Soteria

I learned a new word today – soteria.  It’s pronounced “so-tay-ree’-ah,” at least according to the Blue Letter Bible website. It’s a word, in English, with which we are very familiar – salvation. 

Salvation is a word that I tend to take for granted any more.  As a long-time follower of Christ, the word is important to me, but it has also lost its weight – much like the familiarity of any given Bible story that we have heard many times over.  The saying “familiarity breeds contempt” doesn’t quite fit here, but perhaps we could switch it up and say, “Familiarity breeds complacency.” 

I have lost my wonder over the miraculous, the curious, the wondrous, and the impossible.  And salvation is all of these things. 

The basic definition of salvation, according to the Google online dictionary, is “preservation or deliverance from harm, ruin, or loss.”  It comes from the Latin action verb salvare meaning “to save.”  In the Christian sense, salvation is “‘the saving of the soul, deliverance from the power of sin and admission to eternal bliss’” (etymonline.com). 

This word is absolutely foundational to our faith, but do we actually understand all its nuances?  Let me be so bold as to say – likely not. 

Soteria is from the Greek, and in its most basic form, it comes from the Greek root verb “sozo”.  This verb means “save, make whole, heal, be whole.”  The foundation of the Greek word for salvation is much like what we would expect – it means “to save.”  Yet look at all the other aspects of the definition.  To make whole – for something to be made whole, it must first be broken.  To heal – for something to require healing, it must first be ill or injured.  To be whole – a subtle yet magnificently different situation than making something whole.  To be whole is to be without error or fault, to be free from imperfection while simultaneously being complete, perfected, finished. 

We need all of these.  We need saving because we are lost in our sin.  We need to be made whole because we broke the perfection of our relationship with God with our disobedience and willfulness to do things our way.  Our fore-parents Adam and Eve made the first decision to disobey and rebel, but we continue to make the same decisions every day.  We need healing because in our sin and rebellion, we invited death and corruption into our bodies, our lives, and our very world.  We need to be whole because a part of us always longs for something we cannot quite define.  C.S. Lewis said it best: “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”  Solomon says it another way in Ecclesiastes: “…[God] has also put eternity in their hearts, but no one can discover the work God has done from beginning to end” (3:11).  We long for something we no longer have and have never fully experienced in our present existence.  We long for the wholeness of being one with God. 

We are sojourners on this earth, here for but a short time.  Yet by the grace of God and the blood of Jesus Christ, God has offered us soteria – a chance to be rescued, saved, made whole, healed, and completed.  God offers to fill the void that we have dealt with since the fall in the Garden of Eden. 

Will you accept?