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WHAT A REDEEMER! #1

SLAVE REDEMPTION

If you go to a pawnshop with a claim check and redeem that old guitar or the family jewels, you have to pay to get your treasures back. So when God redeems US through the death of Jesus on the cross, is that expensive ransom paid TO anyone? Is Lucifer maybe the greatest pawnbroker of all time?

A young woman named Ayak was 20 years old and pregnant when she was sold into slavery. The slave lords beat her and the other women with axes and sticks to keep them in line. The abuse was so fierce that she lost her baby, and she spent three years in slavery before receiving the gift of freedom. Amel, another victim, spent five years in slave captivity; slave traders killed her husband and took away two of her three children. Whenever she asked her master about them, he would beat her.

Well, it sounds like a horror story from our own Civil War and the dusty Mississippi cotton fields of 1863 and Alex Haley's TV miniseries, Roots. But no. The date line for this UN internet story is 9 July, 1999.

"A United Nations agency," the report begins, "yesterday accused a Christian human rights group of encouraging the slave trade in southern Sudan by handing over $100,000 to Arab traders to buy the freedom of more than 2,000 slaves."

A Christian agency based in Switzerland had raised the money to pay $50 per person in an attempt to free 2,035 slaves. And who can blame them for trying? Women and children from the Christian Dinka tribe in southern Sudan were being sold off by the thousands, for as little as fifteen bucks per person, to Muslim owners living in the northern part of the country. Unpaid hard labor, torture, beatings, rape, and sexual abuse — often including FGM for the young girls — awaited those who were captured.

But the problem is clear: paying criminals fifty dollars for slaves was basically like extortion; it just encouraged them to take more slaves, because $50, in a country where most people make less than a dollar a day, was more than they were selling them for anyway. Also, it was resulting in some cynical people simply having their own relatives pose as slaves, so they could collect the bounty themselves. What a mess . . . and you certainly have to salute those who were at least trying to help.

It's with heavy hearts that we borrow this sad and poignant story, and we really do so for just one reason. The internet reports describe what these religious groups do as "slave redemption." And here in the first chapter of Ephesians, that word "redemption" is immediately front and center. Paul has just written to Christ's followers in Ephesus — and around the world — about how God gives us the gift of "glorious grace" through Jesus, "the One He loves." And now this in verses seven and eight:

"In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that He lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding."

Now, what does it mean to be redeemed? We churchgoers enjoy the hymn, Redeemed! How I Love to Proclaim It. But what are we proclaiming? How are we redeemed "by the blood of the Lamb"?

Once again, let me gratefully share a line or two from the exceptional commentary, the Tyndale series, which was written by Dr. Francis Foulkes — the Ephesians part, that is. I think we can all relate to this straightforward definition:

"The fundamental idea of redemption is that of the setting free of a thing or a person that has come to belong to another."

Right away, of course, we do think of those desperate people in Sudan and elsewhere who had kind people buy their freedom. In the cases where the redemption actually worked out, can you imagine the relief and joy on the day liberty came? I'm sure they could very quickly embrace the reality of the Christian message on this point.

And it's important to note that the listeners in Jesus' day were equally capable of understanding redemption. Redemption of lands was provided for in the Mosaic Code; you can read about it in Leviticus 25. If a poor man was forced to sell some land, his nearest relatives were obliged to help him out by "redeeming" the property back for him. If they couldn't but the man later recovered financially, he could redeem it himself, on a sliding scale depending on the number of years the buyer had enjoyed its use. Of course, you remember that in the seventh year, land would return to its original owner — in the case of poor people — anyway. Let's recall that in the beautiful Old Testament love story of Ruth, Boaz had to deal with a "kinsman-redeemer," buying a tract of land from the mother-in-law, Naomi, and also marrying Ruth in order to protect the name of her family.

Even more important than redeeming land, though, the entire nation of Israel was a redeemed people. They had been slaves in Egypt, and God had redeemed them by His power and with those ten plagues. Centuries later, He redeemed them again from their captivity in Babylon. So here in his letter to the Ephesians, this is a most apt metaphor Paul is using.

Now friend, let's focus on one key element in the process of redemption. Because if you want to get yourself a free airline ticket from United Airlines, and you go to their REDEMPTION center at "ual.com," it's plain reality that you're going to have to turn in your accumulated 25,000 miles in order to get that ticket. Any redemption center you've ever been in is like that: you cash in miles or S&H green stamps (remember those?), or money, or SOMETHING. There's no free lunch; redemption always involves a price being paid in order to secure the prize.

And certainly that is true in the story of the Cross. In fact, MORE true than in any other buy-back scheme you've ever heard. Notice right here in Ephesians that we are redeemed — we "have redemption" — HOW? "Through His blood." The blood of Jesus, shed on the Cross, is what pays the price for our salvation. Norman Gulley writes:

"Calvary constitutes the most expensive price ever paid for anything."

"We are bought with a price," Paul tells us in both chapters six and seven of his first epistle to the Corinthians. In fact, let's read the second reference: chapter seven, verse 23:
"You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of men."

The NIV text notes add:

"Christians in all stations of life should realize that their ultimate allegiance is not to men but to Christ, who bought them with His blood."

Dr. Foulkes, in his Tyndale commentary, adds this:
"What is the means of liberation" — meaning the blood of Jesus — "is in fact also the price."

Right here we have to be most careful, because the moment you talk about "redemption" and a "ransom payment," you immediately get into this: who got paid? Who was the check made out to? Heaven's account was debited big-time, but who collected the money? And many people have their faith shaken by the proposed concept that maybe God paid the devil, Lucifer, in order to get us back. In fact, one ancient scholar, Origen, back in the second century, constructed a rather elaborate theology where that was exactly what happened: God offered up Jesus TO SATAN in exchange for the whole human race, and the devil, in his blind hatred of Christ, eagerly took the deal . . . not figuring out that on Sunday morning Jesus would slip from his grasp too, come out of the tomb, and leave Satan with his fishpole dangling in the water but with no fish on the hook. Interestingly, Bible scholars, in their discussions, openly call this the "classical" model, or, more colloquially, the "fishhook theory of the atonement."

Well, friend, as they say these days, let's not even go there. Over in Matthew chapter four — where Lucifer offered to trade Jesus the entire planet in exchange for one quick bow-down-and-worship — that was Satan's deal, not God's. Because God doesn't do business with Satan. Not then, not now, not ever. And heaven could never be a secure home and kingdom for us through eternity if it was built on the shaky foundation of a divine swindle.

Others, most notably the great scholar, St. Anselm, just under a thousand years ago, argue that Jesus, by His death, was actually paying God, providing "propitiation" back to God, appeasing the anger of God against sin. Of course, that ignores the very stark statements of Scripture that it was God who SENT Jesus, God who GAVE Him. Jesus and God were together in their love for us, their determination to redeem us.

So the bottom line is that the Bible teaches redemption and the paying of this great price . . . without saying that the price went to anyone. Mark 10:45:

"For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many."

And Hebrews 9:15:

"Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance — now that He has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant."

An Internet essay by theologian Leon Morris and others quietly concludes that the atonement, the redemption of a lost human race, is too hard to ever understand, but then asserts:
"The Cross plainly occupies the central place. . . . We are left in no doubt about its EFFICACY and its COMPLEXITY. View the human spiritual problem as you will, and the cross meets the need."

Sometimes, as any set-free slave will tell you, the proper response to the miraculous gift of redemption is not HOW?, but merely "Thank you."