74. The Nature of Salvation
The Nature of Salvation
Chapter IX
We have now seen how God has met and solved the problem of sin, and something of His provision for our complete and eternal salvation from its guilt, its power, and at last from its presence forever. It remains now to learn a few things on the meaning and receiving of such a salvation.
There is nothing difficult or complicated about it, for it is simplicity itself. It differs in no way from receiving a present and saying, Thank you, for it is a gift from God (Romans 6:23); just that and nothing else. But Satan’s greatest activity with the unsaved is put forth at this very point. This is why their minds are in so much confusion and blindness, both on how to be saved, and how one may know when he is saved (2 Corinthians 4:4). And so the way must be made so plain and simple that none can miss finding it.
One great reason why the lost are not eagerly seeking for some one to tell them how to be saved, is because they do not see their need of salvation. Satan suggests that they can get by with God without the need of anything more than a sincere desire to do right, and a proper regret when they fall into an “error” now and again.
Because sin is self-conceit “in person,” the lost are only too eager to believe this lie of their enemy, and many thus go out deceived into eternal night. Since they can think of numerous sins they would scorn to do, and since they believe they are in real earnest in intending to do right by those about them, with a “mistake” only now and then which they regret, they are sure that a God of love is too good to send such well-intentioned people as they are to an eternal hell. Sin cannot be such a monstrous wrong as to call for any such treatment from a merciful God. He will surely overlook it and take His weak and erring “children” to heaven. And yet in spite of all such “whistling in the dark” to muster up courage to meet the future, the instinctive consciousness of sin is race-wide, and the universal knowledge that we have known better than we have done persists in speaking to every unsaved heart in a voice that cannot be stilled.
We know we have done wrong, and done it purposely. We may laugh off as we will the story of the forbidden fruit plucked in Eden, but we all know that we ourselves have plucked forbidden fruit, and we can’t laugh that off.