Ignorance is the ice on which the unsaved skate

I have a desire to help others get saved. Stubborn resistance to the gospel is so incredibly strong. I wonder if it is worse now than in previous generations.

While pondering my own ‘accidental’ salvation and how it came about, I came up with an analogy that seems to fit quite well. It also implies that salvation is something like dying. The obvious downside of the analogy is that heavenly places are above, not below. I’ll keep pondering and maybe come up with a better one later on.

· Imagine that salvation and the realm of spiritual light lie beneath the ice of a frozen-over lake. Above the ice is the realm of spiritual darkness.

· A skater on the lake is an unsaved person, skating in the dark, seeking God and salvation.

· The ice over the lake is the unsaved person’s ignorance. The greater his or her ignorance, the thicker the ice.

· Gravity is the power of God unto salvation.

When I rejected my childhood Christianity in favour of ‘having a good time’ in a life of booze, drugs and sex, I was very ignorant, the ice was very thick and I was in no danger of falling through into salvation.

When I sought salvation (or enlightenment as I called it then) in Eastern teachings such as Zen Buddhism, the ice remained very thick and I was in no danger of falling through into salvation.

When I sought salvation in the Bible, in the red-letter packed gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the ice I was skating on was not quite so thick. I was still very ignorant but at least I was in the right book.

When I was dragged kicking and screaming away from the red-letters and into viewing the Bible in a rightly-divided, dispensational manner, almost all of the obstacles to my belief were eradicated. My ignorance became paper thin and I fell through the ice into salvation and spiritual light.

Believing God’s word is what gets you saved. You genuinely believe and God does the rest. Rightly dividing God’s word will lead you to the right gospel.

It is quite astonishing now that I never noticed that most of the Bible is not addressed to me and yet I nonchalantly put myself in the audience. It is also quite astonishing that God didn’t forget about us Gentiles and even gave us our own apostle who passed on the Lord’s particular doctrine for us in a number of epistles. All of scripture is profitable but until I learned what God is doing today, and what he is not, my belief was too weak for me to get saved.