(Wes Bredenhof – Abounding In Grace) I was listening to a colleague preach recently and he mentioned how the Bible speaks of salvation in three tenses: past, present, and future. Somewhere along the way I’d heard or read that before, but not for a long time. It got me thinking whether it was really true. It wasn’t difficult to think of several Bible passages to support it.
If we’re Christians, we typically think of salvation only as something that’s happened in the past. Certainly the Bible speaks that way. For example, Eph. 2:8 famously says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith…” We can unpack that in various ways, including from the perspective of Christ’s finished work on the cross or from the perspective of our election, or from the moment the Holy Spirit worked faith in our hearts. All of it refers to salvation in the past tense. In the past, Christians have been saved from the curse of sin.
The Bible also refers to salvation in the present tense. This is less familiar. We could think here of 1 Cor. 1:18, “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (cf. 1 Cor. 15:2). In the original Greek, “being saved” is indeed in the present tense. But what does it mean? This is referring to our sanctification – to that work of the Holy Spirit by which sin is being driven out of our lives. By this ongoing reality in the present, we are being saved from the power of sin.