Systematic Theology -- Salvation

Salvation

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 02

Dictation Name: 02 Salvation

Year: 1960’s – 1970’s

{?} deal with the doctrine of salvation. In Acts 16:25-32, we read, “And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God: and the prisoners heard them. And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken: and immediately all the doors were opened, and every one's bands were loosed. And the keeper of the prison awaking out of his sleep, and seeing the prison doors open, he drew out his sword, and would have killed himself, supposing that the prisoners had been fled. But Paul cried with a loud voice, saying, Do thyself no harm: for we are all here. Then he called for a light, and sprang in, and came trembling, and fell down before Paul and Silas, and brought them out, and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved? And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house. And they spake unto him the word of the Lord, and to all that were in his house.”

Salvation, of course, is what the Bible is about, but as I prepared to come to this meeting, I looked in several major theological works. There was not a single chapter on salvation, not a single chapter on salvation. Why? Because again, the very thing we were talking about in the previous session was at work. There were chapters on the components of salvation, on effectual calling, on election, justification, regeneration, and so on, but no unified statement on salvation.

Now, of course, theologians will defend such a system by saying it is necessary to go into the components so that the student can understand the matter. To a degree this is true, but first, we must always stress the unity of the faith, the unity of the Gospel, the unity of the doctrine of salvation. No more than we can know, a man from a dissection table in an anatomy class, where all his parts are dismembered and spread out, can we know the doctrine of salvation simply from studying the components thereof.

When Paul and Silas were faced with the question, “Sirs, What must I do to be saved?” they didn’t say, “Well now, let’s go into the ordo salutis and the various parts.” They said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house. And they spake unto him the word of the Lord and to all that were in his house.” You see the strength of fundamentalism has been its reliance on the simplicity of scripture. Its weakness has been its Arminianism. Salvation is to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord, kurios, absolute property owner, God, the one who has dominion, who says the word and all things are created. “By him were all things made and without him was not anything made that was made,” so to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ means to put our entire trust in him who is the Lord, the creator, the owner, the controller, the predestinator of all things. He is the Lord Jesus, Jehovah saves, incarnate God.

We are told in Hebrews that he suffered, that he was in all points tempted like as we are, so that our savior is not only the absolute Lord of all creation, but he is one like unto us so that we can come to God and that which we are ashamed to say before men, we can in our prayers confess to him because he knows and understands our {?}, so that to believe in the Lord Jesus is to believe in someone who has the power to save, who knows our every thought before we come to him, for all things are naked and open unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do{?}, and therefore, what we dare not say to those who are nearest and dearest to us, we can pour out to the Lord, for he is the Lord Jesus.

But not only the Lord Jesus, he is the Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Annointed One of God. He is the great King. He is the promised one, and the government shall be upon his shoulders, so said Isaiah centuries before his time. He is the great and last Adam, so that even as we, by our birth, are members of the old Adam and are born to sin and death, so because in our salvation we are members of the new Adam, Jesus Christ. We are born into life and righteousness when we are born again, so that to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ is to believe in him who is absolute God, very God of very God and very man of very man, and the one who has related to us. He is our next of kin. That’s the meaning of his headship. He is the redeemer, and to be the redeemer according to the Old Testament law, someone had to be next of kin. Your next of kin, therefore, is not your father or your mother, your brother or sister. It is Jesus Christ.

There comes a point when, where there is no faith, what we must say of those who are in Adam are next of kin, what our Lord requires us to do, to forsake father and mother and become members of him. He is our next of kin, so that to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ is to believe in him as our next of kin. To believe.

Many months ago, I touched on the meaning of that word, and I will, a few months hence, again spend an evening dealing with it, but you remember perhaps the imagery I used. To believe means to trust, to depend on, to put your entire weight and your reliance on, and I used the image of the time, years and years ago, when early in the winter, I started up into the mountains with an old Indian Christian, and we had to go across a stream that was deep at that point, but was frozen. It was very early in the Fall and I didn’t know if the ice would carry us, and he said, “With the kind of weather we had last night, that ice will be thick enough to carry us, the horses, and the wagon.” Now, I could have said, “I believe you,” and stayed on the shore and said, “I’m not going.” That would not have been faith. That would not have been to believe. To believe meant to get out on that ice and put your weight upon it. We went across the ice. Now, to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ is to put the weight of your whole life, all your problems, all your hopes upon him. Salvation, therefore, is to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. It means our rescue from the power of sin and death. It means victory. It means health. It means redemption. It means salvation from sin and death. Both the Old and the New Testaments speak of the salvation of our Lord.

Girdlestone, a very able scholar of the last century wrote, “Of the Old Testament and its doctrine of salvation, that it implied every kind of assistance for body and soul, and that it was freely offered to God’s people, to the needy, to the meek, to the contrite, but not to the wicked unless they repented and turned to him. Salvation consisted not only of deliverance from enemies and from the snares of the wicked, but also of forgiveness of answers to prayer, of spiritual gifts, of joy, of truth, and of righteousness.”

But do you know the sad fact is that Girdlestone went on to say that, with the coming of our Lord, the meaning of salvation diminished, that it became limited to the spiritual aspects, not to the totality of what the Old Testament promised, and this is wrong. Our Lord rose again from the dead as the firstfruits of them that are asleep, and as the firstfruits of the new creation, of the church, to set forth that his salvation is in terms of body and soul, of time and eternity. So that we cannot say that salvation diminishes in its meaning from the Old to the New Testament.

Our salvation is total. It means we are transformed and transferred from death to life, from sin to righteousness. We are saved. It does not mean that our problems are over. In fact, to be saved commonly can mean that your problems are greater, far greater. Now, if you’re in a burning house and somebody drags you out, you’re saved, but you’ve got a lot of problems. Your house is gone, you now have to make a new life for yourself, you will have to have a new family if you lost everything in that fire, and salvation is like that. You belong before your salvation to a house that is doomed, where you are going to perish, and if you perish, your problems are over. The man who dies in that house has no problems. The man who’s pulled out of that house now has problems. He has to start over again. He has built his life up to that point in terms of something which is perishing, in terms of a structure which is lost, but now he has to make a new life, new friends, new associations, but it’s a glorious calling, but it is full of problems.

To be saved is to be free from the burden of sin and guilt, and from the curse. The more we grow in grace, the more our sanctification increases, the more we are freed from the curse, so that finally, in the totality of the new creation, we are told, “And there shall be no more curse.” We are told in Deuteronomy 28 and elsewhere that, as we obey God, as we believe and obey, to that degree, God’s blessings come upon us and the curse disappears from us, and as we grow in grace, as we move forth in terms of the meaning of our salvation, we are freed from the burden of guilt. You know, Freud said the easiest way to abolish religion, and this is what he dedicated his life to, was not through scientific proofs of the non-existence of God, because he said as long as people feel guilty as all people do, they will want a god, but if we tell them that the guilt feeling is a scientific problem, and is a part of their primordial inheritance, a psychological inheritance, and that it is meaningless, then we can deliver them from religion. Of course, it didn’t work. All men are haunted with the problem of guilt, and guilt is the most burdensome and time-consuming, and energy-consuming thing that mankind has ever known. It’s a form of living dead. We are saved from guilt, because our sins are laid upon Christ and {?}, and the burden of sin and guilt removed so that now, we’re free men, free from death, free from sin, free from guilt.

Fallen man has his plan of salvation also. The world has seen it, from Cain to Babel, and from Babel to the present day, and it involves war against God. As a result, that plan of salvation, the ungodly plan is all around us. The public schools represent a plan of salvation, a very evil one. Our humanistic civil government today, and the various civil governments of the world represent also a humanistic plan of salvation. Many churches represent a humanistic plan of salvation, but the good new of salvation that the word of God sets forth is to perishing man, calling them out of sin and guilt, calling them out from the futility of their lives into a life of meaning for all eternity, and God all the days of our life works to bring us to that point, and to put meaning in our lives, in time and eternity.

Moses tells us in Psalm 90:3, “Thou turnest man to destruction and sayest, ‘Return ye children of men.’” So that God, as he leads us, brings us face to face with the meaning of our lives apart from him so that we come to him and are able to see more clearly what he has to offer in terms of that which we were in our wanderings. There is one word of salvation in all of scripture. The Bible is, you know, however many facets it has, one word, Jesus Christ. God declares through Moses that all his law is one word. In Deuteronomy 4:2 where our Lord speaks to Moses and forbids anyone to add or detract from the one word of scripture, one word, a unity, the whole of revelation is one word. “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved and thy house.”

There is a magnificent simplicity to scripture. The old saying of Augustine is worth saying over and over again, that the Bible is like a stream that is shallow enough for a child to wade across and deep enough to drown an elephant. It has an essential simplicity that we can grasp {?}, so that it is important for us as we speak of salvation to set forth the unity of the word. “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.”

Are there any questions now? Yes?

[Audience] So much. When you were talking about Freud, I am reminded of {?} priding itself on how much population are now atheists. {?} earlier this week how much alcoholism Russia is suffering right now. {?} correlation there.

[Rushdoony] Yes. The Soviet Union is having a tremendous revival of religion, Christianity, as well as occultism. You see, man does not stand still. Man cannot stand still. He is either going to move towards reprobation more and more emphatically every day, or more and more towards God’s salvation. Men never can stand still. This is why, in the Soviet Union, there are these tremendous counter-trends. In fact, I read just this week that Pope John Paul II is now taking steps toward some kind of situation with the communist countries whereby although he is a militant anti-communist, they will soft-pedal a great deal of that in return for the opportunity to work in the communist countries, because he apparently has concluded that the Western world, and the free world, is not ready to accept the faith and to apply it, but that because there’s such a tremendous revival behind the Iron Curtain everywhere, that it is imperative for them somehow to be in there to minister to those people. It’s interesting because there are several other leaders who have come to a similar conclusion, that there is a tremendous opportunity in the Iron Curtain countries, and that is where people are ready to make a true stand for the faith. Now, I believe we’re seeing a tremendous reawakening here in this country over these legal battles, and because of them, but it is true, occultism is tremendously popular in the Soviet Union, and also a tremendous growth of Christianity. Yes?

[Audience] It seems to me in looking over history and so forth, that Christianity seems to strengthen and flourish, I mean in terms of its strength in individual peoples’ strength in the faith under greater adversity. {?} when things get rosey and little adversity, then it seems like, people seem to drift toward apostasy, but then when there’s more adversity, and there’s more oppression, then actually Christianity grows in strength and flourishes.

[Rushdoony] Yes, there is a limited truth to that. That whole idea has been summed up in a totally different context by {?} when he said man is a bad weather animal. The best in him comes out in bad weather. That’s not true, because that is saying then it is adversity that saves us rather than God’s grace, you see. Many people have had adversity who have not been saved. However, on the other hand, it is true. Moses said, “Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men.” So that God ordains these distresses, and troubles, and persecutions in order to shake men out of their unbelief, and to bring them back to him. So, God uses those situations.

Well, if there are no further questions, we will adjourn.

End of tape