Getting Saved

From a status update by a FB friend (and former heartbeat from when I was in 6th grade):

I believe in Jesus Christ and have accepted Him as my personal Savior. One FB user has challenged all believers to put this on their wall...In the Bible it says, if you deny me in front of your peers, I will deny you in front of my Father. This is...simple... If you love God and you are not afraid to show it, re-post this as I have.. :)

"Getting saved" is a funny thing to write about. Not because it takes a lot of gall and balls to talk about it with strangers and with people you know don't want to hear about it, but because "getting saved" involves accepting or affirming a very very large package of numerous specific beliefs.

First, and most obviously, you are to belive in God. Not just any god, but a God who has very specific things in mind for each human. This God wishes eternal happiness for each human, but also has set up a scheme where each human will likely be damned to eternal misery (which born again Christians can try to define as mere separation from God, but prefer instead to describe as a bottomless firey pit).

This has funny implications about justice. For just living a less than perfect life which would typically last no longer than 90 years, an unsaved human spends an eternity in hell, which again is usually described as a place of actual torment, and not mere separation from God. Accepting the solution offered by the God who put together this arrangement means accepting that it is just to punish someone with an eternity of torments for sins they committed in a less than 90 year life. Even if the person lived long and wickedly, with constant and cruel sin, the the gravity of the sin divided by the gravity of the punishment evens out to a big fat zero.

You are to believe that this place of eternal torment is the only possible place God can send you, and that places like - oh, purgatory - are simply not options that the omnipotent God will make available.

Included in the beliefs I mentioned above is a non-reincarnation, or linear, view of the afterlife and the world. You don't come back. Once you die you immediately go to where you're destined to go, or you stay in the ground until the trumpet blows, but you don't come back.

You are to believe that your wickedness which condemns you to an eternity of torments can be suddenly washed away (or covered up) by Jesus' death.

You are to believe that since you are so wicked, it is only by the grace of God that you can get saved, and that nothing you do can get you saved - unless of course we're talking about your act of praying to accept Jesus' death as a payment for your sins, since the sufficient grace of Jesus' payment is insufficient to cover you unless you accept it.

You are to believe that a life in awareness of Christ's payment does not constitute faith, that salvation requires the act of accepting Christ's payment, and that this act is not some inefficacious religious ritual or human effort that Paul refers to as a "work".

You are to believe that once you're saved, you're set, and that anything you do, no matter how bad, is covered. If for some reason you thought you were saved but incorrectly believed that you can loose your salvation, you should pray the sinner's prayer again one last time just to "make assurance" of your salvation. Or if after getting saved you committed a sin that is so grave it puts you in doubt of the authenticity of your salvation, you can pray the sinner's prayer again just to make for sure for sure.

All of this and much much more is to be conveyed in the couple minutes it takes to read the Roman's Road.