“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me…” Do we sing songs without stopping to think of what we are singing? I fear that this hymn is sung by many Americans who are not saved and thus who do not know the meaning of the word in a personal way. It is also true that many Christians do not stop to reflect on the meaning of the word saved. And many Christians do not even believe that they are saved!

J.I. Packer, in his introduction to John Owen’s monumental work on the atonement, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, summarized the redemptive work of God with three words: “God saves sinners.” An analysis of these three words can go on indefinitely, although I would recommend your reading Packer’s wonderful introduction.

To be saved is to be rescued or delivered, as Paul wrote to the Galatians: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father” (Gal. 1:3-4).

Although salvation appears in three tenses in the Scriptures, for there is a sense in which salvation is ongoing as God sanctifies us, and salvation is culminated in glory, yet there is a definitive nature to salvation as a past reality. The tense in Eph. 2:5 and 8 is perfect passive. The perfect tense in Greek carries the idea of an event that is completed and done with implications that cover past, present, and future. It certainly suggests the idea of saved forever. By no stretch of grammatical understanding could that tense be interpreted to mean that once God saved a person, the salvation could be undone.

Newton understood that he had been saved. God loved him when yet a sinner, and reached for him in the depth of his degradation and rebellion. He knew what salvation was. He had been rescued and delivered forever from the grasp of sin and the devil and dwelt comfortably and safely in the arms of his Redeemer, Jesus. Paul argues the point well in Romans 5 that if we were justified and reconciled while enemies of God, how much more will we be saved from the wrath of God by the resurrection life of Jesus!

Please meditate, until you really understand, on what it means to be saved!