The second effect of Jesus’ death for us is that it brings about the reconstitution of Israel as a people of grace rather than of law, possessing the Spirit of God, including Gentiles. Paul’s critical statement in Ephesians 2:8-9 about salvation by grace through faith and ‘not because of works’ belongs to a larger argument about the reconciliation of Gentiles to God and their incorporation into a ‘holy temple in the Lord’, which is the ‘dwelling place of God in the Spirit’ (2:21-22). This argument needs to be taken seriously. Of course, by making themselves part of the redeemed community of Israel at a time of impending distress, Gentiles also associate themselves with the oppressed saints of the Most High and have the same hope of being glorified at the coming of the Son of man. But fundamentally, they are ‘saved’ not in order to get into heaven but in order to be part of a redeemed community, where the Spirit of God is active, which experiences the life of the age that will come after the crisis (cf. Acts 13:46), from which they had previously been excluded.
Salvation in the Old Testament is a very worldly notion. It describes God’s intervention to rescue the people from a difficult or dangerous situation and restore them to wholeness: salvation is health, safety, peace, military victory, deliverance; it is the continuing well-being of the people. Only in extreme instances does salvation require rescue beyond death in the form of resurrection. The eschatological crisis that marked the transition between the old Israel and the new brought salvation as resurrection to the fore because the continuation of the community required faithfulness and steadfastness to the point of death. But we should not lose sight of the fact that salvation is the response of God to a particular set of concrete circumstances.
Most of what is said about ‘salvation’ in the New Testament, therefore, must be interpreted in relation to the eschatological watershed of the coming of the kingdom of God (the destruction of Jerusalem, the defeat of Roman imperial power, the emergence of the church) and the experience of God through the Spirit in the context of the ‘new covenant’ community. Beyond this, however, at the point when death itself is overcome (1 Cor.15:26; Rev.20:14), all people will be judged according to how they have lived their lives: ‘the dead were judged by what was written in the books, by what they had done’ (Rev.20:12). This is the final and universal judgment.