Once more Old Testament prophecy suggests the words of this exhortation.
In Isaiah's grand vision of God, arising to execute judgment which is
also redemption, we have a wonderful picture of His arraying Himself in
armour. Righteousness is His flashing breastplate: on His head is an
helmet of salvation. The gleaming steel is draped by garments of
retributive judgment, and over all is cast, like a cloak, the ample
folds of that 'zeal' which expresses the inexhaustible energy and
intensity of the divine nature and action. Thus arrayed He comes forth
to avenge and save. His redeeming work is the manifestation and issue of
all these characteristics of His nature. It flames with divine fervour:
it manifests the justice which repays, but its inmost character is
righteousness, and its chief purpose is to save. His helmet is
salvation; the plain, prose meaning of which would appear to be that His
great purpose of saving men is its own guarantee that His purpose should
be effected, and is the armour by which His work is defended.
The Apostle uses the old picture with perfect freedom, quoting the words
indeed, but employing them quite differently. God's helmet of salvation
is His own purpose; man's helmet of salvation is God's gift. He is
strong to save because He wills to save; we are strong and safe when we
take the salvation which He gives.
It is to be further noticed that the same image appears in Paul's rough
draft of the Christian armour in Thessalonians, with the significant
difference that there the helmet is 'the hope of salvation,' and here it
is the salvation itself. This double representation is in full accord
with all Scripture teaching, according to which we both possess and hope
for salvation, and our possession determines the measure of our hope.
That great word negatively implies deliverance from evil of any kind,
and in its lower application, from sickness or peril of any sort. In its
higher meaning in Scripture the evil from which we are saved is most
frequently left unexpressed, but sometimes a little glimpse is given, as
when we read that 'we are saved from wrath through Him' or 'saved from
sin.' What Christ saves us from is, first and chiefly, from sin in all
aspects, its guilt, its power, and its penalty; but His salvation
reaches much further than any mere deliverance from threatening evil,
and positively means the communication to our weakness and emptiness of
all blessings and graces possible for men. It is inward and properly
spiritual, but it is also outward, and it is not fully possessed until
we are clothed with 'salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.'
Hence, in Scripture our salvation is presented as past, as present, and
as future. As past it is once for all received by initial faith in
Christ; and, in view of their faith, Paul has no scruples as to saying
to the imperfect Christians whose imperfections he scourges, 'Ye have
been saved,' or in building upon that past fact his earnest exhortations
and his scathing rebukes. The salvation is present if in any true sense
it is past. There will be a daily growing deliverance from evil and a
daily growing appropriation and manifestation of the salvation which we
have received. And so Paul more than once speaks of Christians as 'being
saved.' The process begun in the past is continued throughout the
present, and the more a Christian man is conscious of its reality even
amidst flaws, failures, stagnation, and lapses, the more assured will be
his hope of the perfect salvation in the future, when all that is here,
tendency often thwarted, and aspirations often balked, and sometimes
sadly contradicted, will be completely, uninterruptedly, and eternally
realised. If that hope flickers and is sometimes all but dead, the
reason mainly lies in its flame not being fed by present experience.