Psalm 3:8 English Standard Version (ESV) Salvation belongs to the Lord; your blessing be on your people! Selah

Psalm 68:20 English Standard Version (ESV) Our God is a God of salvation, and to God, the Lord, belong deliverances from death.

Salvation belongs to the Lord and deliverance from death is His right.

The sticking point for religions outside of Christianity is the deity of Christ. The deity of our Lord is a critical truth which must be agreed upon.

Acts 4:10-12 English Standard Version (ESV)

¹⁰ let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead—by him this man is standing before you well. ¹¹ This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. ¹² And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”

Fully man and fully God was a concept not only foreign to the Jews, it was considered blasphemy.

Consider this when trying to reconcile this concept. Sin could only touch His humanity. In order for Christ to carry the burden of all sin for all time, only His humanity could touch sin. Now consider the sacrifice for sin, all sin, and that the deliverance from the penalty for sin is the purview of God and God alone. His deity had the authority to put an end to sin as a reason for eternal death. That eternal death is being separated from God for eternity.

If we cannot accept the deity of Christ as the son of God, we are doomed. We must agree on this.

Hebrews 9:28 English Standard Version (ESV) so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

The third save is being saved from the presence of sin. It is important to see that He does not come to deal with sin again. He dealt with sin once and that cure for that curse was permanent.

This is our second redemption and in might be helpful to explain redemption here.

Because of original sin God lost man to the world. Man chose poorly and suffered the consequences. Our first redemption came from reinstating relationship with God by faith. He redeemed us from the world, at a personal cost to Himself, the death of His Son.

Redemption in the biblical sense is to rescue whether it be deemed by purchase or ransom. Both are applied in scriptures relevant to Christ redemptive work. I whoever like the image of the Green Stamp Redemption Center. Younger people will not be familiar with the practice.

Green Stamps had no value anywhere other than the redemption center. There you could trade your worthless green stamps for items of value. I like this imagery because my life before Christ had no value and I traded it for the life in Christ that is priceless. The same can be said of the second redemption where we trade our corruptible bodies for incorruptible bodies.

Our first redemption left us in a world where sin was still present in our lives and we have to deal with it. In the second redemption sin will no longer be present.

We have spoken about Justification and salvation as issues where their correct understanding is critical. I will continue on with more critical issues but I wonder; is our understanding of sin critical? I may have to address that at some point.