God, Our Savior

By Chaplain (Col) Stephen W. Leonard, USA, Ret.

The Apostle Paul begins his first epistle to Timothy with what might appear to you a switch in adjectives to describe God and His Son, Jesus. Paul calls God, “our Savior,” and he calls Jesus, “our hope.”

First, Paul says he is himself an apostle by the command of God. God, of course, orders all things by his providence. His providence is certain. God ordered Paul’s status and calling as one of His and Jesus’ apostles, maybe as the chosen-by-God substitute for Judas, rather than Matthias.

Yet, he calls God here, “our Savior.” Is this right? Jesus hung and died on the cross in his saving act to become our Savior, not God, the Father. Yet God planned for and sent Jesus to the cross, as seen most vividly in Jesus’ prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane before his trial and crucifixion.

In those prayers, it is seen that the Father’s will was that Jesus should go to the cross and die. Jesus died as both Son of God, and He died as God on the cross, for He was God. In that sense, God is truly our Savior. Jesus told His disciples, “If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father.”

And Jesus is the hope of the world, for through no one else but Jesus must men go to the Father. There is salvation for them in no other way. He said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” Jesus Christ is the true hope of all men!

I know this may be confusing to some. The Triune God and the understanding of the three persons of the Godhead can be hard to fathom. But we talk about the Triune God the way Jesus Himself speaks about the persons of the Trinity in the New Testament.

He is both God and the second person of the Trinity. He has a Son-Father relationship, and at the same time He is equal to His Father, as all the persons of the Godhead are equal to one another.

So God saves us through His own plan of salvation, and Jesus is our hope of salvation, for we must go through Him to rightly call God “our Father.”

Paul helps us understand all of this through his greeting to us from his letter to Timothy. God is indeed “our Savior.” And Jesus is indeed “our hope.”

These adjectives were carefully, and under inspiration, chosen by Paul. They describe God, the Father, and Jesus, His Son, accurately. So shouldn’t we imitate the Scriptures, and count on God’s Word as our infallible guide as we worship God in three persons, a blessed Trinity?

Encouragement