What Is Salvation?
Exodus as Archetype
Introduction
What does it mean to be saved? If I were to ask Christians living in the United States today, I would probably get a significant number of responses that look something like this: it means going to heaven when you die. If I were to press further—say, to ask that person who is saved and how one is saved, I might get the following: each person is saved once they accept Jesus as their savior.
This picture isn’t quite at home in the Old Testament’s reflection, however.
In this post, I look at one of the primary ways in which the Old Testament speaks of salvation, namely, through the exodus event. I aim to show that the Old Testament offers a rich challenge to an oversimplified way of thinking about salvation.
Getting to Heaven?
Before I look at one prominent example of what is in the OT, I want to call attention to what is not in the OT. Notoriously, the OT does not speak much about anything that might be called an afterlife. There simply is not much material addressing the issue. We might call attention to a couple passages—the dry bones in Ezekiel, the resurrection in Daniel—but those prove the exception, not the rule, and even those are debated among scholars.
Someone might ask here about hell. For the layperson, the OT might seem to talk often about hell. In particular, it mentions a place called Sheol. However, Sheol is not hell. Sheol is itself a more nuanced topic. It is the realm of the dead. It’s where all the dead go. When it is mentioned, it’s not really explained; it’s only evoked. To the point, it doesn’t provide us much by way of understanding what salvation is.
Before I move forward, I want to clear up what I am not saying. I am not saying that the OT cannot be used to reflect on and consider some sort of afterlife. In fact, much of what develops in Jewish and Christian thinking on the resurrection of the dead and some sort of end-time restoration comes precisely by reflecting on the OT and thinking through its logic. But that is different than claiming that the OT talks directly about heaven or the afterlife.
More positively, I would say this: that the OT does not seem to reflect so obviously on heaven should, at least, challenge us to enter in the OT and think with it. How does it think about God’s act of salvation? This is what I want to focus on in this post.
The Exodus as Archetype
Arguably the paragon of salvation in the OT is the exodus event. Not only does the account of the exodus itself play a crucial role in the narrative, but it also shows up throughout the OT. It’s not only conceived of as an act of salvation in the past, but it is regularly seen as the pattern for the way God saves in the present and in the future. In other words, it is seen as the template for salvation, in many ways.
A quick aside, before I start looking at the details itself. One common temptation for us is to come to the text with our agenda, our questions, and then compel the text to address what we want it to address. Yes, the text of Scripture can address the questions we bring to it. But it is also important for us to allow Scripture itself to form us not only by giving us answers to our questions but training us to ask the right questions. I want to look at the exodus event to see what questions it asks, what issues it raises.
Salvation: How? From Whom/What?
In Exod 1, the pharaoh, perceiving the proliferation of the people of Israel as a threat, sets out to oppress them and eliminate their male children. He does so unsuccessfully, due to the working of God through a few key women—the midwives, the family of Moses, and pharaoh’s own daughter. (I’ve written a few different posts on Exodus: see Keeping the Law to Earn God’s Favor?, How Did the King Not Know Joseph?, Moses and God: The Gospel of Matthew and the Book of Exodus, Who Are You?, and Reading Scripture with the Midwives of Exodus 1.)
Once an adult, Moses witnesses an Egyptian killing a Hebrew. He intervenes by killing the Egyptian and burying him in the sand. Once news spreads, he flees. Then the narrative tells readers that God heard the cries of the people (2:23–25). Readers know that this sets in motion God’s great act of deliverance.
Stated more directly: what sets in motion God’s act of salvation is the people crying out and God hearing the cries. On that alone God intends to save them. As readers will see, at times, the people seem to be committed to trusting that God will save them. At other times, though, they question. But God will not waver about the plan to save them, regardless of how they respond at a given moment.
Also important to observe is that salvation is from oppression. It involves a flesh-and-blood oppressor as well as tangible experiences of oppression. It not, as some might be inclined to say in our world, “spiritual” salvation as a realm set apart from physical. Exodus operates with a much more holistic picture. Those two realms are not separated. We might even say that everything is spiritual.
Two questions that are often asked in theological conversations about salvation might now be asked about the way Exodus presents salvation. First, how are people saved? That is, what initiates their experience of salvation? Second, from what/whom are people saved?
Salvation in Exodus begins with God hearing the cries of the people and is then anchored in God’s determination to save. It is not based initially on some robust, perceptive trust by the people. And the salvation God initiates is salvation from oppression, which includes what we might call “spiritual,” but it also includes what we label “physical.”
Salvation: For Whom? When? By What Means?
As the narrative progresses, God invites Moses to participate in this great act of deliverance (Exod 3). Moses plays a crucial role in leading God’s people out of Egypt. Salvation is never something Moses accomplishes alone, but it is certainly not something that God accomplishes without him.
Exodus doesn’t spend time parsing out and classifying which parts of salvation belong to God, which parts belong to Moses. Rather, it presents something much more mysterious, something much more organic, something much more cooperative, in which it is hard to separate divine and human.
Exodus 14 might be identified as the moment of salvation. This is when God delivers the people of Israel through the sea but crushes Egypt in the same sea. I want to talk about two dimensions of this moment.
To begin, it is crucial to notice that deliverance is not something that happens at the level of the individual. Whereas we tend to talk about salvation as something that happens to me or you, individually, the salvation enacted here is communal. God delivers a people.
I suppose we might say that it is up to the individual to determine whether they will share in the communal experience of salvation. We might imagine some Israelite who decides not to talk out onto the dry bed of the sea. But their experience of salvation as an individual comes as they choose to join the communal salvation that God enacts.
Also important to note is that though Exod 14 might mark the key moment of salvation, it is a part of a wider experience that began before that moment and extends beyond it. In previous chapters, God sent Moses to speak before Pharaoh. He brought plagues on Pharaoh and his people. He gave the people of Israel the observance of the Passover. Salvation was begun back in Exod 2; even though it reaches a sort of climax in Exod 14, it is not something that happens in a singular moment.
Likewise, salvation extends beyond the moment at the sea. When God committed to delivering the people from oppression, God committed to delivering them to service to the Lord and to dwelling in the land of promise.
Notoriously, the people will have significant failures at this juncture. But their failure does not change the fact that the salvation that God initiated was not complete. In a very real sense, they had been saved, freed from oppression, but they were not yet living fully as God intended them to live. Salvation might involve key moments, but those moments are part of a broader journey, one that is not yet complete.
We might ask here some more questions from conversations around salvation. First, who is saved? Second, when does salvation occur? Third, whose activity saves: God’s or human’s?
In Exodus, salvation is not primarily an individual experience. God is saving a people. Further, though we might be able to identify key moments along the way, salvation is a journey, a process. In a real sense, we might speak of salvation as past, present, and future: the people were saved, they are being saved, and they will be saved. Finally, Exodus envisions salvation that comes fully from God, yet it involves the full participation of humans. Those realities cannot be clearly separated.
Salvation: By Grace Alone?
Having been rescued, the people of Israel enter into the wilderness experience. The whole experience is cast as testing. Moses, later reflecting back over the forty years in the wilderness, says, “Remember the long road on which the LORD your God led you during these forty years in the desert so he could humble you, testing you to find out what was in your heart: whether you would keep his commandments or not” (Deut 8:2, CEB).
God’s instructions given to Moses for how the people should live before God and with one another are not presented as the optional add-on to the real experience of salvation. They belong to salvation. That is, Exodus presents salvation as involving the key moment of Israel’s deliverance from the forces of Egypt, yes, but including also the formation involved in becoming the sort of people God is calling them to be.
Stated in other words, it would be foreign to Exodus to imagine that salvation refers only to the initial act of deliverance and then may include subsequent reshaping of life. The journey of salvation includes both. Salvation is all-encompassing.
With the children of Israel, their failure to live faithfully as God has called them to live actually prevents them from entering into the land of promise, that place that represents the geographical as well as metaphorical destination of salvation. They do not fully arrive; they die in the wilderness.
Were they saved? Yes, in that they experienced God’s deliverance from oppression. Were they saved? No, in that they did not make it to the land of promise and live faithfully before God. Again, Exodus does not seem to operate with oversimplified dichotomies.
Another question: are “works” or “fruit” necessary for salvation, or is salvation by the grace of God alone?
Exodus clearly roots salvation in the work of God, apart from which the people could not have experienced deliverance. Yet at the same time it sees a necessary role for the people, apart from which they will not experience the fullness of salvation. People must respond to God’s deliverance. An organic rather than a mechanical metaphor is more appropriate: a good tree will produce good fruit.
Conclusion
In this post, I’ve attempted to think with Exodus about salvation rather than come to Exodus and force-fit it into preconceived categories. When we do that, we see that Exodus offers a vision for what it means to think about God’s great deliverance.
But this is not limited to the past; Exodus provides a template for how God delivers into the present and on into the future. The biblical witness is replete with just this sort of thinking. The exodus event looms large in the imaginations of the biblical authors when they think about God’s new acts of deliverance.
The result of this exploration has been a particular portrait of salvation that is both illuminating and challenging. It points to a particular vision of salvation that might not sit easily with all the usual categories and questions we Christians bring to the discussion.
At the same time, I want to say that my approach here has not been to replace one way of thinking about salvation with only one other way of thinking about it. Rather, I’m assuming here that part of what the biblical witness challenges is precisely the idea that there is only one, right way of thinking about a topic such as salvation. The exodus is one, perhaps primary, way to think about salvation, but there are others.
The goal really has been to allow Exodus to have its own voice. Coming humbly and openly before the text involves a willingness to be shaped not only by the answers it provides but by the questions it asks.