Chapter 17: How did God make our salvation possible?

Satan would give anything to make sure that man is eternally separated from God.

In the Garden of Eden, Satan executed his plan to separate man from God eternally. He did this by getting Eve to doubt God’s plan for her by assigning wrong motives to God’s command to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. By doing this Satan succeeded in getting Adam and Eve and the rest of mankind to sin. At that point Satan must have thought that he had succeeded in separating man from God eternally.

But God executed His plan to save man.

That must have made Satan mad. If he could find a flaw in God’s plan he could still win. If Satan could find a flaw in God’s plan for the salvation of man then he would be able to make God look like a fool and he would be successful in ensuring that man remained damned.

Therefore, Satan must have carefully examined God’s plan for the salvation of man for flaws. He must have carefully examined whether the payment for sin was valid, whether the payment was paid in full, and so on.

However, since God is so perfect and does everything perfectly we can be sure that God engineered the plan for man’s salvation with utmost care, dotting all His i’s and crossing all His t’s, so to speak, making everything conform to His sense of justice. It would be impossible for Satan (or anyone else) to accuse God of cheating simply because God would never cheat.

Since Satan cannot find a flaw in God’s plan for the salvation of man his next step would be to subtly put doubt in the mind of man, and try to convince man that God cheated somewhere or the other in the design and execution of His plan for man’s salvation. That is why we need to understand how God’s plan for man’s salvation works. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to understand how God’s plan for man’s salvation works.

Consider below, an example of a plan for salvation that would not work.

We know that God wants all men to be saved (1 Tm 2:3-4, 2 Pet 3:9). So why didn’t God just declare that He would forgive everyone who wanted to be with Him in heaven? Why did the price for sin have to be paid?

The answer lies in the just nature of God. To be just means to execute law as it is meant to be. God said that the wages of sin is (spiritual) death (Rom 6:23). That was His law. Therefore, someone had to suffer spiritual death for man’s sin. The price, no matter how much, had to be paid. If there was any other way that did not compromise God’s just nature God would have taken it and spared His Son the payment of the price for our sins. God did not do away with His laws when it inconvenienced Him. From this we see that God abides by His own laws.

Interestingly, if God did not pay the price for the sins of those who wanted to be with Him in heaven then He could not require from those who did not want to be with Him the payment for their sins. That is, He could not send them to hell. And further, He could not send Satan to hell either.

If God tried to simply declare that He forgives all without making the payment then Satan would have accused God of injustice for removing him from God’s presence.

In the rest of this chapter we will examine how God’s plan for the salvation of man works. God’s plan was made up of two steps. In the first step, God paid the price for the sins of man. In the second step, God entered into a covenant with man for the forgiveness of man’s sins. The next section discusses the first step, and the section after that discusses the second step.