The God Who Saves

Passage: Isaiah 45:18-23; Acts 4:1-12

In Isaiah 44:9-20 the prophet describes a man cutting a piece of wood in two.  The man painstakingly shapes one half of the wood into a beautiful image.  He kneels before the image and prays to it.  He then proceeds to light the remaining half on fire and roast hot dogs and marshmallows over it.  Kosher hot dogs, presumably.  This, says Isaiah, illustrates the folly of idolatry.  People repeatedly turn to the fleeting, flawed and failing stuff of earth for salvation.  None of it – no created thing – can save.  In the Hebrew Old Testament, the word pesel (“idol”) is almost invariably paired with the word bal, which is often translated “worthless” or “vain”, but means, literally, “not”.  It’s a word that evokes an absence or failure.  In other words, God identifies all the substitutes to which people turn as “not-God”.  In his next chapter, Isaiah adds this word:

…there is no God apart from me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is none but me.

Nothing can do what God does.

This is an unpopular stance.  At a sentimental level we don’t like it because we don’t want to admit that the objects of most of our ambitions and affections will ultimately get us nowhere.  At a cultural or political level it’s offensive to claim that only one deity bearing only one name is the one route to eternal salvation.  It’s exclusive and elitist.

Unless it’s true. 

Centuries after Isaiah recorded God’s controversial words, the disciples of Jesus find themselves embroiled in more controversy.  On their way out of church, Peter and John are accosted by a panhandler.  The man is disabled; when he asks the apostles for money, they say, “We have none.  But we can give you something else: in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.”  The man does so.  News of the healing spreads; the religious authorities grab Peter and John and demand to know “by whose name or by what power” the healing occurred.  Peter says,

It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed.

Then he adds,

Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved. (Acts 4:10, 12)

No other name than Jesus – the only Jesus of Nazareth, risen and ascended.  Jesus – “Yeshua” – whose name means, the Lord saves. 

At the heart of Christianity is this conviction: there is no other name by which we can be saved.  Exclusive?  Of course.  But if Jesus is indeed the embodiment of the one true God, then it’s a waste of time looking for your salvation anywhere else.  Money; sex; food; politics?  Isaiah says, “Use your head.  Each one of these things is as temporal as you are.  How can you be saved by something that, like you, will one day be reduced to its constituent elements?”  Turn to the only one – the only name – that can truly save.  The only one who conquered death and promises to share his resurrection.  Jesus, whose very name is salvation.