Accordingly he exhorts them thus: "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who worketh in you both the willing and the working of [according to] his good pleasure." InEphesians 2, the saints are viewed as seated together in heavenly places in Christ; they are regarded here as working out their own salvation with fear and trembling. How can we put these two things together? With perfect ease, if we are simply subject to the Word of God. If you try to make out that there is only one meaning of salvation in the New Testament, you are in a difficulty indeed; and you will find that there is no possibility of making the passages square. In fact, nothing is more certain and easy to ascertain, than that salvation in the New Testament is more frequently spoken of as a process incomplete as yet, a thing not finished, than as a completed end. It is not then a question of taking away something, but of getting a further idea. Take Romans 13:11, 12, for instance. There we find salvation spoken of as not yet arrived. "Now is our salvation nearer than when we believed." From the context we find that it is connected with "tint day" being at hand; so the salvation spoken of there is evidently a thing that we have not actually got, no doubt, coming nearer and nearer every day, but only ours in fact when the day is come. "The night is far spent, and the day is at hand." Salvation here, therefore, is manifestly future. In the first epistle to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 1, 5, 9, 10), the same thing appears, though it be not so marked in expression. Take Hebrews again as a very plain instance. It is said there (Heb. 7:25) that Jesus is "able to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him." The passage plainly is limited to believers. It is a saving of those that are in living relationship to God. Christ is looked at as a priest, and He is a priest only for God's people — believers. It would, therefore, be an illegitimate use of the verse to apply it to the salvation of sinners as such. Again, in chapter 9, "As it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment; so Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation." There cannot be the shadow of a doubt that there the Spirit speaks of salvation (salvation of bodies, and not merely of souls) as a thing only effectuated when Christ in person appears to us, when He receives us to Himself in and to His own glory. But without going through all similar statements in other epistles, let me refer to the first epistle of Peter. It appears to me that, with the exception of a single phrase in 1 Peter 1:9, salvation is always regarded as a thing not yet accomplished, and only indeed accomplished in the redemption of the body. That one phrase is: "Receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of [your] souls." Now soul salvation will not be more complete for believers after Christ comes than now when they believe and are being carried through the wilderness; it is an already enjoyed blessing as regards the resting place of faith. But, with that exception, salvation in Peter applies to the deliverance that crowns the close of all the difficulties we may encounter in the passage through the desert-world, as well as to the present guardian care of our God who brings us safely through. It is a salvation only completed at the appearing of