“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope.” (1 Timothy 1:1, NIV)
Familiarity with Scripture is a great thing.
It’s wonderful to be reading one of the gospels or Paul’s letters and to feel as though it’s a road you’ve driven many times before. You know the speed limit without checking, you know the stop signs before you see them, and you know where your turn is without looking for a road sign. Your familiarity helps you enjoy the ride without being preoccupied with navigating. You can read story after story in a gospel knowing what’s going on, knowing what people are going to say, and knowing how it’s going to turn out because you been there before. You’re not navigating through the stories any longer; you’re just along for the ride.
That being said, there can come some complacency with familiarity. Because we may know a gospel or New Testament letter so well, we may check-out and simply pass over the words on the page without actually reading. When that happens we might miss what’s right in front of us. This happened to me as I read the first verse in 1 Timothy 1.
I’ve read this letter a good number of times before and I’ve never noticed (at least I can’t remember noticing) what Paul said about God in verse 1. Paul wrote, “Paul, and apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope.” I’ve underlined the section that seemed new to me this time around.
I think I’ve always read the beginning of this letter and just assumed (based on previous theological categories in my head) that I should be equating “Savior” with Jesus instead of God because, of course, Jesus is our savior. The problem is, that’s not what Paul wrote there. Paul did not write that Jesus is our savior; he wrote that God is our savior.
Now, to be clear, I’m not trying to say that Paul doesn’t think Jesus is his savior and our savior. He definitely believes that Jesus is our savior. What I am trying to say is that Paul is saying something different, but the difference is not meant to exclude the fact that Jesus is our savior; it’s meant to expand upon that truth.
Jesus is our savior. Therefore, in Paul’s mind and the greater trinitarian reality, God is our savior. Jesus is God, therefore, what’s true about Jesus is true about God. Even while admitting that, it still sounds a little strange to say that God is our savior, because we’re so used to saying Jesus alone saves. It may be that we’ve been conditioned by the state of the religious world around us (mainly, through the necessary orthodox response to those religious systems that deny the truth about Jesus), which has caused us to be hyper Jesus-focused while, unintentionally, diminishing God as a whole.
This is a big reason why I’m so thankful for someone like the Apostle Paul. He wrote in such a way as to help us see again what we’ve sometimes forgotten.
Jesus is our savior.
Therefore, God is our savior.