The "Doctor" on God's Salvation

Dr. David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, expounding Rom. 1:16 at Westminster Chapel in the late 1950s, proclaimed powerfully the salvation of God:

Often this word salvation, or being saved, is used very inadequately. Some people, sometimes, when they use the term, are only referring to one small part of it, while they give the impression that the one small part is the whole. That, surely, is very wrong and very bad. The Apostle glories in this great word, and we must understand something of the fulness of the content which he puts into it. This term salvation can really only be understood as we understand the biblical teaching with regard to man. We will never know the full content of salvation until we know what man was like when God made him, until we know God's view of man—man as he came out of the hands of God and was placed in perfection in an earthly paradise. And, in addition to that, to understand the real meaning of salvation, we must also understand what happened to man as the result of the Fall, and as the result of sin, for if we do not understand what is meant by the Fall, and by sin, we cannot possibly understand what Paul means by salvation. . . . 

That, then, is the way in which you measure this great term salvation. You start with man in the early chapters of Genesis. And that is why you cannot shed the Book of Genesis, or even the first three chapters. If you do, you are immediately detracting from salvation. In other words, if you believe in the doctrine and theory of evolution, which says that man is a creature that has evolved out of the animal, and is still evolving and has not yet "arrived," well, you really cannot have a doctrine of salvation—you will not know what Paul is speaking about in this Epistle to the Romans. In a sense, if the theory of evolution is true, a man does not need salvation. No; the only way to understand salvation is to see man in the garden of Eden, perfect, in absolute correspondence with God, and enjoying the companionship and the fellowship of God, without sin, in a state of perfect innocence. But then you learn that he was tempted and that he fell, he committed that sin, and this led to certain terrible consequences. 

What is salvation? Salvation is the deliverance of man from the consequences of the Fall and of sin; and our definition of salvation must never be less than that. It must include all that, in all its fulness.

The "Doctor" (as he was called—even by his wife!) goes on then to speak to what this deliverance from sin is. Briefly, summarizing what he unpacks more fully, the Doctor says, God's salvation is rescue from the guilt of sin, the power of sin, and the pollution of sin.

—Romans: An Exposition of Chapter 1, The Gospel of God (The Banner of Truth Trust: Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 272-274.