Ransom - Mark 10:45 Series

Substitutionary

One of the debates is over the word for. When he said he would give his life as a ransom for many, that word translated “for” is the Greek word anti which normally means in place of. The first time that word appears in the NT is in Matthew 2.

Matthew 2:22 … Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod.

That’s the normal meaning of the preposition anti. The way Jesus uses the word here is a lot like the way he used it in Matthew 5:38—an eye anti an eye and a tooth anti a tooth. Your eye is the price for their eye; your tooth is the price for their tooth. Here Jesus said he came to give his life as a ransom as the price for the lives of many.

This answers the question Jesus asked back in ch.8—"What can a man give in exchange for his soul?” What is the price to free a soul? Nothing less than the very life of the Son of God.

Penal

So why is that controversial? It’s controversial because some people don’t like the idea of God requiring the life of his Son in order to secure our forgiveness. They call it divine child abuse. They say it makes God look like some primitive, angry deity who can only be appeased by death. And instead we should think of God as being only soft and friendly and harmless, never punishing evil in any way, never getting angry, never bringing justice. They say God should just forgive us as an act of his will without anybody paying any kind of price. They say a God who would require death for sin is a terrible God.

I can’t relate to that argument. From my point of view, a god who didn’t carry out justice would be a terrible god. A deity who just winked at sin would be evil. There was a woman in the news the other day who didn’t know what to do with her 6 year old grandson during the lockdown, so she locked him in a shed for 2 months, until she got caught. She gave him food, gave him plastic bags to use for going to the bathroom, and periodically just hosed him off with her garden hose. 6 years old, locked in a shed for 2 months because Grandma can’t be bothered. And you know that’s just one of thousands and thousands of cases of child abuse. You think of the sex traffickers who kidnap young girls, beat them, then sell them into prostitution where they are raped 50 times a day for years and years. If there’s no punishment for those people—no justice—I can’t imagine worshipping a god like that.

Not only that, but think of how unjust and cruel God would be if Jesus’ death wasn’t in our place and wasn’t punishment for our sin. If not for sin, why did he suffer and die? Why would a father do that to his son?

Isaiah 53:10 It was the LORD's will to crush him and cause him to suffer.

Acts 4:27 Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. 28 They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.

It was God who made the decision that Jesus would suffer and die. Jesus was innocent. If it wasn’t as a sacrifice for our sin, then it was just the greatest miscarriage of justice in all human history. Talk about child abuse and cruelty—to kill your son on a cross for no good reason?