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THE PLAN OF SALVATION

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 18, 1878

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 52, No. 4.

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THE PLAN OF SALVATION.

By G. V. Kilgore

Ask any church member in our land if he believes in the plan of salvation, and he will say, Yes, certainly I do. But go among all the professors of Christianity and find the number that live strictly up to this plan, and how many will you find? Everybody will answer, “We should find comparatively very few.” But let us inquire again how many really know what the plan of salvation is. All know that it is Jesus who laid the plan, and that through him we must be saved, if saved at all; but what is Jesus’s plan by which he is to save men? How will he save them? Will he save them regardless of character? Does he promise to save all who profess to follow him, whether they really obey him or not? These are important questions. If Christ will not save men unless they do as he directs them to do, then we might just as well give up trying to be saved, if we will not submit ourselves to his requirements. Christ’s plan of saving men is given in plain words in the New Testament. Just read a few of his statements:—
“Have faith in God.” Mark 11:22. “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.” Matt. 19:17. “What is written in the law? . . . This do, and thou shalt live.” Luke 10:26-28. “He that doeth the will of my Father” “shall enter into the kingdom of Heaven.” Matt. 7:21. “Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city.” Rev. 22:14. “Whosoever shall do and teach them [the commandments], the same shall be called great in the kingdom of Heaven.” Matt. 5:19. In the face of all these plain statements of Christ, can men be saved who will not do the things that he says? There is no way of being saved only by following Christ’s directions, and he directs us to keep his Father’s commandments as well as his own. He says, Have faith in God, repent, be converted, &c.; but to do, or try to do, these, without doing the rest that he commands, is only to be an unfaithful and slothful servant, and to lose eternal life. “He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.” 1 John 2:4. Christ commands men to keep his Father’s commandments, and men that say they know him by an experimental knowledge, when they preach that “God’s old laws” are abolished, do really lay themselves under the condemnation of the ninth commandment. John says so. They may try to believe they are right before God, but the Bible says they are wrong.
Jesus’s plan of saving men will stand. He died to magnify and make honorable his Father’s law (Isa. 42:21), and he declares that men shall turn from the violation of that law in order to have life. He died to redeem the transgressions of that law, and the men whose transgressions are not redeemed will themselves have to die for their transgressions.
The commandments of God were the condition to be obeyed in the past dispensation, in order for men to obtain the promises of God. When God made his promise to Isaac he made it “because that Abraham obeyed my voice,” said God, “and kept my charge, my commandments, and my laws.” Gen. 26:5. And those same moral laws of God are the condition of salvation in this dispensation. God said, when he promised the new covenant, “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts.” And when Christ, the mediator of the new covenant, came, he said, “If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.” Thus we see that the plan of salvation has always been that men should be saved by obeying God’s commandments. There is no other way. To repent of sin is to obey God, for he commands repentance. And to have faith and be converted are also to obey God; for he commands these things to be done. So the whole duty of man is just what the wise man says: “Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.” Eccl. 12:13. And the plan of salvation is designed to bring man back to that obedience in which he would always have lived, had he never transgressed God’s commandments.
G. V. KILGORE.