What Is Salvation?
Salvation is the Bible's central theme: being brought out of danger, slavery, sin and death into freedom. In the Old Testament its defining example is the Exodus: God delivers his people from bondage, and that event shapes the language of faith for later generations. In the Psalms salvation also names rescue from personal distress. The New Testament focuses this broad concept in Jesus: his very name carries the meaning, and the angel says he 'shall save his people from their sins'. Salvation is told here in three tenses: the believer has been forgiven through Christ's death and resurrection, is being changed by the Spirit's work, and awaits the resurrection of the body and the renewal of all things. For the apostles salvation is not only individual; it is the hope of a restoration embracing the whole creation. Its source is not human effort but God's grace: 'by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God.'