“…knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, 19 but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ. 20 For He was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but has appeared in these last times for the sake of you 21 who through Him are believers in God, who raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God.”
The Psalmist wrote:
“No man can by any means redeem his brother Or give to God a ransom for him— For the redemption of his soul is costly, And he should cease trying forever— “ Psalm 49:7-8
In the verses prior to today’s text Peter admonished his readers to reject entirely their former life of evil desires and ignorance of what is good.
As he continues, here in verse 18, he cites as our incentive for submission to the Holy Spirit and the exercise of Godly conduct, our knowledge of certain things. So let’s look at what we know today.
First, let’s talk about…
THE NEGATIVE THING WE KNOW
Like the Psalmist said, no amount of worldly wealth can be amassed to purchase back a soul. In fact the very idea is so ludicrous that it hardly merits mention.
Unfortunately though, there seems to be a lot of people who have never recognized the absurdity of trying to ‘buy God off’.
I think they exist fundamentally in two camps. The irreligious think to make their heaven here in this life with their wealth and what they can accumulate to themselves.
I don’t know who said it first but most of us have heard the foolish utterance that the winner is the guy who dies with the most toys.
This made me think of something I thought I had heard about Frank Sinatra so I went to the web to research it. In the meantime I ran across a site that talked about a gangster named Willy the Wimp who died in 1984 and was buried in a ‘Cadillac coffin’. Not actually a Cadillac, but a coffin designed to look like an old Deville one-seater. There was a picture of him all laid out in his Cadillac coffin, dressed in a pink suit topped with grey fedora, looking spiffy and going nowhere.
So I came to the Wikipedia site about Sinatra and found that the legend is, Frank was buried in a blue suit with a flask of Jack Daniel’s, a roll of ten dimes, a Zippo lighter and a pack of Camel cigarettes. On his tombstone are the words, ‘The best is yet to come’.
I beg to differ.
The other camp consists of the religious who think that their alms and their good deeds will earn them the same sort of deference at the gates of the Celestial City that they enjoy from the apartment house doorman or the desk clerk at the Hilton.
Jesus asked: “…what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?” Matt 16:26
What indeed? Men go through life deliberately shutting their ears to the gospel, closing their hearts to the call of God, cursing His name and mocking His people, and then with a prideful audacity that only the foolish and ignorant are not ashamed to display, they go to their grave boasting that they are heaven-bound and the best is yet to come.
But God’s declaration to them is ‘You fool, this very night your soul is required of you…’ Lk 12:20
The religious dead play at a façade of piety while trusting that the big check they dropped in the plate today will cover for their indulgence in the lusts of the flesh yesterday.
They take a week or two to travel to a third world country and pass out rice and Bibles and that washes away any stain of indifference to the plight of their unsaved neighbor or their disdainful treatment of the unwed mother in the pew behind them.
Redemption is not purchased with any of these things; not big checks and not good deeds.
God could make the stars into diamonds. He could speak and turn the planets into gold and silver and you would sell your own soul for paltry penance?
Would you think to buy His favor with that which you would not have apart from His grace?
Nevertheless, Peter says redemption is not purchased with those things; neither that which man can gather nor all that God could make.
Never mind the billions upon billions who have passed through this world; if Adam and Eve had remained childless the cost to redeem their two souls would have remained the same, and Eden itself could not have measured out a down payment.
Let’s talk about…
A THING TO MAKE CLEAR
There is something I want to make sure we’re clear on.
The word ‘redeem’ means to purchase back or to regain by rescue.
Now I like C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. They are a great classic work and valuable to teach a great deal about Christianity. But there is one part that could lead to a misconception if the reader takes it the wrong way.
In “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe”, the evil White Witch is obviously symbolic of Satan. When Edmond betrays his brother and sisters to the White Witch, Aslan, as a type of Christ, trades himself for Edmond so that Edmond is freed from the Witch’s clutches and Aslan dies in his place.
What we must be careful to understand is that when Jesus went to the cross and shed His blood and died it was not to pay something to Satan as though he was the offended party and God owed him something.
The only Person offended by sin is God, and it was His holiness that sin was an offense to; only He could claim offense and therefore it was His sole right to name the price that would be required to pay its penalty. That price was death; the death of the offending party.
It was God’s mercy and grace that determined to require the blood of His own Son to pay that penalty for all. He did not owe Satan anything.
I don’t remember reading anywhere in scripture that Satan has a personal claim on human beings. When all is said and done and Christ has returned and this earth is no more, Satan is going to be too busy with his own fate to have time to think about torturing the souls of those who are eternally separated from God.
Satan is a deceiver and a destroyer, but he has no personal claim on any other individual. The only hold he has over men is the veil he puts over the minds of unregenerate men so they ‘…might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ…’ 2 Cor 4:4
F.C. Jennings, in his work entitled Satan, (pp 29-30) makes some profound statements that I want to share with you before we get back on track:
“He so weaves the course of this age; its religious forms, ceremonies, external decencies, respectabilities, and conventionalities as to form a thick veil, that entirely hides ‘the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus’, which consists in righteous mercy to penitent sinners only. This veil is not formed by evil-living, depravity, or any form of what passes as evil amongst men; but by cold formality, heartless decency, proud self-complacency, highly esteemed external respectability, and we must add, church-membership – all without Christ. It is the most fatal of all delusions, the thickest of all veils, and the most common. It is the way that because it is religious, respectable, decent ‘seems right unto a man but the end thereof is death’; for there is no Christ, no Lamb of God, no Blood of Atonement in it.”
No, the cost of the redemption of men’s souls is a payment God required and then paid. There was no bargaining with Satan and he didn’t have anything to bargain with.
Now let’s talk about…
THE POSITIVE THING WE KNOW
Peter says in verse 19, “…but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ.”
Now let’s make sure we all understood what Peter’s first readers understood when they heard a reference to a ‘lamb unblemished and spotless’.
Go to Exodus 12 and let’s read verses 1-13
“Now the LORD said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, 2 “This month shall be the beginning of months for you; it is to be the first month of the year to you. 3 “Speak to all the congregation of Israel, saying, ‘On the tenth of this month they are each one to take a lamb for themselves, according to their fathers’ households, a lamb for each household. 4 ‘Now if the household is too small for a lamb, then he and his neighbor nearest to his house are to take one according to the number of persons in them; according to what each man should eat, you are to divide the lamb. 5 ‘Your lamb shall be an unblemished male a year old; you may take it from the sheep or from the goats. 6 ‘You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month, then the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel is to kill it at twilight. 7 ‘Moreover, they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and on the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. 8 ‘They shall eat the flesh that same night, roasted with fire, and they shall eat it with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. 9 ‘Do not eat any of it raw or boiled at all with water, but rather roasted with fire, both its head and its legs along with its entrails. 10 ‘And you shall not leave any of it over until morning, but whatever is left of it until morning, you shall burn with fire. 11 ‘Now you shall eat it in this manner: with your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it in haste—it is the LORD’S Passover. 12 ‘For I will go through the land of Egypt on that night, and will strike down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments—I am the LORD. 13 ‘The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live; and when I see the blood I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.”
So the unblemished and spotless lamb was chosen, killed, and its blood applied to the doorways of their homes and when God saw the blood, placed there in obedience to His command, He passed His arm of protection over them so the Destroyer would not come near on the night that all the firstborn of Egypt died.
Now I’m going to be clear about something else before I make my next statements.
Christ’s literal blood was literally shed on the day of His scourging, beating and crucifixion. He literally died and He bodily rose from the grave in glorified life on the third day. These are truths that have been spiritualized or just denied outright by unbelievers, but they are true nonetheless.
However just as it was not the lamb’s blood itself that saved the children of Israel, it was not the literal blood of Jesus that had some intrinsic power to save. The reference to His blood and the shedding of His blood entails His entire work of redemption that was carried out on the cross and in going down into death for sinners.
Listen to MacArthur on this:
“The meaning of the crucifixion…is not fully expressed in the bleeding alone. There was nothing supernatural in Jesus’ blood that sanctified those it touched. Those who flogged Him might have been spattered with blood. Yet that literal application of Jesus’ blood did nothing to purge their sins. Had the Lord bled without dying, redemption could not have been accomplished. If the atonement had been stopped before the full wages of sin had been satisfied, Jesus’ bloodshed would have been to no avail. If blood per se could redeem sinners, why did Jesus not just bleed and not die? He did not because the ‘shedding of blood’ in Scripture is an expression that means more than just bleeding.” The MacArthur New Testament Commentary – 1 Peter, MacArthur, Moody, 2004
No, the blood of Jesus Christ poured out for you and me ran down and mingled with the dust that day on the hill called Golgotha. It dried and decomposed and was soon gone.
But the precious cost in the shedding of that blood involved the death of the only absolutely innocent human who ever lived; the utterly sinless Son of God who purchased our redemption at a cost greater than a universe of gold, silver and precious gems.
It was precious and costly because the God of life had to taste of death, going to it as a lamb to slaughter, never opening His mouth to object, never wavering with the slightest turn of His noble head, willingly laying His life down to purchase back to the Father that which was lost at Eden and more.
That’s the positive thing we know and that Peter says the knowledge of which should cause us to walk in holiness and Godly conduct while on this earth.
Now let’s talk about…
CHRIST THE FOREKNOWN
We made mention of this verse a few weeks ago and Peter’s usage of this term ‘foreknown’ in reference to Christ.
Remember that it denotes a ‘foreordination’, a predetermination.
God wasn’t caught by surprise when Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden folks.
Just a month or two ago I was flipping channels one day while I took a break from work and decided I’d go to one or two of the Christian broadcasting channels, since I never watch those and was curious of their content.
Just moments after I turned to a channel where a pretty well-known preacher was talking about God’s announcement of the Flood, he read those verses in Genesis 6 where the Lord saw the wickedness of man and was sorry that He had made man on the earth and said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land…” (vs 7)
Then he closed his Bible and said, “God said, ‘I made a mistake; I’m starting over’!”
No, God did NOT say ‘I made a mistake’!
My goodness, where do these people get this stuff? By the way, that moment reminded me why I don’t watch those channels and I turned off the television and went back to work.
Folks, listening to some of these crackpots talk you’d think that God was busy cleaning his nails or something and suddenly looked down and said, “Oh my! Adam’s eating from that tree after I clearly told him not to! What are We going to do now?”
God is from eternity to eternity and all of eternity is ‘now’ for Him. It was the predetermined plan of the Trinity before the foundation of the world that the Second Person of the Godhead would enter into history as a human baby, grow to manhood in stature and in favor with God and men in that He was without sin; without offense, and that He would go to the cross as God’s chosen, unblemished Lamb of sacrifice.
God didn’t make it up as He went along; God didn’t have to back up and devise a new plan because mankind took Him by surprise with sin.
He was foreordained for this purpose before the foundation of the world, and in the fullness of time He appeared on the scene to accomplish in time what had been determined in eternity.
Now Peter says that He appeared in these last times. You know what that means. The last days of earth. We’ve been in the last times since Jesus came out of the tomb and the end draws almost palpably near…
…for you who through Him are believers in God.
Hear it? He appeared to accomplish this sacrifice for you, if you are a believer in Christ, because Peter says it is through Him that you believe in God.
Listen. People will say, ‘Sure, I believe in God’. No, they don’t. Not if they are not a believer in Christ.
They might honestly be able to say, “I believe there is a god”. But they don’t believe in Him and they don’t know Him and He does not know them, unless they have come to Him ‘through Christ’.
And the reason you CAN come to Him through Christ, the reason Christ can bring you to Him, is because He raised Christ from the dead and gave Him glory.
You see? The Son glorifies the Father, and the Father glorifies the Son, Who was raised up by the power of the eternal Spirit (Rom 8:11) so that He might bring many sons to glory (Heb 2:10). That’s you who believe; who are of the elect; His chosen ones.
The Son brings glory to the Father, the Father glorifies the Son, the Son brings those the Father has given Him to the Father and glorifies them.
Therefore your faith for now and your hope of later are firmly grounded in God.
By faith your soul is redeemed from the fall, and the hope you have in God is for the redemption of your body in Heaven.
The immeasurable cost of redemption was paid so that you could receive an immeasurable and eternal weight of glory.
Do you know these things today? Peter says that as a believer you do know them. But he’s not talking about an academic understanding. He’s talking about a settled assurance that manifests in Holy behavior, in Godly conduct, during the time of your stay on the earth.
As Paul said to the Corinthians, “For you have been bought with a price…” 1 Cor 6:20
And oh, what a precious price! What a costly price! What an immeasurable cost! The precious blood as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ!
May this knowledge bind us to Him in faith and hope and obedience until He appears once more, without reference to sin (Heb 9:28), to take us home to glory.
