His first picture occurred right after Adam and Eve sinned. Although they were punished by being banished from the Garden of Eden, God provided clothes for Adam and Eve. This provision is an important picture that if we are to be saved, the salvation must be provided through God.

Another picture is that of Noah and the flood. This picture actually contains two indications of God's salvation. The first is the seriousness of sin. God loves deeply everything that He created. So when He sees people destroying, violating, or being reckless with it or its people, He gets angry. He's not angry because of some petty rules that were broken-He's angry because each of us thumb our noses at Him and utterly desecrate His good creation. We'd be angry if someone did that to someone or something that we dearly loved-God gets angry at it as well. The flood is a picture of that anger and God's desire to clean His world of all the injustice and filth we've filled it with-both materially in the world and personally in our lives.

It's also a picture of His grace. God would not turn His back completely on His creation or the people in it. He saves Noah, his family, and a representation of creation so that the world could be re-inhabited after the flood. God didn't need to do this-but again, He loves us far more than we realize.