, remains of absolute importance. You may remember that Jesus said the cross was not only His, but that we must also carry our crosses. In fact, this action is part of coming to Him. If we want to come to Jesus for new life, we must deny ourselves and take up our crosses (Matt. 16:24). The symbol of the cross is just that, it is denying ourselves—denying our plans, our life, our hopes, our fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and exchanging it all for God’s plans, God’s life, God’s hopes, God’s fruit from the tree of life.
The idea of the cross reaches as far back as the Kingdom of God does, down to the roots of the human and divine drama springing from the inception of sin. It is putting down the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, as we discussed in chapter 9. It is turning our back on Babylon, on the superstructure devised by a sinful mankind and the diabolical elohim who defied YHWH near the beginning of creation. In place of this, we turn and choose God’s knowledge of good and evil—one of the most costly decisions a human being can make in a world built on the back of humanity’s knowledge of good and evil. But the conclusion, the unseen end hoped for and promised by God, is a foundational and never-ending good which the world could never see or achieve—eternal life abiding with God, the biblical symbol of the tree of life.
If you remember from chapter 9, the tree of life is far from a peripheral theme in Scripture. It is the image of life rooted firmly in the reality of God. When we eat from the tree of life, we subsist on a reality permitted, established, and intended for us by God, which is the realm in which God’s perfect will is being done. Don’t let yourself assume that God’s perfect will means God’s hard work being shrugged off onto us—it involves every good thing implied by a reality in which God is our loving Father. We were intended for an infinity of delight and love at the Father’s side—it is far from inhuman to be happy with heaven if heaven is only life with God. And this is why the availability of the Kingdom of Heaven today through Christ is, in fact, good news—the best news! We are free to shed the old way of things, the “old man” (Eph. 4:22–24), the spurn the allure of Babylon because we have a greater treasure than she can offer. As we deny ourselves and the world and cling tightly to Christ, “uniting” ourselves with Christ as some translations say, we begin to experience what eternity will be like—unbroken union, fellowship with God, the way Jesus is united to the Father.
This is no far-off hope, this was and continues to be the message of the gospel. That we who believe on Christ have died to the world and are now alive with His life, living daily in, and expanding, the Kingdom of God. Salvation is not so much a state of being as it is a dynamic flow of life from above, directing us and moving us to do and delight in the will of God. Sadly though, we cannot say that this is the experience of every Christian. Many are willing to accept Christ’s forgiveness, but are discouraged that sin continues to govern their lives. This is due, in part, to an extreme deficit of understanding in our churches regarding what Christ’s kind of salvation is.
A justification gospel—where forgiveness and heaven after death are the primary goal of salvation—is sweet in the mouth for most Christians because that means they can retain their own little kingdoms and alleviate their guilt. I’m not saying you cannot start here, but to stay here is not to receive the gospel at all. When the Kingdom of God begins to conflict with our own little kingdoms, we begin to squirm. Until we yield to the growth of the Kingdom of God in our lives (incidentally like a mustard seed), we cannot expect to grow as Christians—and grow we must. For salvation is a growing thing, much as we should expect a baby to grow when it’s born. It would be a very concerning thing if, after a year, your baby looked no bigger or stronger than before. So it is with our birth from above. As we feed on Christ, as we “grow in grace”, as Peter says (2 Pet. 3:18), we begin to experience more and more of what the new life means. We begin to experience, and not always in sensational ways but those come as well, what it looks like to really be like Christ. This is what our systematics know as, sanctification, and it is what I will reserve the next chapter to discuss.
The Overlapping Seen and Unseen Realms