Hoping for Rescue?

I have sometimes heard it said that God doesn’t take us out of difficult situations; rather, he enters into our difficult situations. This is usually in the context of discussing the tribulation. The thought seems to be that it is unbiblical to think that God will simply rescue believers before things get difficult. I am not going to try and decide that issue here. However, I did recently come across something interesting while translating Galatians that I thought I would share.

Recent work by theologians in the area of creation care has rightly pointed to the dangers of having too strong of an escapist mentality. The belief that God can come and rescue us at any moment has too often been used as an excuse for not caring about the environment: “If Jesus could come at any moment, why plant trees?” The Thessalonians seem to have made this kind of mistake, since, believing that the Lord’s coming was near or already present, many of them had stopped working and Paul had to correct this mindset (2 Thess 3:6-14). So, emphasizing escapism too strongly can have negative side effects.

In an attempt to combat these negative side effects, others have made the opposite mistake of saying that God never rescues us from difficult circumstances. God does not rescue us from bad stuff, they say, but rather enters into our bad stuff with us. However, while it is true that God enters into our suffering with us (Jesus!), I don't think that mere solidarity is enough. In other words, I think putting too much emphasis on God's suffering to the exclusion of God's saving can have the opposite side effect: robbing us of hope. Jesus didn't just come to suffer, but also to save.

While God does not always remove us from difficult circumstances, we don’t want to forget that scripture also affirms that our heavenly father is a God of deliverance. After all, the Lord’s prayer asks for the father to “deliver us from [the] evil [one]” (Matt 6:13). In light of this theme of rescue, today I would like to take a brief look at a passage from Paul's letter to the churches in Galatia. The verse I want to look at is Galatians 1:4, part of the opening and thesis of the letter.

Speaking of Jesus, Paul says:

τοῦ δόντος ἑαυτὸν ὑπὲρ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ἡμῶν, ὅπως ἐξέληται ἡμᾶς ἐκ τοῦ αἰῶνος τοῦ ἐνεστῶτος πονηροῦ...

who gave of himself for our sins, so that he might rescue us from the present evil age...

The part that stood out to me was the subjunctive verb that Paul uses here, ἐξέληται (exelētai), which I have translated above as “he might rescue.” The standard Greek lexicons agree that here this verb has the sense of “to rescue or set someone free from danger — ‘to set free, to rescue, to deliver.’” (Louw and Nida, s.v., “ἐξαιρέομαι” 21.17); “to deliver someone from peril or confining circumstance, set free, deliver, rescue” (BDAG, s.v., “ἐξαιρέω” 2). So, Paul is saying that Christ gave of himself for our sins so that he might deliver us, rescue us, set us free from the present evil age. This verb is only used seven other times in the New Testament. In those other places, it means “to take out” or “pluck out” one’s eye (Matt 5:29; 18:9) and “to rescue” (Acts 7:10, 34; 12:11; 23:27; 26:17). In short, in the New Testament this verb definitely seems to have what we might call an “escapist” meaning, e.g., plucking something out or rescuing it.

In the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament that Paul and the other New Testament writers used as their Bible, this word is similarly used with the sense of “to deliver” or “to rescue”. In Exodus 3:8, for example, God says:

I have come down to deliver [ἐξελέσθαι] them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey...

Discussing Paul’s choice of this word in Galatians 1:4, commentator N. T. Wright notes that “the word for ‘rescue’ here has echoes of God’s rescuing Israel from Egypt.”¹ By using this same word here, Paul “implies that the world in general, and Israel in particular, had been living under a form of slavery comparable to the time in Egypt.”²

Like Israel under the Egyptians, we too are in need of rescue from slavery today. Just as God rescued Israel by bringing them through the waters of the Red Sea into freedom in the Promised Land, God rescues us by bringing us through the waters of baptism out of slavery to sin and into freedom in Christ.

The theme of rescue is at the heart of the Old Testament Exodus story and forms the thesis of Paul's letter to the Galatians in the New Testament. Therefore, dare I say, it is definitely biblical to hope for God’s rescue — even while affirming that God doesn’t promise to pluck us out of every difficult situation. We who are in Christ have already been rescued from the present evil age; yet, we still hope for Christ's return and ultimate rescue. This is the already-but-not-yet tension that pervades the New Testament. We live in the in between. And, until that final day of rescue comes, Jesus promises that he will always be with us (Matt 28:20).

Ἀμήν, ἔρχου κύριε Ἰησοῦ

Amēn, erchou kyrie Iēsou

Amen, come Lord Jesus!

(Rev 22:20)

Notes

[1] N. T. Wright, Galatians (CCF; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021), 55.

[2] Ibid.