Salvation Step-by-Step
The Triune God, the Source of Salvation
Everything in our salvation
depends on the Triune God
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
— John 1:1
In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men.
— John 1:4
In John’s vision as recorded in the book of Revelation, the twenty-four elders at one point fall before the throne and praise God as the one who is worthy because “You created all things, and because of Your will they existed, and were created” (Rev. 4:11).
Here we see that the entire universe came into existence because God has a will, a purpose, that He desires to carry out within that universe. Apart from this will the universe makes no sense whatsoever; everything seems pointless. But, once we understand what God is after, we will see that there is a meaning in our life beyond anything we could ever have imagined.
According to the Bible there are two aspects to God’s purpose. The first has to do with us as individuals. That is, God wants to conform us to the image of His firstborn Son, Jesus Christ (Rom. 8:29). The second has to do with all of the believers in Christ together. That is, God wants to make us, as the many sons of God, the one unique Body of Christ. This is God’s ultimate purpose, what the Bible calls His “eternal purpose” (Eph. 3:11).
And how does God carry out this purpose? Very simply, by giving us His divine life. This is why, at the very beginning of the Gospel of John, when John is describing how God existed in eternity past, before anything had been created, he states, “In Him was life.” It’s as though John is saying that, even before He created us, there was something within Himself that God yearned to impart to us, and that was His own divine, uncreated, eternal life. And this life was to become “the light of men” (John 1:4).
God is able to give us this life because He is “triune,” that is, “three-in-one,” the Father, Son, and Spirit. This is truly a mystery, one which should not be overly defined, but we may say that the Father is the source of salvation as the one who planned this great purpose, the Son accomplished redemption for us through His death and resurrection, and the Spirit applies to us what the Son has accomplished by actually imparting the divine life into our being. When God gives His divine life to us, He does so as the Spirit.
As for how this chart depicts the divine being, we simply use a star to symbolize God because we don’t want to try to depict who God is, e.g., with a triangle to attempt show His 3-in-1 nature. So, we just felt to use the star as an arbitrary but very positive symbol to represent God.
