T asks: “Ecclesiastes 12:7 tells us clearly what will happen when we die: ‘the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.’ The implication is that this happens to everyone. If the spirit of everyone returns to God on our physical death, where did the idea that we all need "salvation" come from?”
From time to time I manage to get around to answering questions, or I should say, responding to questions, because any answer inevitably leads to more questions.
Thanks, T, for asking about salvation, and apologies that it’s taken me a while to respond. Salvation is a word that is frequently chucked around in Christian circles, and one which, of course, is more complex than it might appear.
In the first place, you have the problem of the Bible. It’s a wonderful collection of literature, but it isn’t internally consistent. Which is to say that the writers of the various books don’t all agree on everything. Actually that’s one of the things I like most about it. Any attempt to prove something by using a verse can soon be rebutted by another verse.
So, for all that the writer of Ecclesiastes (one of the best wisdom books of all time, bar none) says this, so Paul, in his letter to the churches in Rome, talks a bit about ‘salvation’ and says, among other things, that “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” From one way of looking at it, you can choose your own adventure here.
Or can you?
The same word that’s used in the letter for ‘saved’ is also used in the story of the jailer in Acts chapter 16, when there’s an earthquake and Paul and Silas are miraculously freed from prison. When the jailer sees what has happened he’s suicidal because he thinks he has lost his prisoners, but Paul tells him that they’re still there, and in his relief he asks: “ what must I do to be saved?” And they answer: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.”
Salvation is still an open question in the New Testament. But what, exactly, is the jailer asking about?
We started off by acknowledging that any answer gives rise to more questions. And here the questions might include: “what is salvation?” and “what does it mean to believe?” And neither of these two are simple questions, actually. They’re certainly not as simple as ‘what happens when I die?’
There’s a Buddhist parable about an elephant which might be helpful. Broadly speaking, the story is that in the early days of Buddhism, one of Siddhārtha Gautama’s cousins, a bloke called Devadatta, led a sort of breakaway faction. As time went on he decided to try and kill the Buddha (and not in the good way). So he deliberately caused a wild, and angry, elephant to charge at him.
What happened then was that the great loving kindness of the Buddha caused the angry, frightened, elephant to become calm - and as a result neither the Buddha nor the elephant were hurt. O’ happy day.
I suppose what I’m saying is that this is an instance of salvation, of a sort anyway. But it leaves us with a new question - who was saved in this story? Was it the Buddha? Was it the elephant? Was it it Devadatta? The truth is that, even disregarding the imponderable question of “what happens when I die?” there is still a great deal to be saved from, both in ourselves, and in the world around us.
I love taking questions - please hit reply to send me a question to respond to. It can be anything - serious or silly, something you’ve always wondered about or something that has just occurred to you. I don’t promise a definitive answer, but I would hope to provide an interesting response.