What must a person be saved from?
Question 2 of 7. Sin, death, judgment, and the final punishment, and the promise God gave on the day sin began.
Where it begins
To be saved is to be rescued from something. Many people doubt there is anything to be rescued from. They see themselves as decent people, they think of death as the natural end of a life, and if they think of hell at all, it is as an old picture few people take seriously.
Scripture begins the answer in a garden. God made the first man and woman, gave them every tree in it but one, and told them what eating from that one would bring: "in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die" (). They ate. Everything on this page follows from that day: what sin is, what it brings, where death leads, and the promise God made before the day was over.
The answer Settled
Every person has sinned and stands accountable to God. The charge is not kept for especially wicked people. Paul brings Jews and Gentiles, the religious and the irreligious, under one verdict: "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (). God's law gives no one a way to stand on his own record. It stops every mouth and leaves the whole world answerable to God.
Sin brings death. God attached death to the first command before anyone broke it, and through the first man's sin, death entered the world and "spread to all men, because all sinned" (). Death is not simply how nature works. It is what sin earns: "the wages of sin is death" ().
In Scripture, death means separation, and it comes in more than one way. A person can be alive in body and still cut off from the life of God; Paul calls such people "dead in trespasses and sins" (). When the body dies, the spirit leaves it. At the end comes the second death, the last separation.
Death does not end a person. Men can kill the body, Jesus said, but they "cannot kill the soul" (). All the dead will be raised, the just and the unjust, some to life and some to condemnation, for "it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment" ().
Nor does the verdict wait until then. The person who does not believe in God's Son "is condemned already" (), and God's wrath "abides on him" (). The Son did not come to bring a new condemnation. He came to save people from the one they were already under.
Scripture names where the dead are held and where the judgment ends, and they are not the same place. Hades, called Sheol in the Old Testament, holds the dead until the judgment. Then Hades gives up its dead and is itself cast into the lake of fire, which Jesus calls Gehenna. English Bibles have often used the one word "hell" for both, which hides the difference. The lake of fire is the final punishment, "the second death" (), and it is felt and never ends. Jesus sets "everlasting punishment" beside "eternal life" in a single sentence ().
That is what a person must be saved from. But the news was never only bad. In the same scene in which God pronounced death, He told the serpent, who is Satan, that the woman's Seed "shall bruise your head" (). What that Seed did is the next question.
What you can see for yourself
- Your own record. Try to name one person, yourself included, who has never lied, never taken what was not his, and never said something he wished he could take back. Paul's charge covers everyone: "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" ().
- "It wasn't my fault." Every parent has heard it, and every person has said it. The first sinners said it too. The man answered God, "The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate" (), and the woman answered, "The serpent deceived me" ().
- No one teaches a child to sin. Put two small children in a room with one toy. One wants the toy the other is holding, so he takes it, and when a parent asks what happened, he says the other child gave it to him. No one taught him to want what was not his, to take it, or to lie about it. He did all three before he could read. Paul says where it comes from: we all once lived "fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others" ().
- Every family buries its own. No medicine, money, or care has yet kept anyone from dying. Paul names the reason: "death spread to all men, because all sinned" ().
Dive deeper
Each page below takes one part of this answer and shows the passages it rests on.
- Aren't most people good enough? What Genesis and Romans say about sin and the death it brings.
- What does the Bible mean by death? Dead toward God while alive, and the spirit leaving the body.
- Doesn't death end everything? Why death does not end a person, and the raising of all the dead.
- Isn't God's judgment only at the end? Why the one who does not believe is condemned already.
- Isn't hell just one place? Sheol and Hades, Gehenna and the lake of fire.
- Won't the lost simply cease to exist? Why the final punishment is felt and never ends.
- Was there any hope on the day sin began? The promise God made to the serpent's face.