You’ve most likely heard the gap illustration of salvation. Just to refresh your memory, it goes like this.

God created man to live in relationship with him. We stood with him, walked with him. Then Adam and Eve sinned and caused a great void to open up between man and God. There was no way we could cross that void. It was a deep canyon with God on one side and man on the other.

Jesus gave the solution by crossing the canyon, something we could not do. He came among us and lived and died on the cross, paying the penalty for our sins. The cross then became the bridge between God and man, giving us the means to cross the canyon and reach God. Through the cross we can find God and salvation.

Let me suggest an alternate picture.

God created man to live in relationship with him. We stood with him, walked with him. Then Adam and Eve sinned and all creation fell as though down a huge cliff. We stood at the bottom of that cliff with God at the top. Nothing we do would enable us to climb the cliff.

Jesus presented the solution by descending the cliff. He stepped down from high above and lived among fallen humanity. He died on the cross, paying the penalty for our sins. Through the cross he draws us to himself. Jesus then ascends back to God at the top of the cliff, taking us with him.

The difference in these two illustrations is enormous. In both of them God is the one who makes salvation possible. Man is helpless to make a way to God. But in the first God only makes salvation possible, not certain – and only in a world different from our own. In the first illustration Jesus creates a bridge we must walk across to be saved, but this ignores man’s inability to walk toward God. Dead in our sins, we neither have the desire nor the ability to approach God. We are enemies in rebellion against him. The first illustration is truly semi-Pelagian in imagining some ability remains in man so that he can walk to God. Perhaps some who present this illustration would include the Arminian notion of prevenient grace, the belief that God has enabled people to respond to him. This would take the illustration out of the realm of Pelagian heresy but it still leaves the person with an ability the Bible says we simply do not have.

The second illustration does a better job of presenting the biblical picture. It is not perfect, no illustration can contain everything, but it shows that man is not capable of any of the work to reach God.

God brings us to himself. He descends the cliff, does what is necessary to bring us into righteousness, then wraps his arms around us and carries us with him back into Heaven. This is what it means to be saved, to be found in the arms of Christ when he has returned to his heavenly home. “But wait!” you say “He was raised 2,000 years ago! I was not there, I could not have been risen with him!” Ahh but you were, dear saint. Thus we are told a few times in the New Testament, as at Ephesians 2:6, that God has raised us up with him and ​seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. In an event that is both very real and very mysterious, all the saints of God were raised with Jesus Christ. He carried us from the fallen world to the throne of his Father. This is the only way our salvation could take place.

Perhaps I should make some tracts.