(unedited/draft show notes here, not a totally dialed-in transcript — what a great time to listen, compare, and experience the superiority of the podcast to the text below!)
Have you ever had a time in your life when you looked at something and thought, “I can do that!?”
Maybe it was an activity like a sport or craft or task. Maybe it was something aspirational like seeing a musician or public speaker or some other skill that would take you time to develop.
For me, I’ve had many of those moments…but let me tell you about just one.
I was young enough so that I don’t remember many details now, maybe I was four or five years old. But the snippet of what I do remember is being at the edge a swimming pool and just having the utter confidence that I could swim.
Except that I couldn’t.
I dove in and, given that I couldn’t actually swim, I sank like a rock… and the water was deeper than I was tall. When I got to the bottom of the pool, I pushed off, and when my head broke the surface, I somehow gulped air and yelled for help. Down, up, gulp. Down, up, help!
Well, the fact that I’m telling you this story is testament to the fact that someone heard me hollering and pulled me out.
In other words, I got saved.
Sound familiar?
Hearing that someone “got saved” is one of those Christian-ese sounding things, but did you know that that actually is the right concept? At it’s root, “salvation” means “rescue” – as in saved from harm, ruin, or loss.
As a little reflection, listen to this passage from Isaiah. To set this in the timeline of history, you may remember that in the last few days as we’ve romped through 2 Kings, one of the many kings you’ve heard about was Uzziah. So this moment is roughly 740ish BC.
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne, and the hem of his robe filled the temple. 2 Seraphim were standing above him; they each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. 3 And one called to another:
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Armies;
his glory fills the whole earth.4 The foundations of the doorways shook at the sound of their voices, and the temple was filled with smoke. 5 Then I said:
Woe is me for I am ruined
because I am a man of unclean lips
and live among a people of unclean lips,
and because my eyes have seen the King,
the Lord of Armies. Isaiah 6:1-5, CSB [1]
We could spend days picking apart this little passage, but notice a couple things.
One, as Isaiah encounters the living God, he experiences utter, perfect holiness (and a whole lot more, but we’ll focus on this for the moment). And what is Isaiah’s response?
Interestingly, he doesn’t just recognize his own unholiness, he declares himself ruined. Now I’m no Hebrew scholar, but the word there can mean “destroyed.” Toast. Finito. I’m done for. Or to badly paraphrase C.S. Lewis, “I didn’t realize how dark my darkness was until I encountered the true light.”
Two, Isaiah also instantly recognizes this isn’t just him…it’s all the people which, for him was the chosen nation of Israel. What?
Again, when did this happen for Isaiah? He says, “because my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Armies.” Your translation may say, “Lord of Hosts.” And this version of God’s name appears 235 times in the Bible, and it is a recognition of supreme sovereignty. AND here the context is also God’s holiness.
Not holy.
Not holy, holy.
But holy, holy, holy which, in Hebrew triplicate usage, meant the holiest of all possible holies.
So Isaiah’s big “duh!” moment is that, compared to the perfect holiness and goodness and beauty and might and justice of God, he’s toast, and so is everyone else.
Isn’t that what we do?
If you’re like me, it’s pretty easy for us to not have our eyes on Jesus and instead compare ourselves to other people. I mean, there are all those people who are way worse than I am. And surely God must grade on a curve, right?
When we talk about this whole “got saved” bit of salvation, it’s often useful to think not just in terms of “saved from what,” but also “saved for what?” If we kept reading the passage in Isaiah, you’d hear that this was the moment of God calling him for a purpose. And this is true for all of us…you’re saved for something, too.
But I want to wrap up this reflection with an even deeper couple questions.
Biblically speaking, if salvation is rescue, what is the worst possible calamity any human could face? Would it be just drowning in a pool? No, the worst possible calamity would be the consequence of being separated from God for all eternity.
And I trust you also recognize this from the passage in Isaiah: Most accurately, the question isn’t even “saved from what?” It’s “saved from whom?”
We love the idea that God is love. But we don’t like the idea that God is also just. He’s fair. He’s perfectly fair. He wouldn’t be a righteous, or even loving, judge, if he looked the other way, played favorites, and just winked at sin.
Remember, Isaiah wasn’t like one of the evil kings doing all kinds of despicable stuff…he was one of the good guys…if you think about it in human terms. Coming face to face with God meant seeing that everybody is toast by comparison. Every person on the planet needs salvation…a savior…a rescuer.
And this, my friends, is what makes one other question really beautiful: Who initiates the rescue?
I cannot pretend to understand even the tiniest slice of why history as we know it has unfolded the way it has, let alone the whole mind of God. But even if we can’t know the whole of Truth doesn’t mean we can’t know some true things.
There are only two ways that God’s justice can be satisfied with regard to your sin. Either you satisfy the judge…or Jesus does.
So there I am, bobbing up and down in the pool. Down, up, help! And who knows, maybe I could have done that for hours and hours, but one thing was for sure: I wasn’t going to be saving myself.
And that, my friends, is why the gospel – the good news – is, in fact, reeeally good news. God reaches out his hand to us all.
So the final question is, “Are you going to take him up on his offer?”
I love you.
ForTheHope is a daily audio Bible + apologetics podcast and blog. We’ve got a passion for just keepin’ it real, having conversations like normal people, and living out the love of Jesus better every single day.
Roger Courville, CSP is a globally-recognized expert in digitally-extended communication and connection, an award-winning speaker, award-winning author, and a passionately bad guitarist. Follow him on Twitter -- @RogerCourville and @JoinForTheHope – or his blog: www.forthehope.org.
Sources and resources:
[1] Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020), Is 6:1–5.