God's Day of Salvation

By Thomas Curr

“Then the Lord God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever’—therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.” From Genesis 3.

We were shut out of the garden of Eden; lost the right to the tree of life; were cursed to painful toil (men); were cursed to painful childbearing (women); and became innately disobedient to the God who created us.

The problem is serious, but the solution is wonderful. It centres on the person Jesus Christ, who will as the Bible describes redeem us from our fallen state and restore our right to the tree of life – and to eternal life. This book unpacks what the Old and New Testaments say about God’s day of salvation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jun 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398458475

Thomas Curr

Thomas Curr read Law at Downing College, Cambridge, and is “an intelligent and articulate young man” according to Lady Justice Andrews. As well as this book, for which he gives any glory entirely to God, he has been published in two academic legal journals. He lives in Salisbury.

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About the Author

Thomas Curr read Law at Downing College, Cambridge, and is an intelligent and articulate young man according to Lady Justice Andrews. As well as this book, for which he gives any glory entirely to God, he has been published in two academic legal journals. He lives in Salisbury.

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Thomas Curr 2023

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Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Gary Horlock and Nick King, my undergraduate neighbours during the academic year 2010–2011, for debates over ‘religion’ that ultimately inspired many of the points made in this book. A special acknowledgment is also due to a gentleman who taught Latin to my father as a secondary school student in the 1960s. He does not wish to be identified by name but, having the privilege of reading and writing New Testament Greek fluently, supplied the expertise behind chapter 20 and Appendix VI. That appendix goes directly to the Greek, but the translators of the ESV deserve my thanks, in numerous other places, for producing a dignified and versatile English translation of the Bible.

Preface

The Bible, in the estimation and the assertion of evangelical Christianity, is a work inspired and breathed out by God. It consists of different books – those of the Old Testament and those of the New Testament. These were penned by different authors. But the texts are underpinned, in the evangelical view, by divine inspiration. They were ***breathed out by God* according to 2 Timothy 3:16, and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.

The principal purpose of God in inspiring the Bible, if indeed he inspired it as evangelicals think, was to declare his scheme to save humankind.

This is a book for the inquiring non-Christian. It aims to pay closer attention to the Bible’s text than is perhaps done in other accessible books – and to show the Bible’s consistency and interconnectedness, drawing different parts of the whole together, in order to unpack the absolutely crucial topic of human salvation.

This is also a book for the Christian seeking to grow in knowledge of the Bible. No issue could be more central to the Christian faith than the Biblical salvation scheme. Deeper knowledge of the many parts of the Bible pertaining to this issue, will be of great value.

The Bible contains multiple books and different types of literature. The Old Testament begins with the creation of the world – although its oldest book is probably that of Job, located about halfway through.

The Old Testament describes the creation of the world by God, the first disobedience to God by humans, and the adoption of the nation of Israel as God’s chosen people – whom God will redeem from their own state, of innate and inevitable disobedience to him. The last book of the OT, Malachi, foresees a time when the Lord whom you seek (Malachi 3:1) will come, implementing God’s salvation plan.

The New Testament picks up the thread left loose in Malachi, commencing with four gospels describing the life of the expected Lord – namely the man, Jesus of Nazareth. On the claim of the New Testament, the man Jesus was in very nature God, and was the Lord or Messiah foretold in the Old Testament.

Jesus became the cornerstone of what was built by the Israelite nation in the Old Testament. And by faith in him, all people may be redeemed from their state of disobedience to the God who created them. They may therefore obtain a glorious eternal life with God, standing blameless before God’s judgment seat and entering an eternal holy city, after physical death.

Jesus, according to the New Testament, is the door to eternal life (words of Christ, in John 10:9). And now is the day of salvation when anyone who chooses may call on his name.

Introduction

This book takes the Bible as its source text to unpack the salvation scheme of the God described by the Bible – comprised, as the Bible is, of the books of the Old Testament and the books of the New Testament.

Those books, in short, describe how we became disobedient to God but can be redeemed by the salvation offered in Jesus of Nazareth. [F]or all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus (Romans 3:23-24).

The account in the Bible is of a two-way relationship between humanity and its creator God. Humans are naturally disobedient to the God who created them, so can, in the words of Peter Cotterell, neither do what they knew to be right, nor evade what they knew to be wrong.¹

Being inherently disobedient to God, we would, if left to our own devices, suffer God’s judgment. But the God of the Bible, being rich in mercy (Ephesians 2:4), has supplied a solution, in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification (Romans 4:25).

The man Jesus was himself God – and so he, alone among humans, was morally perfect. Jesus’s death, in the sense of everything he suffered up to and including his physical expiry on a Roman cross, was wholly undeserved. And so, his death could pay, by substitution, an otherwise infinite penalty for human disobedience to God.

Just as God, in the Old Testament, had prescribed flawless animal sacrifices as a temporary measure, Jesus was the true and flawless sacrifice. Jesus promised to give his sheep eternal life (John 10:28); and all the promises of God find their Yes in him (2 Corinthians 1:20). Being the infinite God-man, Jesus’ death at a finite point in time provided an infinite and eternal substitution.

The Bible’s system is not one of damage limitation – as though everything had been perfect in the Garden of Eden, when our first ancestors disobeyed God, and all subsequent events had simply repaired the damage done there. Rather, our inherent moral imperfection and redemption by God’s sheer grace put humankind and their creator into the correct relationship to one another.

The relationship between God the Father and God the Son is also perfected, by the need for the Son to atone for sin, thereby doing the will of the Father. For this reason the Father loves me, Jesus says in John 10:17, I lay down my life that I may take it up again.

Having been forgiven and saved by God’s sheer grace, we have more love for the Creator than if we had remained in our original, perfect state. And God the Son, being the appointed and perfect saviour, is loved by the Father for his obedience in providing the atoning sacrifice.

As is made clear in the NT, at the start of John’s gospel and at Hebrews 1:3, Jesus is the Father God’s only begotten Word and Son – clothed with human flesh to undertake his work of redemption. Before the world was created Jesus, as Jonathan Edwards put it, was with the Father, in the enjoyment of his infinite love.²

Jesus had glory with the Father before the world existed (John 17:5). And to redeem humankind was a command that he received from [the] Father (words of Christ in John 10:18).

God, concerning imperfect and disobedient humankind,

[H]as consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all. Romans 11:32.

The books of the Bible start by showing up a serious problem. The first humans, Adam, and Eve, were unable to obey one single command from God. Consequently, they were cast out of the garden in which God had put them, becoming liable to painful toil (the man) and to pains in childbirth (the woman).

As descendants of the first humans, all people have inherited Adam and Eve’s disobedient state. **Surely,* in the present world, there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins (Ecclesiastes 7:20).

The problem is substantial. Yet it’s a problem that the God of the Bible is equal to the task of solving. He delights to solve it; to solve the problem, so that humankind may love him for so doing, is the God of the Bible’s proper role. The salvation of humankind is the Biblical God’s great work – a work which the God-man Jesus, on the NT accounts, proved that he was fully equal to.

Having, alone among humans, never deserved death, Jesus died to pay by substitution for the sins of all who trust in him. He was then raised from the dead; and, just as our earthly bodies bear the likeness of the first man Adam, the bodies of those to whom Christ grants eternal life will bear the image of the man of heaven (1 Corinthians 15:49).

This book will take the reader on a journey through the God of the Bible’s salvation plan. As the nation of Israel are, in the Old Testament, led out of perdition in Egypt, we will begin in a barren valley, facing the dire problem as the Bible describes it. Having found ourselves marooned in this valley; we then will encounter the Bible’s glorious solution in the person of Jesus Christ.

Like a multitude of dry bones, in a valley in Ezekiel chapter 37, death turns into life. For, according to the words of Jesus in the New Testament, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life … [and] has passed from death to life (Words of Christ in John 5:24).

Along the way, we will ask various connected questions, such as the significance of the Law given in the Old Testament, and the meaning of 1 Timothy 2:15 – a New Testament verse that, taken literally from English translations, might suggest that women are saved by giving birth to children.

Suffice it to be said that investigation of the Ancient Greek, in which the New Testament texts were originally written, shows that the verse from 1 Timothy certainly does not mean this. This conclusion reinforces the consistent point of Old and New Testament alike, that a person is saved, in the end, by trusting in – that is, having faith in – God.

A person, having been accepted by God graciously and unconditionally, has his salvation is made complete in what he does, flowing out of that trusting relationship.

The Bible culminates with an offer and a promise of eternal life – after physical death, for those willing to take the water of life.

The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price. Revelation 22:17.

The claim of the whole Bible, then, is that today is the day of God’s salvation.

The Problem According to the Bible

1. Judgment Is Pending for the Sin We All Commit

The Old Testament (or OT) describes a God whose role it ultimately will be to judge the whole earth. God is referred to in Genesis 18:25 as the Judge of all the earth.

It is correspondingly promised, in Ecclesiastes 12:14, that God will bring every deed into judgment.

The OT book of Daniel, for its part, contains a vision of God’s judgment taking place.

‘As I looked, thrones were placed, and the Ancient of Days took his seat … [T]he court sat in judgment, and the books were opened.’ Daniel 7:9-10.

It was clear from the Old Testament that the time would come when every person’s deeds were brought into judgment by God. The books, quite clearly, would one day be opened.

This point is reiterated in the New Testament or NT. In the book of Revelation, at chapter 20, the author reports that

I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened …And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. Revelation 20:12.

It is because of verses like these that Peter Cotterell remarks, op cit at 102, that The Bible is shot through with references to a day of judgment.

The NT furthermore reveals that God’s judgment will be applied through a man whom he has appointed (words of Paul of Tarsus in Acts 17:31). That appointed judge will be the God-man Jesus – who, as well as God’s appointed judge, is God’s appointed saviour.

Jesus came, in the first century AD, to fix the problem that – as it turns out – none of humankind could ever come up to God’s perfect moral standard. If they were judged by the books of their deeds alone, there could be no hope for anyone: Cotterell at 107.

2. No Person Can Survive Judgment by Their Own Efforts to Be Good

There are assertions even in the Old Testament that a person cannot, in themselves, entertain any hope of coming up to God’s moral standard. In the book of Genesis, it is recorded that God, smelling a pleasing aroma, resolved never again to curse the ground because of humans, even though ‘the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth’ (Genesis 8:21).

The human heart, according to this saying, is corrupted at its core; and it is accordingly remarked, in the OT book of Ecclesiastes, that

[T]here is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins. Ecclesiastes 7:20.

The book of Ecclesiastes also advises its reader, not to offer the sacrifice of fools who do not know that they are doing evil (Ecclesiastes 5:1). Doing wrong, then, is seen as an inevitable part of human existence. Not