Salvation is great in its past accomplishment. We have viewed this aspect of our salvation as justification, which is God’s act of declaring or counting repentant sinners acquitted of sin and accepted into His favor.
This accomplishment is a completed work of God that comes to us on the basis of Christ’s death through the means of personal faith in Him. In the confession of faith we are saved from sin’s ultimate penalty.
Salvation is great in its present progress. We who are accounted right and good in God’s sight have embarked on a life of becoming what God already counts us to be. Last week Theology 101 reminded us this ongoing process in salvation is termed sanctification. Across one’s life of faith God is active in us by His Spirit, the Spirit of holiness, enabling victory over sin’s power and growth in His likeness, as exemplified in Jesus.
Future completion
This week brings us to see how salvation is great in its future completion. Romans 8:16 declares that as Christians we are children of God. The next verse adds, “And if children, then heirs — heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with Him” (Rom. 8:17). From such a verse, Christians have come to express the future completion of salvation as glorification.
Our great salvation provides justification, sanctification and glorification. We turn now to look at the completing stage of salvation when Christians enter the eternal state of God’s children and begin experiencing their final blessedness. This blessedness includes not only the duration of eternal life but also its quality. While it begins with conversion, it reaches its fullness when believers transition from this world into the one to come.
One important aspect of our glorification is that it will be embodied existence. “For we know that if the tent which is our earthly house is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor. 5:1). In our final state of glory, we who have already been saved from the penalty of sin and have begun to be saved from the power and practice of sin while living in a sinful world also will be saved from the very presence of sin. The Bible assures us concerning heaven, “Nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable, or false” (Rev. 21:27).
‘Sanctify and cleanse’
Salvation’s future has both a collective and a personal dimension.
Collectively in that glorified environment Christians will find themselves part of a glorified Church which, according to Ephesians 5:26–27, Christ has been working to “sanctify and cleanse” in order that “He might present it to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.” This prospect capsules the meaning of glorification.
Likeness to Christ
In its personal dimension, a believer’s glorification will mean final and full likeness to Christ. While many details about eternity are not outlined for us, inasmuch as “what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when He appears we will be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2).
That final transformation will be salvation in its glorious and completed manifestation to individual Christians. “As we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly” (1 Cor. 15:49).
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