To understand what salvation is, and how to know if one is saved, it is important to be in agreement with the idea that people need to be saved from something.
When God created all things, and when creation was finished, “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31a). The animals, the plants, the weather, and the people – Adam and Eve – were all good and in harmony with God and would not know death. Satan tempted Eve to disobey the one command that God gave, which was not to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Both Adam and Eve gave into the temptation, “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7a). Because of the disobedience, they could recognize good and evil.
They did not die that day, but eventually they both succumbed to physical death, and their bodies returned to the dust. Not only did this sin bring forth physical death, but it meant that people could no longer stand before God in His perfection, because they were not perfect, but sinful. Their souls could not be in the presence of God, but had to go to the place created for Lucifer and his fallen angels – hell. To atone for sin, God put forth a system of mediating priests and animal sacrifice, since only something pure could pay recompense for the moral blight against God.
The law, through the Ten Commandments and the Levitical law, was a way for people to recognize their sin, and to atone for it. Later, in Jesus’ ministry He clarified that violations of the law came not only in the form of actions, but in the mind, the heart, and the will. To truly reconcile people to Himself, God came down in the person of Jesus Christ, lived a sinless life, and died. God the Father poured His wrath out on God the Son in that moment, and that act atoned for all sin.
Anyone who accepts that Jesus died for them would have a path to a right relationship with God. Jesus rose again bodily after three days in the tomb, and Jesus promises that those who die covered by His blood will be resurrected bodily. Paul wrote, “For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost…But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:16-20).
Salvation, in the Biblical sense, is the path created by God for people to be restored to Him spiritually, so they can have a relationship with Him in life and in eternity, and for a future glorification of the physical body through resurrection, prophesied to occur when Jesus returns for His church.
Paul summarizes succinctly the process by which someone comes to a saving relationship with God, “Because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). It begins by believing and confessing that Jesus is Lord, and that His death and resurrection are true, and sufficient for salvation.
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