Salvation & Preservation
During Scripture reading with Rick, we came across a couple passages (Psalm 144:10, Psalm 145:20) that gave me the below thoughts.
It bothers me how people don’t really think twice about what Scripture is saying when they use words like “save” and “preserve.” So many people are afraid to think outside a frame of mind that immediately tells us that salvation speaks of conversion to God through a faith that is preserved eternally - if it’s “real.”
I’m not going to analyze where the interpretation of these terms became what they are today, but I am going to whine about how they are often not used in the Scriptural sense. Reformed people freak out if you say that there are different types of salvation. There is salvation from physical death, there is salvation from spiritual death, and a hundred other things. God saves me every day. And no, I’m not an Arminian. Biblically speaking, God saved me from death today. God saved me from my sins today. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t saved 15 years ago when I got baptized. Because that is a different kind of salvation.
With preservation, it’s the same thing. Some Calvinists like to think that the preservation of the saints only deals with the preservation of our eternal salvation. So not true. God preserves His people from their enemies. That’s physical preservation (or a spiritual preservation in a temporal sense). He preserves them from certain temptations or situations or possible car wrecks or a hundred other things. His angels help with our preservation. And this preservation is talked a lot about in Scripture – a whole lot more than the “P” on TULIP kind of preservation/perseverance is talked about.
