Define Deliverance

What is deliverance according to the Bible?

Deliverance means protection or rescue from danger. The more interesting questions are:

• From what things are people delivered?
• Who delivers?
• Who is delivered?
• How does (whom?) deliver?

When you consider all the possible answers to those questions, you can see that deliverance can have a great number of meanings.

Here are some examples from the Bible. Note: A word in the original Hebrew or Greek manuscripts can have more than one translation or interpretation in English, so different Bible translations may use other words.

• No king is saved by his vast army; no warrior is delivered by his great strength. A horse is a vain hope for deliverance; even its great strength cannot save. Psalm 33:16–17.
  
  The word deliverance in this passage has a wide meaning. It could be translated deliverance, help, salvation, or victory. The passage emphasizes reliance on God instead of on physical means. It continues:
  
  Behold, the eye of the LORD is on those who fear Him,
  On those who hope for His lovingkindness,
  To deliver their soul from death
  And to keep them alive in famine.
  Our soul waits for the LORD;
  He is our help and our shield.
• You are my hiding place; You preserve me from trouble; You surround me with songs of deliverance. Psalm 32:7.
  
  God protected the prophet, King David, from many attempts on his life both before and after he became king of Israel. God usually did this by providing a way of escape for David.
• For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows but that you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this? Esther 4:14
  
  Israel had been conquered by Babylon. A politician had tricked the king into killing them. God was using Esther’s cousin/adopted father to talk her into appealing to the king in order to rescue their people from the plot.
• But on Mount Zion there will be deliverance, and it will be holy, and the house of Jacob will reclaim their possession. Obadiah 1:17
  
  This was part of a prophecy that had a very broad meaning. It predicted that God would provide a means of rescue and protection from the destruction of the wicked on Judgment Day. It implies physical protection of both faithful descendants of Abraham and faithful non-Jews, as well as redemption of faithful people from damnation.

In the New Testament, the word deliverance is replaced by more specific words such as salvation and redemption. The word deliver is used, but usually in a negative sense wherein one person turns a second person over to an authority for punishment. That includes (a) betrayers or low-level authorities turning a believer over to authorities for persecution and (b) a spiritual leader turning a badly sinning Christian over to the devil for punishment. The second sense happened when false preachers blasphemed and when a Christian took his father’s wife as his own.

Some churches use the term deliverance to means that God rescues someone from an addiction, disease, or demon, possibly using healing of the body or the emotions. Many of those churches cross the line into fanatical. The deliverance is almost always psychological, not miraculous. However, it would be just as wrong to say that God never does such deliverance.

In other churches, deliverance may mean that God rescues someone from the penalty of sin. This is normally called salvation. Near-synonyms that emphasize how it happens include redemption and the new birth (born again). Spiritual deliverance is far more important than types that only benefit us in our short, earthly lives. As Jesus said, “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” God does this by by granting an awareness of one’s condemnation and then granting trust in His promise to apply the price that He paid through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, with the physical resurrection of Christ being the proof that God does what He promises.

I first posted this on Quora at https://www.quora.com/unanswered/What-is-deliverance-according-to-the-Bible. I trust anyone who copies it to give credit where credit is due.