'Guarded ... unto salvation.' Now that great word 'salvation' was a new
and strange one to Peter's readers--so new and strange that probably
they did not understand it in its full nobleness and sweep. Our
understanding of it, or, at least, our impression of it, is weakened by
precisely the opposite cause. It has become so tarnished and
smooth-rubbed that it creates very little definite impression. Like a
bit of seaweed lifted out of the sunny waves which opened its fronds and
brightened its delicate colours, it has become dry and hard and sapless
and dim. But let me try for one moment to freshen it for our conceptions
and our hearts. Salvation has in it the double idea of being made safe,
and being made sound. Peril threatening to slay, and sickness unto
death, are the implications of the conditions which this great word
presupposes. The man that needs to be saved needs to be rescued from
peril and needs to be healed of a disease. And if you do not know and
feel that that is _you_, then you have not learned the first letters of
the alphabet which are necessary to spell 'salvation.' You, I, every
man, we are all sick unto death, because the poison of self-will and sin
is running hot through all our veins, and we are all in deadly peril
because of that poison-peril of death, peril arising from the weight of
guilt that presses upon us, peril from our inevitable collision with the
Divine law and government which make for righteousness.
And so salvation means, negatively, the deliverance from all the evils,
whether they be evils of sorrow or evils of sin, which can affect a man,
and which do affect us all in some measure. But it means far more than
that, for God's salvation is no half-and-half thing, contented, as some
benevolent man might be, in a widespread flood or disaster, with
rescuing the victims and putting them high up enough for the water not
to reach them, and leaving them there shivering cold and starving. But
when God begins by taking away evils, it is in order that He may clear a
path for flooding us with good. And so salvation is not merely what some
of you think it is, the escape from a hell, nor only what some of you
more nobly take it to be, a deliverance from the power of sin in your
hearts; but it is the investiture of each of us with every good and
glory, whether of happiness or of purity, which it is possible for a man
to receive and for God to give. It is the great word of the New
Testament, and they do a very questionable service to humanity who
weaken the grandeur and the greatness of the Scriptural conception of
salvation, by weakening the darkness and the terribleness of the
Scriptural conception of the dangers and the sicknesses from which it
delivers.
But, then, there is another point that I would suggest raised by the
words of my text in their connection. Peter is here evidently speaking
about a future manifestation of absolute exemption from all the ills
that flesh and spirit are heir to, and radiant investure with all the
good that humanity can put on, which lies beyond the great barrier of
this mortal life. And that complete salvation, in its double aspect, is
obviously the end for which all that guarding of life is lavished upon
us, as it is the end for which all the discipline of life is given to
us, and as it is the end for which the bitter agony and pain of the
Christ on the Cross were freely rendered. But that ultimate and
superlative perfection has its roots and its beginning here. And so in
Scripture you find salvation sometimes regarded as a thing in the past
experience of every Christian man which he received at the very
beginning of his course, and sometimes you have it treated as being
progressive, running on continually through all his days; and sometimes
you have it treated, as in my text, as laid up yonder, and only to be
reached when life is done with. But just a verse or two after my text we
read that the Christian man here, on condition of his loving Jesus
Christ and believing in Him, rejoices because he here and now 'receives
the end of his faith, even the salvation of his soul.' And so there are
the two things--the incipient germ to-day, the full-foliaged
fruit-bearing tree planted in the higher house of the Lord.
These two things are inseparably intertwined. The Christian life in its
imperfection here, the partial salvation of to-day demands, unless the
universe is a chaos and there is no personal God the centre of it, a
future life, in which all that is here tendency shall be realised
possession, and in which all that here but puts up a pale and feeble
shoot above the ground, shall grow and blossom and bear fruit unto life
eternal. 'Like the new moon with a ragged edge, e'en in its
imperfections beautiful,' all the characteristics of Christian life on
earth prophesy that the orb is crescent, and will one day round itself
into its pure silvery completeness. If you see a great wall in some
palace, with slabs of polished marble for most of its length, and here
and there stretches of course rubble shoved in, you would know that that
was not the final condition, that the rubble had to be cased over, or
taken out and replaced by the lucent slab that reflected the light, and
showed, by its reflecting, its own mottled beauty. Thus the very
inconsistencies, the thwarted desires, the broken resolutions, the
aspiration that never can clothe themselves in the flesh of reality,
which belong to the Christian life, declare that this is but the first
stage of the structure, and point onwards to the time when the
imperfections shall be swept away, 'and for brass He will bring gold,
for iron He will bring silver,' and then the windows shall be set 'in
agates, and the gates in carbuncles, and all the borders in pleasant
stones.' Perfect salvation is obviously the only issue of the present
imperfect salvation.
That is what you are 'kept' for. That is what Christ died to bring you.
That is what God, like a patient workman bringing out the pattern in his
loom by many a throw of a sharp-pointed shuttle, and much twisting of
the threads into patterns, is trying to make of you, and that is what
Christ on the Cross has died to effect. Brethren, let us think more than
we do, not only of the partial beginnings here, but of that perfect
salvation for which Christian men are being 'kept' and guarded, and
which, if you and I will observe the conditions, is as sure to come as
that X, Y, Z follow A, B, C. That is what we are kept for.