Salvation by S. Harris

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 21, 1863

Salvation.

By S. Harris

THE work of the Saviour is salvation. It involves all that we can imagine of perfection, deliverance from mortality and all its ills, immortal youth and beauty, angelic intelligence and power, perfect excellence, like the excellence, of Christ, the society of all the glorified, the vision of God, and intimacy with him forever. Revelation searches the entire creation, and uses all its beauties and glories as shadows of that higher beauty and blessedness. This is salvation—the work of Him who bears the precious name, Saviour. This is the work on which he was intent when he left the heavenly glory and came down to earth. This is the work which nerved Him to dwell on earth, a man of sorrows, to encounter temptation, and to die on the cross. This is the work on which he is intent in heaven, and for which he ever liveth to make intercession for us. This is the work which he aims to perfect to its utmost glory in every penitent sinner that comes to him. When he first approaches the heart of a child, when he invites and draws him by the Holy Spirit, it is that he may bless him with all the glories of a perfect salvation. With this end he follows him with the means of grace, the discipline of providence, and the guidance and support of the Spirit. This work he can not complete while the believer, remains on earth. The believer, while in this body of weakness, in this world of sorrow, he cannot array with glory, and make him like the sun in brightness. He must take him to himself, where the weakness of mortality is no more felt, where temptation no more assails, where trials and sorrows no more come. There he can array him in splendor, and put the crown upon his brow. There he can make him like himself, glorified in both body and spirit. There he can present him before the angels and before the Father, a sinner saved by grace, a trophy of his redeeming love, pure among the pure, radiant among the shining ones, so that no eye can see any stain of his former pollution, or scar of his former ruin. It is then the Saviour sees the travail of his soul and is satisfied. Therefore it is his desire that his saints be with him and behold his glory, because only thus can he secure the completing of that work of salvation, for which he came to earth in his humiliation, and upon which, in all his merciful dealings with the individual, he has been intent.—S. Harris.