Introduction
Seeing Jesus approach him, John the Baptist declared, 'Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world' (John 1.29). His testimony was of Jesus' impending crucifixion, His shedding of blood in death as a sacrifice for sin for the whole world. In this essay, I will examine the ways in which the Old Testament's hope in God as Saviour comes to fulfillment in Jesus Christ.
In his Lectures in Old Testament Theology, Dennis Kinlaw draws attention to similes and metaphors applied to God. The metaphors derive from various social paradigms. One metaphor comes from a political paradigm: God is King and Lord. A second comes from the judicial context: God is Judge. A third derives from the family paradigm: God is Father. Kinlaw’s fourth paradigm is marriage: God is the Groom to His people.
I would point out that these metaphors and paradigms also relate to Jesus in the New Testament. If God is said to be the King over His people and the whole world in the Old Testament, Jesus is said to be the Messiah—the Saviour King for Israel—and Lord of all, reigning now from the throne of God (Ephesians 1.20-23). If God is the Judge of all, Jesus will come again as Judge to administer final judgement (2 Corinthians 5.10). If God is called Father, Jesus is the Son fully representing the Father and doing His will (John 5.17-29). If God is the Groom to His people in the Old Testament, Jesus is also said to be the Groom and Husband of the Church, God’s people in Christ (Ephesians 5.22-33).
Therefore, we have these four paradigms from Kinlaw for our relationship to God and that describe deity in the Old Testament, and we see that they extend to Jesus Himself and our relationship to Him: the political, the judicial, the familial, and the marital.
Yet we should also note that there is a fifth metaphor that comes from the paradigm of the military: God is our Defender and Saviour. This is applied to our personal situation and relationship to God, to Israel’s relationship to God, and, in the New Testament, to the Church’s relationship to God. I would like to explore each of these further as I offer a study of God our Saviour.
Our Personal Saviour
Through King David’s life experiences and his and others’ poetic and musical expressions in the psalms, we come to know and experience God as our Defender and Saviour. One of David’s psalms is found in 2 Samuel 22.1-51. This long psalm of praise was written in reference to the LORD’s deliverance of David from all his enemies and the hand of his mentally disturbed father-in-law, who was then the King of Israel. David, pursued relentlessly by the envious and vindictive Saul, was delivered by God.
Note the terms and metaphors that appear in this passage. Not all of them are military images, but they apply to God delivering and saving David. What God does for David provides metaphors for understanding God and a paradigm for our relationship to Him. First, we learn that God is ‘my rock’ (vv. 2-3). This image of deliverance is used many times in the Old Testament. In a flood, one can be saved by clinging to a great, immovable rock in the midst of raging waters. Jesus stated that His words were like a house built on a rock to those who heard and did them. They were salvation from the flood (Matthew 7.24-27). Jesus named Cephas ‘Peter’, meaning ‘rock’, as his testimony that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the Living God’, was salvific (Matthew 16.16-18). The Church would be built on Peter’s confession and withstand Jesus’ death, the gates of hell. Death could not overcome life, the Son of the Living God, and the Church’s confession that Jesus was the Messiah (‘Christ’ in Greek)—the Saviour—and the Son of the Living God was the rock foundation of the people of God.
Second, God is David’s ‘fortress’ (v. 2), an image that understands that there is a personal enemy and, even if we are not combatants on the field of war, we have a place of refuge. Similarly, God is a ‘refuge’ (v. 3). One might picture David fleeing from King Saul’s men and finding a cave of refuge. God is also David’s ‘deliverer’ and his ‘shield’ (v. 3). A deliverer may defend or take the offense. The common image of God as a shield is a defensive metaphor. In 2 Samuel 22.31, David says that the LORD is ‘a shield for all who take refuge in him’. Note that this image relates to the strong theme in Scripture of faith in God, extended in the New Testament to faith in Christ Jesus. If God is our Saviour, our faith and trust and hope in Him is like taking refuge behind His shield. Turning to God as our fortress, refuge, deliverer, and shield is faith in God. Paul’s teaching on salvation by God’s grace through our faith is a thoroughly Old Testament teaching.
David also refers to God as ‘the horn of my salvation’ (v. 3). Using metaphors we see in 2 Samuel 22, including this one, we read in Psalm 28.2, ‘The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.’ The horn is an image for power, as the horns of a bull. It symbolizes the power to save and is appropriately a feature of the altar for sacrifices at the Temple. The square altar was constructed with horns on its four corners, and the priest would smear blood from the sacrifice for a sin offering on the horns of the altar (Exodus 29.12; 37.25; Leviticus 4.7, 18, 25, 30, 34; 8.15; 9.9; 16.18). In Leviticus 8.15, we read that Moses ‘took the blood, and with his finger put it on the horns of the altar around it and purified the altar and poured out the blood at the base of the altar and consecrated it to make atonement for it.’ The blood of the sacrifice placed on the horns of the altar purifies the altar, making the offering, and the one offering the sacrifice, acceptable to God.
In the New Testament, when the prophet Zechariah meets the baby Jesus, he says,
Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people 69 and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, 70 as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, 71 that we should be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us... (Luke 1.68-71).
It turns out that Jesus is the horn of our salvation, the place of sacrifice where He Himself was the sacrifice that makes us acceptable to our holy God.
These metaphors are summed up in the term ‘Saviour’ (v. 3). David says, that the LORD is his Savior because God saves him from violence (v. 3), from his enemies (v. 4), from the waves of death, the torrents of destruction, the cords of Sheol, and the snares of death (vv. 4-6). What then follows is a psalm describing God’s might and power in bringing David salvation. Verse 18 says that God ‘rescued me from my strong enemy, from those who hated me, for they were too mighty for me.’
Salvation involves a rescue and a battle against those who would capture and kill. God is our rescuer even as He is David’s. David says, ‘He brought me out into a broad place; he rescued me, because he delighted in me’ (v. 20). Such words apply to us in many circumstances, including our salvation from sin. David, hiding from his enemies, is rescued by God. He no longer has to hide. God brings him out into a broad place. This is an image of peace. So, too, Christ’s work of salvation can be described as peace. Paul says, ‘He is our peace’ (Ephesians 2.14).
We are delivered from whatever might make us hide. We may even hide from the shame of our own sin, as Adam and Eve hid from God in the garden of Eden. David regularly speaks of hiding from others’ evil designs against us, from the anxiety and anguish of our relentless, calumnious (lying in order to cause another harm) assailants who imagine and speak all evil against us, wrongfully accusing us, and hoping to do us harm. David knew this in his relationship with his father-in-law, the king, who’s delusions led him to believe that David had done him wrong. He even tried to kill David. Several psalms speak of evil people scheming evil against a righteous suffer, even people in the most intimate relationship of once being a friend. Evil is made worse through the betrayal of a friend. Psalm 41:9 says, ‘Even my close friend in whom I trusted, who ate my bread, has lifted his heel against me.’ Psalm 55:12.13 says, ‘For it is not an enemy who taunts me—then I could bear it; but it is you, a man, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend.’ Psalm 88:18 says, ‘You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness.’ How might one stand legally against the lying testimony of another, and how might one survive the betrayal of a friend?
The persecuted righteous person, like David, is a type of Christ, who suffered even though He was sinless. Second Samuel 22 continues in v. 20-28 with David describing his righteousness. At this point in the psalm, God is depicted as the righteous judge. David then returns to military imagery. God is his defender. God enlightens his darkness, empowers him to run against a troop, to leap upon a wall of defense in his attack (vv. 29-30). The military imagery continues in the following verses, now with God enabling David to fight. In all this, God is Saviour (v. 51).
God as Saviour of His People
God is not only the personal Saviour of David and of us as individuals. He is also the Saviour of His people. To illustrate this, consider Isaiah 45.20-25. The context is Israel’s being taken into exile by other nations that worship idols. The true God, Israel’s God, is the Saviour of His people. Worthless, lifeless idols have no existence, no power or authority. They cannot save. The passage in Isaiah not only presents God as the Saviour of His people but as the LORD before whom all these nations will one day bow. Note the theme of saving in Isaiah 45.20-25:
“Assemble yourselves and come;
draw near together,
you survivors of the nations!
They have no knowledge
who carry about their wooden idols,
and keep on praying to a god
that cannot save.
21 Declare and present your case;
let them take counsel together!
Who told this long ago?
Who declared it of old?
Was it not I, the LORD?
And there is no other god besides me,
a righteous God and a Savior;
there is none besides me.
22 “Turn to me and be saved,
all the ends of the earth!
For I am God, and there is no other.
23 By myself I have sworn;
from my mouth has gone out in righteousness
a word that shall not return:
‘To me every knee shall bow,
every tongue shall swear allegiance.’
24 “Only in the LORD, it shall be said of me,
are righteousness and strength;
to him shall come and be ashamed
all who were incensed against him.
25 In the LORD all the offspring of Israel
shall be justified and shall glory.”
Paul applies this passage to Jesus in Philippians 2.5-11. The confession, an oath of allegiance, that Jesus is the Lord God who saves is one every nation will make—whether unto salvation or in submission.
God as Saviour of the Whole World
Not only is God our personal Saviour. Not only is He the Saviour for His people. He is also the Saviour of the Whole World. As already noted in Isaiah 45.21b-22a, God says,
And there is no other god besides me,
a righteous God and a Savior;
there is none besides me.
22 “Turn to me and be saved,
all the ends of the earth!
This does not mean that God forgives everyone no matter what they have done. It does not mean that He will not judge the nations. It certainly does not mean that, no matter what religion a people holds, God will save them. It means that He offers salvation to all the nations who confess that He and He alone is God and Saviour.
The message in John 4, the Samaritan woman who believes in Jesus, is that God not only saves Israel, His covenant people, but extends His salvation even to the Jews’ enemies, the Samaritans. First, the sinful woman finds in Jesus the water of eternal life: ‘The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life’ (John 4.14). If she, a sinful woman and a Samaritan, can receive this gift of Jesus, then God is also Saviour of the whole world. The Samaritans who then come to Jesus and believe in Him say, ‘It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world’ (John 4.42).
Thus, God the Saviour is Saviour of the whole world in Jesus Christ. How so? We know that Jesus’ crucifixion was a blood sacrifice for the removal of sin for all who repent. It is not limited but universal. John writes in First John,
My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. 2 He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world’ (2.1-2).
The testimony of Israel to the world is that God is its Saviour. In saving Israel from Egypt, from the nations, from defeat and exile—in the example of a people so often and so greatly in need of God’s salvation—Israel became God’s witness to the entire world, to all nations, that He is the Saviour. The testimony of followers of Jesus Christ is to how God is the universal Saviour: His salvation is in Jesus Christ the righteous, who became a sacrifice that removed our sins and assuaged God’s wrath against sinfulness on the earth in us all. Thus, Paul too says,
For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, 12 training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, 13 waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, 14 who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works (Titus 2.11-14).
Israel could attest to God’s literal salvation from its foes, whether enslavement in Egypt or from their just punishment in exile for their sins. Christians attest to God’s salvation in Jesus Christ in His giving Himself to redeem us from lawlessness and to purify us through our renunciation of ungodliness and worldly passions and zealousness for good works. Salvation is both forgiveness of sins and transformation in Christ Jesus. Only a righteous people will be able to give such a testimony to the world, the testimony that Jesus is the Saviour of the world.
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