Well…he’s back. Exactly thirty years after we first learned the name Apollo Creed, thirty years after we first heard the strains of “Gonna Fly Now”, thirty years after we first heard him cry, “Adrienne”, and sixteen years after we last saw him on the silver screen, this Christmas, Rocky Balboa is returning. Yes, it’s true, confirmed this week, ironically just as Brent is discovering Rocky for the first time (we watched the five-picture set together recently). I don’t know which of the films is your favorite, but mine is Rocky II, and in that film, we see Rocky evening the score with Apollo, getting what some would term “redemption”. Redemption…not a word we use a whole lot today; my mother used to collect S&H Green Stamps, though, and she’d redeem them every so often. Do a Google search on the word and you’ll find that there is a group that goes by the name “Redemption”, billing themselves as a “progressive metal power band”. Whatever.
“Redemption”…of that word, theologian B.B. Warfield said that “it’s sad to see a word die”. He was lamenting an increasing reticence to use that term in order to describe what Christ has done for us. Even our translation today doesn’t actually use the word itself, though it does a reasonably good job of defining it. Incidentally, Warfield’s been dead for many decades. Why is it that this word has fallen out of disfavor? Well…because some of the things that redemption implies aren’t in vogue today, in our age of “discard theology in favor of relevance”.
“I find people today are not looking for theology”, says the handsome young man who pastors what is apparently the largest church in America. And so his habit, and the trend in so many pulpits today, is to preach on so-called “practical” issues, to try to be “relevant”. Now…being practical is great, but I think that dealing with the most realistic, practical problem people have—that of being estranged from a holy God because of their sin—is the first and most practical issue people face. I have this sad vision of thousands of people who have memorized tips for making their kids mind, and have gotten on a budget, and have gotten a bit of a grip on their anger, who have never been born again—and in Jesus’ economy, this is the starting place, and without a firm grasp on the reality of my sin, I will not come to Jesus as Savior. Understanding and appropriating the redemption made for us in Christ Jesus is utterly essential, not only to life eternal, but to living in the here and now as well.
And so we wrestle a bit today with that word that seems to be dying away from disuse and, in some quarters, from distaste: redemption. Notice that the first implication of the word is
1. The Plight
The plight of those of us before Christ. It’s implicit in the very word: for one to be redeemed implies that one is in some unsatisfactory situation. A person must be redeemed from something. And that something is sin.
The problem is that we underestimate the gravity of our sin. First off, we don’t like the word; it isn’t used in polite company today. Karl Menninger wrote a book entitled Whatever Became of Sin? for this very reason. As Dr. Bill Long said, “…sin is no longer a topic that is preached on or taught. It doesn’t attract members to congregations and it doesn’t keep them there. It flies pretty directly in the fact of the upbeat message that we must inculcate in the young in order to keep the economic engine of America going. Sin has no place…grace rather than depravity, (is) the word that people want to hear.”
Sin is endemic. As we’ve said before, we’re “natural born sinners”; it is our common condition. All have sinned and fall short of God’s glory, the Bible tells us.
Sin is vile. Do pigs stink? Well, that depends; we say that they do, but to pigs stink to other pigs? JC Ryle, “The very animals whose smell is most offensive to us have no idea that they are offensive; fallen man has just no idea what a vile thing sin is in the sight of God.” Similarly, we categorize sin—sure, some of it is bad in our eyes, but some of it we excuse and condone; we tend, I think, to conform our thinking more to the cultural ethos than we do to the Bible. We’ll agree that certain forms of sexual perversion are wrong, that racism is evil, that Enron-style greed is sinful; at the same time, envy is something to be encouraged, as is pride; gluttony a sin? Please! Gossip? A little fudgin’ here and there? We don’t tend to see sin as the vile thing it is, but
Sin is an offense to a holy God.
Consider John Donne’s take on the subject; in a poem he wrote called “A Hymn to God the Father”, notice his sense of giving offense to a holy God; think that this poet takes sin a bit more seriously that most Americans?
"Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallow’d in, a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done;
I fear no more."
Sin is bondage.
Romans 6:6 uses just this term—bondage—to describe sin’s hold on us. The entirety of the Old Testament Law does us the service of demonstrating that we are sinful, and that sin binds us. We cannot choose to do what is good apart from God, apart from His Spirit’s regenerating work in us.
Now…the point of all of this sin talk isn’t to cause you to leave here today feeling like a heel—but it is to cause you to come face to face with the reality of the ugliness of sin—in order that you might leave here having experienced the amazing, cleansing, nature of God’s grace!
2. The Purchase
What we need is freedom from our sin; from its power, its guilt, its condemnation, its penalty. Describing the lostness of the Gentile world, Eph. 2:12 says that we are “without God and without hope”. But Jesus promised that if He would make us free, we would be really, truly free (John 8:36). Paul echoes this in Galatians 5:1, speaking to the Galatian believers who were ready to abandon their freedom in Christ in order to go back into bondage to law-keeping.
Here is the Biblical picture: apolytrosis, which means “the emancipation of slaves or prisoners”, but within that word is the word lytron, which is the Greek word for “a ransom or the price of release”. Put together, we get the picture of how this word was used: the release of a slave or prisoner through the payment of a price.
Slaves could be bought out of bondage in the Greek world, released in a binding, legal arrangement through the payment of a price. It happened with the Jews as well: a relative could purchase the freedom of one who had been sold into slavery. That still happens today; one Christian organization has been involved in Sudan in the buying back of those sold into slavery. But in each case, there was the payment of a price. Some of our translations render the word here “deliverance”, but with deliverance there is not necessarily the concept of the payment of a price, but with redemption, we see clearly
3. The Price
The price paid for our sin. “The blood of His Son” – there is no redemption without a costly payment. “Blood” here is a word-symbol for “death”; Colossians 1:20 tells us that God “made peace with everything in Heaven and on earth by means of His blood on the cross.”
John Stott makes it clear that redemption always involved “a decisive and costly intervention”. A deliverer might sometimes put himself at great risk to rescue another, but often deliverance can take place at little or no cost to the deliverer. Not so with redemption; always a price, and often a steep one, had to be paid.
It is God’s holiness which demands that a payment for sin be made. There are some who shrink at the notion of words like “ransom” and “redemption” because in their minds, this makes God out to be a celestial Shylock, demanding His pound of flesh. One writer, whose book you can purchase at the Christian book store in the outlet mall, refers to the idea that Christ would die as a ransom to appease His Father as “cosmic child abuse”.
No…God in His utter and total holiness demands that sin be atoned for, but in His love, He supplied what His holiness demands, in sending His only begotten Son to the cross. Peter tells us that it is not silver or gold that has purchased our redemption, but the precious blood of Jesus Christ.
We’re talking about how we are “rich beyond imagination”—and so we are in Christ, because my very birthright is that of one who is loved by God so much that He paid the ultimate price, the death of His own Son, to secure my redemption.
The Bible tells of the sacrifices that the Jews made in what we call the Old Testament; these sacrifices were of bulls and goats, but they were not sufficient to make payment for sin. They only covered sin, for a time, but regularly, the Jews were required to make sacrifice. It was an over-and-over thing, but Jesus by His death once-for-all provided the payment for sin; that’s why you didn’t bring your goat with you this morning!
And thus the song of the elders around the throne of God is that Jesus is worthy—but the reason that they ascribe worth to Him is because of the central characteristic of His work: He was slain for our sins (Rev. 5).
4. The Purchaser
The one who pays the price owns the merchandise…It is the prerogative of the Redeemer to set the redeemed free, and Christ has released us from sin’s bondage, power, guilt, condemnation, penalty—one day, in eternity, we’ll be released from sin’s presence as well.
But as we said last week, we reiterate today: the One Who paid the price now owns us; we belong to Christ. Not in the sense that God is a some slave-owner, but in the sense that He is a Father, who lovingly instructs us and leads us. Our adoption—of which we spoke last week—is accomplished through redemption. He paid the price that we might forever be His!
As fire raged through the house and drew closer, so did the urgency in the voice of the desperate little orphan boy, crying at the top of his lungs for help, hoping his dear grandmother, who had taken him in, could reach him in time to save his life. Unbeknownst to him, his grandmother had already perished in a futile attempt to reach the boy through the fire and smoke. Finally, just when all seemed lost, the little boy’s cries were answered when a stranger climbed an iron drain pipe to reach the boy and then, with the little orphan clinging tightly to his neck, he descended the same iron pipe to safety, and then vanished through the crowd.
A few weeks later, a public hearing was held to award custody of the child. A local farmer, a teacher at the town school, and a wealthy banker were among the townspeople who stepped forward to give the boy a home; each offered reasons to the judge as to why they should be chosen. As they spoke, the little boy’s eyes remained glued to the floor.
As the judge was about to announce his decision, the stranger made his way into the courtroom and to the front. He said nothing, but when the judge asked him his business, his only reply was to slowly take his hands from his pockets, his deeply-scarred, burned hands. The crowd gasped, but the little boy leaped from his seat and into the arms of the man whose hands had been disfigured, burned almost beyond use in saving the little boy’s life when he climbed the red-hot drain pipe. One by one, the townspeople walked silently away, leaving the little boy and his rescuer, his “redeemer”, alone. His marred hands had settled the issue.
And so have the nail-scarred hands of Jesus settled the issue: we belong to Jesus, for it is His blood that purchased our redemption.
