D. Scott Meadows
Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations (Psa 90.1).
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At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you (John 15:4).
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Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.
—Isaac Watts, 1719
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My early conceptions, when I was ten years old, of the salvation which was part of the Christian message, were admittedly very crude. First, it was, to me, a fire escape from hell. Then it was to go to heaven with some vague “happiness” as the attraction. Frankly, in my mind, salvation really had little to do with God Himself. My idea of salvation was individualistic and aimed at my well-being physically and emotionally.
Now, four and a half decades later, I see that salvation is union and communion with the Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Scripture calls this “eternal life,” a label referring mainly to the quality of that experience, not its duration. “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (Jn 17.3).
“Knowledge of God” in the highest sense, that is, union and communion with Him, substantially constituted the original Paradise. Yes, there was abundant provision in the garden of all that creatures can be and do for human beings, but these earthly delights were only conveyors of blessing from the summum bonum [highest good], God Himself. They were but rivulets leading to the great Spring of all blessedness. Eden was home only as long as God and Man dwelt together there in union and communion—as one, in some sense, both mysterious and incomprehensible. Jesus prayed for the elect “that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us” (Jn 17.21). Increasing spiritual and theological maturity undoubtedly increases our open-mouthed awe on account of this amazing plea from Christ.
Home is your beginning place. We all originated from God. He created us ex nihilo, out of nothing. The Son of God is eternally begotten of the Father; we are begotten in time. We did not exist, and then, by divine fiat, we did. In Adam, the human race rebelled, leaving our divine home and finding ourselves a cursed part of the sin-cursed world outside Eden. Ever since then, we have been as the prodigal son, far from home, longing to be fed with pods the pigs ate (Luke 15.16).
Adapting Jesus’ parable, I suggest to you that the aching soul hunger we have all known sometimes to some extent is not our main problem but only a tell-tale symptom. Estrangement from our Father is the cause of all our misery. For a while, the prodigal son did not feel so acutely his need to be home again, and so it is with many unbelievers today. They are still squandering the inheritance of divine, forbearing benevolence, goodness intended to lead them to repentance (Rom 2.5).
To repent, then, is not just moral reformation, but to return to God. To believe is not just to accept the gospel of Christ as true, but to repose everlastingly in God. To be saved is not just to avoid hell, but to be welcomed home again with joy and celebration by the Father who is Love Itself, and to dwell there permanently. Like Eden, heaven is only blessed on account of the fact that there we dwell in God and God in us.
And such a salvation is only accomplished by the Father sending the Son and Spirit into the world that we might return to God and know Him again. The mission of the Son and Spirit, proceeding from the Father, are to recover the children, to retrieve the wanderers, to restore impoverished sons and daughters of Adam, all to the praise of God’s glory. When we are saved, God has brought us once again into fellowship with Himself. We are in Him and He is in us. Christ once cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me” (Matt 27.46) and then experienced the blessing of return to God’s favor and fellowship. The Son says to the Father in Psalm 16.11, “Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fullness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.” Propitiation made for others, Christ rose again and returned to the Eden of perfect bliss in God, leading the way for us who follow Him in believing. With the light he had at the time, the Preacher said truly of man’s destiny, “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it” (Eccl 12.7). Our spirits return home!
The fruit of the saving work accomplished by the Father, Son, and Spirit, is that the saved enjoy fellowship distinctly with each Person of the blessed Trinity. Our experience of that fellowship will be perfected in the consummation when Christ returns. That is salvation understood much more profoundly. Amen. Ω