to rescue: to reach into a place of danger and pull someone out of it to safety
This is the Bible's vivid word for rescue. It does not picture safety in general; it pictures the moment of being snatched out of harm, like a hand reaching in and dragging a person clear of death. The danger can be physical (a lion's mouth, deadly peril, persecution), spiritual (the grip of sin, the power of darkness), or final (the wrath to come), but the image is always the same: someone powerful pulling a trapped person out.
The rescuer is almost always God, and in the New Testament that role passes to Jesus. The word arrives loaded with this history. In the Greek Old Testament it was the standard word for God rescuing Israel out of Egypt and rescuing the faithful from fire, lions, and enemies, and the prayer "rescue me, Lord" became a fixed cry for help. The Lord's Prayer picks up that cry in "rescue us from the evil one."
Because the rescuer is so central, the word also hardened into a title. "The Deliverer" (literally, "the one who rescues") names God in the Old Testament and names Christ in Paul's letters. So the same word covers both the action of rescuing and the person known for doing it.
The one core idea holds across every use, which is why it counts as a single meaning rather than several: every occurrence is some form of being drawn out of peril to safety.