THEOLOGY IN A SIMPLE STORY
The book of Genesis presents God as the good Creator of a good world.
But the human race entertained suspicions that God was not good but rather a deceptive manipulator seeking to oppress us, not bless us. We declared our independence from Him to save ourselves from (as we saw it) God’s suffocating control. Each soul had to instead trust itself to determine good and evil for itself. Each soul had to turn to its own way (Isaiah 53.6) and “follow its heart”.
This is the way that seems right and natural to us. But this “way that seems right” – independence from God – is the very thing that ruins our life (Proverbs 14.12//16.25) according to the remainder of the biblical message.
If our souls are to be saved from ruin, we must be saved from our insistence on our independence from God and we must surrender and return once again to loyalty to our good Creator.
The process of making that happen is wrapped up in the word “salvation”. Salvation is the process of God moving a soul bent on independence from God back to loyalty to God, as we were created to be. When that process succeeds and a soul abandons its drive for independence from God and returns once again to loyalty to God, we say that that person has been “saved”.
This is what it means to become a Christian. You abandon lordship of self and instead bow the knee to the rightful Lord, Jesus Christ.
Our church’s statement of faith spells out “the salvation process” in five paragraphs (points C, D, E, F, and G of the doctrinal statement on our website). But our statement of faith uses traditional theological terminology, understood by most when I began in pastoral ministry, but is less familiar today. That’s why I’m elaborating on our statement of faith.
Over the next few weeks, I hope to explain a few of these important theological terms and show how they fit into the simple story of salvation as I’ve told it in this installation of the blog.
But the human race entertained suspicions that God was not good but rather a deceptive manipulator seeking to oppress us, not bless us. We declared our independence from Him to save ourselves from (as we saw it) God’s suffocating control. Each soul had to instead trust itself to determine good and evil for itself. Each soul had to turn to its own way (Isaiah 53.6) and “follow its heart”.
This is the way that seems right and natural to us. But this “way that seems right” – independence from God – is the very thing that ruins our life (Proverbs 14.12//16.25) according to the remainder of the biblical message.
If our souls are to be saved from ruin, we must be saved from our insistence on our independence from God and we must surrender and return once again to loyalty to our good Creator.
The process of making that happen is wrapped up in the word “salvation”. Salvation is the process of God moving a soul bent on independence from God back to loyalty to God, as we were created to be. When that process succeeds and a soul abandons its drive for independence from God and returns once again to loyalty to God, we say that that person has been “saved”.
This is what it means to become a Christian. You abandon lordship of self and instead bow the knee to the rightful Lord, Jesus Christ.
Our church’s statement of faith spells out “the salvation process” in five paragraphs (points C, D, E, F, and G of the doctrinal statement on our website). But our statement of faith uses traditional theological terminology, understood by most when I began in pastoral ministry, but is less familiar today. That’s why I’m elaborating on our statement of faith.
Over the next few weeks, I hope to explain a few of these important theological terms and show how they fit into the simple story of salvation as I’ve told it in this installation of the blog.