Salvation Summaries

What do angels have to do with salvation?

Angels.  We sing about them at Christmas time. We’ve watched movies with angels (Angels in the Outfield), read books with angels (Piercing the Darkness and This Present Darkness are two of my favorites) and viewed paintings with angels (The Two Angels Raphael). In fact, I would guess more people believe in angels than in God, even though that doesn’t make sense, since God created angels.

So assuming angels are real (which they are, according to the Bible), what role, if any, do they have in a person’s salvation?

You might be surprised to learn that angels do have a role.  The role is not in helping a person become saved; God is in charge of that. Rather, they are assigned the job of serving those who will inherit eternal life (or who have been saved and will ultimately be saved when taken to heaven).  This can be seen from one verse in Hebrews, and a related verse in Matthew:

• Hebrews 1:14 Are not all angels ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation?

• Matthew 18:10 “See that you do not look down on one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven.

Now, we don’t exactly know how the angels minister to those who are saved, but we can make some reasonable assumptions.

• First, because angels are spirits, and because demons who are spirits, it is possible that angels help protect Christians from spiritual attacks. Author Frank Peretti has written some exciting and suspenseful Christian fiction books on this, with angels battling demons on behalf of certain humans. Could some of his stories depict what may be taking place all around us, but invisible to us?  Possibly.

• Second, we know that angels can take on human form, as they did in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and thus it is possible that they can protect us from certain physical harm or danger as well.

So, if you’re a Christian, thank the Lord for His angels, for one of their tasks is to minister to you.

How is a person saved?

As you may know, this is the most important question I have asked, and answered, in a number of my blog posts.  Even the name of my blog, Salvation Summaries, reflects my desire to tell everyone what the Bible says about this issue, as it determines the eternal destiny of every person who has lived or is living on this earth.

The book of Hebrews contains several verses that relate to salvation.  These verses do not specifically state how a person is saved, but we can combine them to form a general understanding of how one becomes saved.  The verses can be grouped into two categories: Jesus and faith.

Jesus

Of all the different aspects of salvation (e.g., repentance, faith, grace, forgiveness of sins, born again, receiving the Holy Spirit, etc.), Jesus is the most important one.  Salvation, in a nutshell, means that you have been saved from the penalty of your sins (where sin is both disobeying God’s laws and not doing what God wants you to do, and the penalty of sin is spiritual death and separation from God), and Jesus is the only One who can save you.

Now some of you might be asking, “Why is He the only one?  Why can’t I save myself?”  The verses below will answer these questions for you.

• Hebrews 5:8-9 8 Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered 9 and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.

• Hebrews 7:23-27 23 Now there have been many of those priests, since death prevented them from continuing in office; 24 but because Jesus lives forever, he has a permanent priesthood. 25 Therefore he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them. 26 Such a high priest meets our need– one who is holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens. 27 Unlike the other high priests, he does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people. He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself.

• Hebrews 9:22 In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.

• Hebrews 9:27-28 27 Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, 28 so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.

According to the above verses, Jesus is the only person who is qualified to save (spiritually) another person.  And based upon these verses alone, to save someone from the penalty of their sins, the saving person, or savior, needs to:

• be sinless (or perfect) (Hebrews 7:26)
• die for that person (shed his/her blood) (Hebrews 9:22)
• be raised again and live forever in heaven (Hebrews 7:23-25)

Who meets these criteria?  There is only one person who has, and that is Jesus, the Son of God.

Since Jesus is the only One who can save a person, what do the verses say about how we are to respond to Him in order to be saved?  We are to:

• “Come to” Jesus (Hebrews 7:25). In another blog post (maybe April 2014?), I specifically address what this means.
• Obey Him, or have a willingness to do so, since no one can obey Him perfectly (Hebrews 5:8-9).
• Look forward to, or wait for, His return (Hebrews 9:28)

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that the way to become saved is like following the instructions in a recipe for cake or cookies, and once you’ve followed them you’re “done.”  Salvation, as I’ve discussed in prior posts, is something that God does for another person, as we can’t do it ourselves.  However, there are responses we make as part of becoming saved, and some of the responses are mentioned in Hebrews and shown above.

Faith

I won’t go into detail here as to what faith is, since I covered it in detail in my last blog post, Hebrews – Part 2 of 3.  However, as mentioned in that post, it is impossible to please God, or be approved by Him, without having faith in Him.  Also, we know from reading a number other New Testament books, that faith is required for salvation.

Conclusion

The book of Hebrews details two groups of people – those who are saved but spiritually weak/immature, and those who were very close to becoming saved, but never were.  The latter group, the enlightened ones, likely knew what salvation meant, how to be saved, and received some of the benefits of salvation via their association with others who were saved; however, despite all of this, they firmly chose not to be saved, and this sealed their fate.   I am afraid that there are many people today who know at least the basics of salvation, and who know about God and Jesus, but for whatever reason, have chosen to reject the Christian faith, and they may well incur the same fate as the enlightened Hebrews.

We also learned that faith is much more than a general belief in God.  It starts with a conviction that God exists, and that all of His promises in the Bible are true. But it goes beyond this.  It also entails an earnest desire to seek after God, an understanding that Jesus (and by extension the Holy Spirit) is God, and a commitment (at least at the time of a person’s being saved) to live one’s life for Him.

In addition, we learned that Jesus is the only One, the only person, who is qualified to save another from the penalty of their sins.  But just because Jesus is qualified to save someone from their sins, not everyone is automatically saved.  For a person to be saved, they must “come to” Jesus (which I discuss, in detail, in another blog post), seek to obey Him and look forward to seeing Him.  There are other aspects to salvation that a person needs to know about in order to fully understand how to be saved, and these can be found from reading some of my other blog posts.

And last, we learned that angels have a role in ministering to those who are saved, but not to those who are not saved.