16 Truths You Should Know: God Saves

The last post in this series told the story of the fall of humankind. Adam, the very first human, disobeyed God, and as a result, every human after him (including my two-year-old granddaughter) is born a sinner. The sin we inherit from Adam has two aspects: We share in his guilt, and we are born with an inner corruption that causes us to disobey God like he did. The bottom line—and the main point of the previous post—is that we are born estranged from God and it only goes downhill from there as we live out our lives in rebellion against him. 

But thankfully, this is not where the story ends. 

Come to think of it, it’s not where the story begins, either, and that’s a good thing, too. Way back in eternity past—before the fall of Adam, even before creation—God had a plan to create the universe and unfold it’s history to accomplish his ultimate purpose, which is to reveal his own glory in it. So he works in everything that happens, including the fall of Adam, to accomplish this goal.

God planned for the bad news that we are guilty and alienated from him to be the backdrop for what J. I. Packer calls his “redemptive project”1—saving sinful people by removing their guilt and reconciling them to himself, all “to the praise of his glory” (Ephesians 1:6, 12, 14). 

The Plan to Save

We see the blueprint for God’s redemptive project in Ephesians 1. It starts like this:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons … . (Ephesians 1:3-5 ESV)

Before creation, the Father chose people from among Adam’s guilty and alienated descendants. He intended for these sinful people to become his own righteous adopted children, and to that end, he orchestrated his plan of redemption. 

The Son has role in the redemptive project, too. 

In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses … . (Ephesians 1:7 ESV)

He willingly came into the world, sent by his Father, to die on behalf of the guilty sinners his Father planned to save. Because he died for them, their sins can be forgiven and their guilt removed. 

And the Spirit?

… you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory. (Ephesians 1:13-14 ESV)

The Spirit’s job is to apply the Son’s redeeming work to the children God has chosen, and then keep them faithful until the end when they receive their final inheritance.

As you can see, each member of the Trinity has a role in God’s plan to save. There is a “division of labor”² (as Louis Berkhof calls it) in God’s redemptive work. In later posts, we’ll discuss in more detail the work of each person, but for now, if we bring in what’s taught in other texts of scripture, we can summarize the division of labor in salvation like this: The Father chooses and sends and adopts; the Son comes and redeems and intercedes; the Spirit applies and recreates and keeps. Or to put it another way, the Father gave the Son a people to redeem, the Son died to redeem them, and the Holy Spirit applies the benefits of Christ’s redemption to his people, and preserves them to the end. 

Since God always accomplishes what he plans to do, all God’s people will be saved for sure through the work of our triune God. And from start to finish, salvation is God’s work, so he receives all the glory for it. 

1Concise Theology by J. I. Packer, page 38.
2Systematic Theology by Louis Berkhoff, page 266. 

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Previous posts in this series:

1. 16 Truths You Should Know: God Has Spoken
2. 16 Truths You Should Know: God Is One and God Is Three
3. 16 Truths You Should Know: God Is Who He Is
4. 16 Truths You Should Know: God Has a Plan
5. 16 Truths You Should Know: God Created the Universe
6. 16 Truths You Should Know: We Are Made in God’s Image
7. 16 Truths You Should Know: We Are All Sinners 

Sunday's Hymn: I Will Sing the Wondrous Story

I’ve sung these words to all three of these tunes. This hymn is associated with Ira Sankey because he published it in his Sacred Songs and Solos. He did not, however, write it.

I will sing the wondrous story
Of the Christ who died for me,
How he left the realms of glory
For the cross on Calvary.

Yes, I’ll sing the wondrous story
Of the Christ who died for me,
Sing it with the saints in glory,
Gathered by the crystal sea.

I was lost: but Jesus found me,
Found the sheep that went astray,
Raised me up and gently led me
Back into the narrow way.

Faint was I, and fears possessed me,
Bruised was I from many a fall;
Hope was gone, and shame distressed me:
But his love has pardoned all.

Days of darkness still may meet me,
Sorrow’s path I oft may tread;
But his presence still is with me,
By his guiding hand I’m led.

He will keep me till the river
Rolls its waters at my feet:
Then he’ll bear me safely over,
Made by grace for glory meet.

—Fran­cis H. Row­ley

Other hymns, worship songs, or quotes for this Sunday:

• Saved by Grace at The Happy Wonderer
• Easter Has Implications for Our Benefit at The Outspoken Tulip

16 Truths You Should Know: We Are All Sinners

Several years ago, when I had only three grandchildren and they were all under three years old, I walked with them down to the shallow pond behind the house. On the walk back, I bribed them with the promise of chocolate milk when we got home because we needed to hurry. One-year-old grandson had tripped at the edge of the pond and was soaked in stinky pond water, and he needed to be cleaned up. 

The bribe worked, and after the clean-up job, we all sat in the front yard drinking our chocolate milk. All of us, that is, except the two year old. She was more interested in starting a toddler fight than drinking. She stood facing us, scowling, sippy cup extended. “You can’t have my chocolate milk!” she announced. She repeated it a few times, but the others were too focused on their own drinks to notice her. 

Then she placed her cup on the ground and walked away, pretending she had no interest in it, but still alert, ready to run back to grab it when someone else tried to pick it up. Her plan, which didn’t work because the other two were paying no attention to her, was to start a scuffle and also be its victim.

This may seem like unusually sophisticated strategy for a two-year-old, but it isn’t. Toddlers are living proof that we’re all born sinners. New parents are often shocked at how soon their little ones learn to manipulate to get what they want, and how often their wants are perverse. (That some parents don’t see this is evidence that human thinking skills are not what they ought to be, either.)

The Fall

The Bible tells us that it all started with Adam, from whom the whole human race has descended. The previous two posts in this series centered on the Bible’s first two chapters, Genesis 1 and 2, in which God created the world, including human beings, whom he made in his image. Everything was perfect until the third chapter when Adam and Eve listened to the serpent in the Garden of Eden and rebelled against God’s one prohibition.

There is much we can learn about sin and temptation from this true story, but I’ll simply note that Adam and Eve’s disobedience was more than just breaking a rule. To quote D. A. Carson, 

That is what a lot of people think that “sin” is: just breaking a rule. What is at stake [in the garden] is something deeper, bigger, sadder, uglier, more heinous. It is a revolution.¹

After all, the chief motivation for Adam and Eve’s rule breaking was a desire to “be like God” (Genesis 3:5). They were setting themselves up as their own gods by doing what they thought was best for them instead of trusting the rightness of the their Creator’s rules. To use Carson’s term, they were “de-godding” God.

This one rebellious act resulted in the fall of humankind. The Bible teaches that Adam, as the first human, represented all of his posterity before God, so the consequences that came from this single sin—a disordering of the whole creation order, and universal death (both physical and spiritual)—affect all humankind.

And because Adam represented us all, every human being has inherited sin from Adam. Since this inherited sin exists within us from the start, right from the moment we are conceived, we call it original sin.

Inherited Guilt

The first aspect of original sin is inherited guilt. The sin of Adam is counted against every one of his descendants. “God thought of us all as having sinned when Adam disobeyed,”² so each of us was born already guilty and condemned for Adam’s disobedience.

Some complain that this is unfair: How can we be blamed for what Adam did? There are a few ways to answer this objection, but what seems clear to me is that since Christ’s representative obedience is necessary for our salvation (a truth we’ll get to later), it does us no good to argue that the representative system is unfair. We’d have no hope without it.

Inherited Corruption

The other part of original sin is inherited corruption. We are all natural-born sinners. At birth, the corrupt seed that will grow and blossom into bad fruit is already there waiting to sprout (Psalm 58:3).

This is the reason no one had to teach my little granddaughter to manipulate others to get what she wants. It’s an innate ability—or perhaps more accurately, an innate disability. Like the rest of us, she was born with the desire to rule her own life and the lives of those around her—to be her own god, if you will—and as soon as she could express herself adequately, that’s what she began trying to do. 

Inherited corruption means that every one of us is a sinner, first in our inner being, and then in our actions. So original sin packs a double whammy of guilt—guilt inherited from Adam, and even more guilt resulting from our inner corruption and all the sins that flow from it.

This is humanity’s principal problem. We are guilty before God, and as a result, alienated from him. And we can’t repair the relationship. We can’t reverse the revolution. 

Thank God the story doesn’t end here.

1The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God’s Story by D. A. Carson, page 33.

2Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem, page 494.

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Previous posts in this series:

1. 16 Truths You Should Know: God Has Spoken
2. 16 Truths You Should Know: God Is One and God Is Three
3. 16 Truths You Should Know: God Is Who He Is
4. 16 Truths You Should Know: God Has a Plan
5. 16 Truths You Should Know: God Created the Universe
6. 16 Truths You Should Know: We Are Made in God’s Image