“Unshackled”
Romans 3:24
November 2, 2008
Undoubtedly, it ranks as one of the strangest things that Scripture records God asking a person to do; it’s found in the second verse of the book of Hosea; allow me to paraphrase: God’s first word to the prophet Hosea was “go, marry a hooker”. Sort of outside the ole comfort zone there, isn’t it? A step or two beyond the pale? See, Israel was prostituting itself by forsaking God, running off after other lovers, as it were, and so in typical fashion for prophets, God used a “visual aid” to get His point across. Making matters worse, the woman was named Gomer; the images that conjures up are pretty gruesome, so we’ll be kind and pronounce it “GoMARE”, if you don’t mind. And if you read the rest of chapter 1, you find that they had kids, and God told them to name their daughter “No Mercy”, and their son, “Not My People”. Every time the kids were referred to, the people were reminded that God had every right to show no mercy to Israel, because His sinning people had forfeited the name, and were not behaving like His people. From a human viewpoint, this was an unfortunate marriage, but it was one that would be used by God to illustrate the grand theme of redemption.
Because you see, it wasn’t long before Gomer returned to her wandering ways; apparently, it wasn’t just the money she was after as she pursued lovers; her heart was wild and desired other men. Unfaithful Gomer again prostituted herself, selling herself to lecherous men, just as Israel committed spiritual adultery. Just as Israel as a nation had committed spiritual adultery, this wild mare had run off after lovers. Finally, probably due to debt, Gomer fell into slavery, and was to be auctioned off naked to the highest bidder, the absolute depth of shame.
And so when we look at Hosea 3, we find God giving another command to Hosea, saying, “Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods...” And so there, on public display in the capital city of Jerusalem, men began to bid for the wretch Gomer, eager to have her for their own slave, to satisfy their cravings.
“12 pieces of silver!”, one shouted.
“13”, said Hosea.
“14 pieces of silver!”
“15”, Hosea replied.
The low bidders began to drop out one by one, until another shouted,
“15 pieces of silver and 6 bushels of barley!”
“15 pieces of silver and 10 bushels of barley”, came Hosea’s bid.
Finally, the auctioneer searched the crowd, and with no higher bid forthcoming, he rang down the gavel. “Sold!” Hosea owned her now, having purchased her back from slavery. She was his property now, and he could have done any number of things with her. He could have her killed; he could have made her a public disgrace. Instead, Hosea puts her clothes back on her and leads her…home. His pledge to her is that despite her unfaithfulness, he would love her unconditionally. His only demand was her love in return for the ransom price. She had been shamed and was bound in slavery, with no hope of winning freedom, and yet she had been redeemed by the very one to whom she had been so utterly unfaithful.
If you get that picture, then most of the sermon is already preached, for the story of Hosea and Gomer is an illustration of God’s redeeming of lost sinners. Now, it’s important that we rightly understand this word “redeem”, or “redemption”. When I was a kid, my mom would collect S&H Green Stamps, and would redeem these stamps for merchandise. That’s not what Paul has in mind here. Rather,
Redemption: A Definition
“buying back out of slavery that which was bound”
We do hear of this happening today; in some African and Middle Eastern nations, freedom for slaves has been purchased by the payment of a price. But in a theological context, redemption is God at work, buying back that which is rightfully His own, and He does so in order, not to enslave us or to demand His pound of flesh, but that He might set us free. In fact, the Greek word implies just this, that not only has a ransom price been paid, but it has been paid to obtain the release of the one bound. And we see this terminology used frequently in the New Testament, either terms like “redeem” and “redemption”, or the idea of “ransom”; this is one of the key pictures of our salvation, as is that picture of justification.
Last week, we were in a courtroom as we considered the biblical picture of justification. Today, the scene shifts to the marketplace, from judicial proceedings to business transactions. And what has taken place in redemption is this: though I am a slave, “under sin”, I have been purchased and then set free! I want to look today at four things that are implied when we speak of ourselves as having been “redeemed” by God through Jesus Christ:
I. Redemption implies a previous state of freedom.
Here’s a basic Bible truth: God created Adam and Eve to live free. He didn’t give them a long list of rules and regulations; He said, “do anything you please, except for this one thing.” Freedom! Marvelous liberty was theirs! Perfect bodies, perfect minds, full capacity to function, to be fully human; it’s something we can’t even really imagine: the world in its pristine perfection, with Adam and Eve doing whatever they wanted. Freedom is God’s design, but bondage comes in as a result of sin; we read of that in Genesis 3.
This runs counter, of course, to modern ideas of the state and situation of man. We’re evolving upward from the primordial goulash, from the impersonality of pond scum to a better and better state of humanity. We’re not getting older; we’re getting better! And as proof of this, look at the advance of technology.
Let’s now compare the 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer, which powered Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong to the moon and back, with my $700 HP laptop:
Table Talk
Which do you think is faster, and by how much? Has more RAM, and by how much? Has a bigger hard drive (storage), and by how much?
1. Clock-speed
• The AGC had a clock-speed of 2.048 Mhz
• My computer’s clock speed is 1.73 Ghz
My computer is nearly 1000 times faster than Apollo’s.
2. RAM (Random Access Memory)
• The AGC had a RAM of 4 Kb
• My computer’s RAM is 3 GB
My computer’s RAM is 786+K larger than Apollo’s.
3. ROM (the permanent storage of data like hard disk, cd-rom, floppy)
• The AGC has a ROM of 32 Kb
• My computer’s ROM is 137 GB
My computer has almost 4.5 million times as large a hard drive as the Apollo computer. Plus, I can play Hearts and Spider Solitaire on my laptop...
Can any serious person deny that technology is moving ahead at lightning speed, that the increase of the speed of change is rapidly accelerating? We know more; we can do more; our lives are far easier, at least in the sense of gadgets and devices that amaze us with their ability to entertain us and make us more productive. But a fair question is, are we better people? Might I suggest that we are now able to sin more efficiently and more creatively than ever before? We can exterminate life much more efficiently; we have more tools with which to satisfy our prurient desires; we have more substances with which to intoxicate ourselves; we have more toys with which to amuse ourselves. At the same time, we have less moral authority than ever before, less tolerance for any voice which suggests that some things are ‘wrong’, less interest in right thinking and more interest in telling ourselves those sweet little lies which keep us mollified and pacified. Lacking a moral compass, our increased technology leads us to increased brutality, increased immorality, and lessened inhibitions. We have much more learning, but were we smarter when we were dumber? And are the things that we are sold as liberating really just bonds and chains by another name?
The Bible’s story is this: once, man was free. God created us that way. Contrary to the popular pictures of “religion” painted by the enemies of the cross, God’s way is not the way of slavery and rule-keeping, but the path of freedom which we left in the Garden when Adam and Eve stepped outside the lines and violated God’s plan and purpose. Redemption implies a previous state of freedom!
II. Redemption implies a perilous plight.
Sin enslaves us. The more willfully I practice sin, the more enslaved I will be. We hear of addictions—I’ve never been altogether certain of what I think of that word, because it uses psychological terminology to describe spiritual issues—but we know what we mean when we use that word. A more biblical word would be “slavery”, and while we think of drugs and alcohol and pornography, among others, as things to which people are addicted, the fact is that sin enslaves every one of us. We are all, if you will, “sin addicts”, fallen beings who naturally do not choose God, but who choose sinful ways and practices.
III. Redemption implies the payment of a price.
Redemption is not merely “rescue” or “deliverance”. I could, in theory, “deliver” a prisoner by means of a jailbreak, but his would be a false freedom, a forever looking-over-the-shoulder, waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop kind of freedom. But redemption involves the payment of a ransom, as we might think of a kidnapper demanding a payment to secure release of a hostage. Jesus said that “the Son of man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).
Now at this point, I’d like to digress for just a moment and give you a thought or two on understanding and interpreting analogies in the Bible. “Redemption” is an analogy, in that it is an easy-to-grasp concept that helps us to understand what God has done for us in our salvation. Justification is another analogy, as is adoption, reconciliation, and so on. These word pictures give us a better grasp on what God has done in saving us. But here’s a key concept: no analogy is perfect. Further, we need to take any analogy as far as the Biblical writers do—but no further. We could, for instance, try to think through every detail of a contemporary hostage or slavery situation, and then try to find its Biblical parallel in the analogy of redemption. This would be a mistake, similar to the mistake people make when they read the parables of Christ and try to figure out little minute details that go beyond the one point Christ was trying to make in telling the parables in the first place.
Where that impacts us with regard to redemption is that theologians have speculated, “to whom is the ransom payment made?” And some are certain that God paid Satan in Christ’s death on the cross; they reason that since sin holds us in bondage, and Satan is the author of sin, it is he who has us bound and to whom God made the payment of His Son. The only problem is that this involves speculative adding to the text and teaching of Scripture; the Bible nowhere says or suggests that God paid Satan off to win our release. In fact, the Bible leaves blank the answer to that question; it doesn’t tell us to whom the ransom was paid, and we’d do well to leave it at that.
Please take care not to follow teachers who engage in all sorts of speculative and silly gymnastics with the Bible. On my blog, there’s been a lot of talk about one such teacher, a man who may well be a true believer in Christ, but who has really gotten fanciful and silly with the numbers in the Bible, to the point where he’s pretty sure that he’s got it all figured out when Jesus will return (fall 2011, in case you’re wondering). Let’s follow this principle: be clear where the Bible is clear; be careful where the Bible is unclear; be silent where the Bible is silent.
Now that we’re past Halloween, the retailers will bombard us with Christmas, beginning immediately. We’ve done some terrible things to the celebration of the incarnation of Christ, but here is why Christmas is so critical: God became incarnate in Jesus Christ, to live among us that He might die and pay the ransom for us, entering the human condition, He Who was God from eternity past. Galatians 4 tells us that “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” And I Peter 1:18-19 says that “you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.” Ransomed…purchased from the ways of sin, from the bondage that sin brings. And the purchase price was that of the blood of Jesus. B.B. Warfield said that “Redeemer is the name of the Christ of the cross. Whenever we pronounce it, our hearts are filled with remembrance that He paid a mighty price for our redemption.”
And if Jesus paid the price on the cross, there’s nothing to be added; to try is an insult to God. His was the once-for-all-time payment for our sin.
IV. Redemption implies the proprietorship of the purchaser.
“Blessed Jesus, Thou hast bought us; Thine we are”. I Corinthians 6 reminds us that we are not our own, for we have been bought with a price. If I purchase something, it’s mine. Jesus is the Lord and Master, for He has paid the price to buy the merchandise! We, slaves to sin by nature, are now bought by Christ to serve Christ.
Sin will be a cruel taskmaster; we all know that by experience. Sin promises much but delivers little; pleasures for a season, but anguish for eternity. Serving Jesus, on the other hand, brings true freedom. We all will serve somebody, but serving Jesus brings us the freedom for which God designed us. If Jesus loved us enough to die for us, will we prove we love Him enough to live for Him?
In 1829, George Wilson robbed the U.S. Mail in Philadelphia, killing a man in the process. Wilson was arrested, tried, and convicted of the crime, and sentenced to hang for the murder. But George Wilson was a man with influential friends, and intervening on his behalf, they succeeded in securing from President Andrew Jackson a full presidential pardon. Informed of this turn of events, George Wilson refused the pardon! The sheriff hardly knew what to do; how could he carry out the sentence of death upon a man who had been pardoned of his crime? The case ended up in the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice John Marshall wrote for the findings of the majority, that a pardon is a piece of paper, the value of which depends wholly upon the acceptance of the guilty party, the condemned person. Who would refuse a pardon? But if it were refused, it is as if it had never been issued; a pardon refused is no pardon at all. And thus George Wilson went to the gallows and was executed, while his pardon lay on the desk of the sheriff.
Jesus has paid the entire price for our redemption—but a price paid for a pardon is ineffective if the pardon is not accepted. The only response is faith-acceptance of Jesus Christ!
Table Talk
• In what ways does sin enslave us?
• Why is it an insult to God to add our good works to the price paid by Christ for our redemption?
