The knowledge of God becomes the experience of salvation when God justifies the man guilty of sin and lost to death. This is done by believing in the gospel of Jesus Christ. The knowledge of God through faith in the gospel is an event of salvation because it places the believer in fellowship with the one God who, as the father in the unity of essence and action with his incarnate son, reconciled the world to himself through his vicarious atoning death (2 Corinthians 5:19) and through the work of His Spirit is creatively active in preaching the word of atonement and bringing up a "new creature" (2 Corinthians 5:17). Knowledge of God as knowledge of the triune God is, as an event of knowledge, at the same time an event of salvation.