“Are you saved?”
That was the questioned posed to me during a call-in show that I was hosting. I
responded by asking, “What do you mean by that question?” The caller then
quickly retorted, “If you have to ask, that just shows that you’re not.” So for
the next hour I took phone calls from people: each with a different definition
of “being saved.”
How can that be? How
can we have so many views on “being saved”? This seems like something that
should be better defined, especially since many people will tell you the exact
point in time that they became saved. What does salvation mean? Are there
different ways to be saved? What is the point, the event, the place in time when
you are saved? Is salvation a condition or a process? And how does a person
“become saved”?
A
"Personal" Savior
Many Christians can tell you the exact date and time that they “became
saved.” Many Christians believe that when
you accept Jesus into your heart (or as your personal savior) then you are
saved. But what does THAT mean? The main Christian perspective of salvation
seems to be the necessity of knowing WHO the Messiah is. If this is true, how do
we reconcile the Old Testament and the New Testament views of salvation? Does the accepting
of, or having a knowledge of Messiah save us?
In the New Testament
the message seems to be that those who believe or accept that Yeshua is the
Messiah will be saved, while the Tanakh (Old Testament) seems to be silent on the
importance of knowing the Messiah’s identity. Why is this? Why does the New
Testament seem to stress belief in