Salvation is not only the rescue and deliverance of a man from evils conceived to lie round about him, and to threaten his being from without, it is also his healing from evils which have so wrought themselves into his very being, and infected his whole nature, that the emblem for them is a "sickness unto death," of which this mighty Physician comes for the healing. But salvation is more than a shelter, more than an escape. It not only trammels up evil possibilities, and prevents them from falling upon mea's heads, but it introduces all good. It not only strips
.■^off the poisoned robe, it also invests with a royal garb. It is not only negatively the withdrawal from the power, and the setting above the reach, of all evil, in the widest sense of that word, physical and moral, but also the endowment with every good, in the widest sense of that word, physical and moral, which man
ss. is capable of receiving, or God has wealth to bestow.
2. It is an accomplished salvation. — Salvation is a Divine act completed, but regarded as continuous and permanent in its issues. The Eevised Version slightly modifies the translation of the Authorized Version and reads, " ye have been saved " (A.V. " are saved "). The saving was a fact, finished, rounded, completed, realized once for all. In an earlier Epistle St. Paul said, " We are saved by hope." Despair means death. But here the saving is a fact and a process. It is done and it continues until man ^btains the beatitude of God. Out there swims the lifeboat. The man may be lifted into it from the devouring waves, and you say he is saved. But leaving him there in the open boat, tempest- tossed, wind -driven, you expose him to death as certain, though more slow-footed. And so the saving of man, though the work of God, is a process that goes on till the boat reaches the eternal shore, and we step on to the firm land to realize the larger freedom, and the diviner end.
3. It is the gift of God. — Salvation is entirely God's gift to us ; and it must be so. For we cannot make it or get it for our- selves ; we have no power of our own to make it for ourselves,
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EPHESIANS II. 8 23
nothing of our own to offer in exchange for it. If our salva- tion does not come to us as God's free gift, it can never come to us at all. This is what St. Paul keeps insisting upon over and over again in his statements of the doctrine of justification ; it is the foundation upon which the whole doctrine has to be reared. And so the very first step in the way of our salvation must be taken by God Himself ; we can have nothing at all to do with it.
^ " Not of yourselves : it is the gift of God." This word has often been misunderstood, as if it referred to the faith which is mentioned just before. But that is a plain misconception of the Apostle's meaning. It is not faith that is the gift of God ; it is salvation by grace. That is plain from the next verse : " not of works, lest any man should boast." What is it that is " not of works " ? Faith ? Certainly not. Nobody would ever have thought it worth while to say, " Faith is not of works," because nobody would have said it was. The two clauses necessarily refer to the same thing ; and if the latter of them must refer to salva- tion by grace, so must the former.^
^ Alas ! many don't understand the nature of Christianity, which is one great giving from beginning to end. Christ, God's Son, was a gift. The salvation He has procured us is a gift. The sacrifice which got that salvation is a gift. Heaven, with all its eternal felicities, is a gift — a free, a full, a perfect gift. And yet for Christ's cause there are men who can, and who will, do nothing ! It is astonishing the forms, the methods, the excuses which people will sometimes adopt — people with wealth — to get off from giving to God a little of what God has given so lavishly to them.2
IL
The Source of Salvation.
" By grace."
1. The fountain of all our deliverance from sin lies in the deep heart of God, from which it wells up undrawn, unmotived, uncaused by anything except His own infinite loving-kindness. People have often presented the New Testament teaching about
* A. Maclaren, Creed and Conduct, 37.
" Dr. MacGregor of St. Cuthberts, iu Life by Frances Balfour, 44.
24 SALVATION THE GIFT OF GOD
salvation as if it implied that God's love was brought to man because Jesus Christ died, and turned the Divine affections. That is not New Testament teaching. Christ's death is not the cause of God's love, but God's love is the cause of Christ's d«ath. " God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son." When He loves, He loves freely and unmodified except by the constraint of His own Being. Just as the light, because it is light and must radiate, falls upon dung-hills and diamonds, upon black rocks and white snow, upon ice-peaks and fertile fields, so the great fountain of the Divine grace pours out upon men only by reason of its own continual tendency to communicate its own fullness and blessedness.