The Complete Rob Bell: His Seven Bestselling Books, All in One Place

To this day, many Jews wear a prayer shawl to obey this text. The prayer shawl is also in a lot of interesting places throughout the Bible.2 (#ulink_36865efa-65fa-5e3e-a0f2-30c81e654437) One of the most significant is in the prophet Malachi’s prediction about the coming Messiah: “The sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings.”3 (#ulink_33be9cfd-9945-598d-98ac-82873fd438d3)

The word Malachi uses for wings is kanaf—the same word in Numbers that refers to the edge of a garment, to which the tassels were attached. So a legend grew that when the Messiah came, there would be special healing powers in his kanaf, in the tassels of his prayer shawl.

Fast-forward to the time of Jesus: A woman has had an illness for twelve years and no one can cure her.4 (#ulink_1a9d7c26-beaa-551a-9e34-ad7d309670c4) She pushes her way through a crowd to get to Jesus, and when she gets close to him, she grabs his cloak. Now remember, Jesus is a Torah-observant Jewish rabbi who keeps the scripture commandments word for word, including passages like Numbers 15, which means Jesus would have been wearing a prayer shawl. So when the woman grabs the edge of his cloak, she is demonstrating that she believes Jesus is the Messiah and that his tassels have healing powers. She believes that Jesus is who Malachi was talking about.

If you were in the crowd, what would you think about this woman? This woman believes that this man is the Messiah.

She touches his tassels and is healed, just like Malachi said.

But I don’t think the physical healing is Jesus’s point here. I think it is what Jesus says to her as they part ways.

He says to her, “Go in peace.”

The word Jesus would have used for peace is the Hebrew word shalom. Shalom is an important word in the Bible, and it is not completely accurate to translate it simply as “peace.”

For many of us, we understand peace to be the absence of conflict. We talk about peace in the home or in the world or giving peace a chance. But the Hebraic understanding of shalom is far more than just the absence of conflict or strife.

Shalom is the presence of the goodness of God. It’s the presence of wholeness, completeness.

So when Jesus tells the woman to go in peace, he is placing the blessing of God on all of her. Not just her physical body. He is blessing her with God’s presence on her entire being. And this is because for Jesus, salvation is holistic in nature. For Jesus, being saved or reconciled to God involves far more than just the saving of your physical body or your soul—it involves all of you.

God’s desire is for us to live in harmony with him—body, soul, spirit, mind, emotions—every inch of our being.

Restoration

To say that salvation is holistic is to acknowledge that there are many dimensions to living in harmony with God. In one sense, salvation is a legal transaction. Humans are guilty because of our sin, and God is the judge who has to deal with our sin because he is holy and any act of sin goes against his core nature. He has to deal with it. Enter Jesus, who dies on the cross in our place. Jesus gets what we deserve; we get what Jesus deserved.

For Jesus, however, salvation is far more. It includes this understanding, but it is far more comprehensive—it is a way of life. To be saved or redeemed or set free is to enter into a totally new way of living in harmony with God. The rabbis called harmony with God olam haba, which translates “life in the world to come.” Salvation is living more and more in harmony with God, a process that will go on forever.

When we understand salvation from a legal-transaction perspective, then the point of the cross becomes what it has done for us. There is the once-and-for-all work of Jesus dying on the cross for our sins and saying, “It is finished.” Nothing more to be offered and nothing more to be sacrificed. Jesus’s death perfectly satisfies God. We claim this truth as Christians. All has been forgiven. But let’s also use a slightly different phrase: the work of the cross in us. There is Jesus’s death on our behalf once and for all, but there is the ongoing work of the cross in our hearts and minds and souls and lives. There is the ongoing need to return to the cross to be reminded of our brokenness and dependence on God. There is the healing we need from the cross every single day.5 (#ulink_090d3a5a-8ac0-5409-b1c3-b618cd875416)

Which leads to forgiveness. The point of the cross isn’t forgiveness. Forgiveness leads to something much bigger: restoration. God isn’t just interested in the covering over of our sins; God wants to make us into the people we were originally created to be. It is not just the removal of what’s being held against us; it is God pulling us into the people he originally had in mind when he made us. This restoration is why Jesus always orients his message around becoming the kind of people who are generous and loving and compassionate. The goal here isn’t simply to not sin. Our purpose is to increase the shalom in this world, which is why approaches to the Christian faith that deal solely with not sinning always fail. They aim at the wrong thing. It is not about what you don’t do. The point is becoming more and more the kind of people God had in mind when we were first created.

It is one thing to be forgiven; it is another thing to become more and more and more and more the person God made you to be.

Let me take this further: If we only have a legal-transaction understanding of salvation in which we are forgiven of our sins so we can go to heaven, then salvation essentially becomes a ticket to somewhere else. In this understanding, eternity is something that kicks in when we die. But Jesus did not teach this.

Jesus said that when we believe, we have crossed over from death to life.6 (#ulink_96daac3b-6604-561a-a027-79c2c442e59d) God always has been and always will be. And when I enter into a relationship with God through Christ, I am connected with God now and I will be connected with God forever. For Jesus, salvation is now.

I need a God for now.

I need healing now.

I need help now.

Yes, even greater things will happen someday.

But salvation is now.

This now leads to another danger of embracing only one dimension of salvation. When faith is defined solely in legal terms, the dominant idea often becomes “inviting Jesus into your heart,” a phrase that is not found anywhere in the Bible. That doesn’t mean it is not legitimate; it just means we have to be careful that we don’t adopt ideas that come with it that aren’t what God has in mind. The problems come when salvation becomes all about me. Me being saved. Me having my sins forgiven. Me being reconciled to God.

The Bible paints a much larger picture of salvation. It describes all of creation being restored. The author of Ephesians writes that all things will be brought together under Jesus.7 (#ulink_9ebd0827-97a3-5daa-9fdc-31edf874c2f2)

Salvation is the entire universe being brought back into harmony with its maker.

This has huge implications for how people present the message of Jesus. Yes, Jesus can come into our hearts. But we can join a movement that is as wide and deep and big as the universe itself. Rocks and trees and birds and swamps and ecosystems. God’s desire is to restore all of it.

The point is not me; it’s God.

It is one thing to be saved. To believe in Jesus. It is another thing to be healed. It is possible to be saved and miserable. It is possible to be saved and not be a healthy, whole, life-giving person. It is possible for the cross to have done something for a person but not in them.

My Soul

What happened to me is that I realized I believed in Jesus and thought of myself as “saved” and “redeemed” and “reborn,” yet massive areas of my life were unaffected. I learned that salvation is for all of me. I learned that Jesus wants to heal my soul—now.

And for Jesus to heal my soul, I had to stare my junk right in the face.

There is so much I could say about this healing of the soul, and it has only just begun for me, but a few things have become quite clear.

First, no amount of success can heal a person’s soul. In fact, success makes it worse. I speak with great authority on this subject. People were referring to me as the poster boy for the next generation of Christianity. I started a church and a lot of people were coming to hear me speak, and I had things I had never dealt with and they were still there, even after I “made it.”

If you have issues surrounding your identity, those issues will not go away if you “make it.” They will be there until they are hunted down and identified and dealt with. We often live under the illusion that when we reach that goal and complete our mission, those issues that churn on the inside will go away.

But it’s not true.

There is a great saying in the recovery movement: “Wherever you go, there you are.”

That’s why when we talk with people who are just itching to leave town because they “just need to get out of here,” we know they will be back. Often they find out that whatever it is, it went with them. The problem is not the town. The problem is somewhere inside of them.

Success doesn’t fix anything. We have the same problems and compulsions and addictions, only now we have more stress and more problems and more pressure.

I used to think—and I’m giving you a window into my insanity here—that when the church got bigger, then it would be easier.

Easier?

I don’t know if this connects with you, but have you bought into any of these lies? The lies that tell you success and achievement will fix it? They won’t. You will be the same person, only you’ll have more of everything, and that includes pain.

In addition, there is always a mystery behind the mystery.8 (#ulink_0fa12809-8919-5b82-a1c7-d1f62c70a709) There is a reason we do what we do, and often it is the result of something that is the result of something that is—you guessed it—the result of something. What happens is we try to fix things, but we stop at the first or second layer. We’re stressed and so we make adjustments in time management. But a better question is, why do I take on so much? But an even better question is, why is it so hard for me to say no? Or even, why is that person’s approval so important to me?

But that’s not even the real issue.

What I have learned is that the deeper you go, the more painful it gets.

We have to be willing to drag up everything.

I started going to counseling and discovered that there are things that happened to me when I was thirteen that have shaped me.

Thirteen?