We often think being saved is something like this: We are floating in the sea of sin and death about to drown when, with our last bit of strength, we cry out to Jesus who throws us a life preserver. That’s certainly a situation from which we would need to be saved, but that’s not what we see in this passage of Scripture. Instead, the picture here is of a corpse, dead and bloated, floating face down in the sea. No strength. No power. No hope. 

You can almost hear the voice of the revival preacher bouncing off the tent folds somewhere in the deep south as he describes the perils of hell and the fact that we’re all headed there. Over and over again comes the question, “Have you been sa-a-a-a-aved-d-d-d-d-d!?!?!?!”

That word, maybe more than any other, has become part of the regular vernacular of Christian churches. We have used it so often that we don’t even think about it any more. We say that “we got saved” at this particular moment or that particular event. We ask others if they’ve been saved. So ingrained is this particular word in the vocabulary of the Christian sub-culture that it became the one word name of the 2004 satirical film mocking it.

When a word rises to that level of usage, when it becomes that much a part of the subculture, when it flows off the tongue of the churchgoer that easily, it’s inevitable that we all stop thinking much about what it actually means. The truth is it’s a good word. It’s the right word. And if we think about the implications that come with using that word, we can see why. Here are three of those implications:

1. Peril.

To say that one is “saved” implies that there is some kind of peril. And not the “boy I sure hope I can get through this traffic in time” kind of peril. The word itself implies danger. Trouble. Hardship. Something that needs to be escaped from.

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