Redemption
Redemption
We now move on from ‘propitiation’ to ‘redemption’. In seeking to understand the achievement of the cross, the imagery changes from temple court to market-place, from the ceremonial realm to the commercial, from religious rituals to business transactions. For at its most basic to ‘redeem’ is to buy or buy back, whether as a purchase or a ransom. Inevitably, then, the emphasis of the redemption image is on our sorry state – indeed our captivity – in sin which made an act of divine rescue necessary. ‘Propitiation’ focuses on the wrath of God which was placated by the cross; ‘redemption’ on the plight of sinners from which they were ransomed by the cross.
And ‘ransom’ is the correct word to use. The Greek words lytroō (usually translated ‘redeem’) and apolytrōsis (‘redemption’) are derived from lytron (‘a ransom’ or ‘price of release’), which was almost a technical term in the ancient world for the purchase or manumission of a slave. In view of ‘the unwavering usage of profane authors’, namely that this word-group refers to ‘a process involving release by payment of a ransom price’,23 often very costly, wrote Leon Morris, we have no liberty to dilute its meaning into a vague and even cheap deliverance. We have been ‘ransomed’ by Christ, not merely ‘redeemed’ or ‘delivered’ by him. B. B. Warfield was right to point out that we are ‘assisting at the death bed of a word. It is sad to witness the death of any worthy thing – even of a worthy word. And worthy words do die, like any other worthy thing – if we do not take good care of them’. Sadder still is ‘the dying out of the hearts of men of the things for which the words stand’.24 He was referring to his generation’s loss of a sense of gratitude to him who paid our ransom.
In the Old Testament property, animals, persons and the nation were all ‘redeemed’ by the payment of a price. The right (even the duty) to play the role of ‘kinsman redeemer’ and buy back a property which had been alienated, in order to keep it in the family or tribe, was illustrated in the case of both Boaz and Jeremiah.25 As for animals, the firstborn males of all livestock belonged by right to Yahweh; donkeys and unclean animals, however, could be redeemed (i.e. bought back) by the owner.26 In the case of individual Israelites, each had to pay ‘a ransom for his life’ at the time of the national census; firstborn sons (who since the first Passover belonged to God), and especially those in excess of the number of Levites who replaced them, had to be redeemed; the owner of a notoriously dangerous bull, which gored a man to death, was himself to be put to death, unless he redeemed his life by the payment of an adequate fine; and an impoverished Israelite compelled to sell himself into slavery could later either redeem himself or be redeemed by a relative.27 In all these cases of ‘redemption’ there was a decisive and costly intervention. Somebody paid the price necessary to free property from mortgage, animals from slaughter, and persons from slavery, even death.
What about the nation? Certainly the vocabulary of redemption was used to describe Yahweh’s deliverance of Israel both from slavery in Egypt28 and from exile in Babylon.29 But in this case, since the redeemer was not a human being but God himself, can we still maintain that to ‘redeem’ is to ‘ransom’? What price did Yahweh pay to redeem his people? Bishop B. F. Westcott seems to have been the first to suggest an answer: ‘the idea of the exertion of a mighty force, the idea that the “redemption” costs much, is everywhere present.’30 Warfield enlarged on this: ‘the idea that the redemption from Egypt was the effect of a great expenditure of the divine power and in that sense cost much, is prominent in the allusions to it, and seems to constitute the central idea sought to be conveyed.’31 For God redeemed Israel ‘with an outstretched arm’ and ‘with a mighty hand’.32 We conclude that redemption always involved the payment of a price, and that Yahweh’s redemption of Israel was not an exception. Even here, Warfield sums up, ‘the conception of price-paying intrinsic in lutrousthai is preserved....A redemption without a price paid is as anomalous a transaction as a sale without money passing’.33
When we enter the New Testament and consider its teaching about redemption, two changes immediately strike us. Although it is still inherent in the concept both that those needing redemption are in a bad plight and that they can be redeemed only by the payment of a price, yet now the plight is moral rather than material, and the price is the atoning death of God’s Son. This much is already evident in Jesus’ famous ‘ransom-saying’, which is foundational to the New Testament doctrine of redemption: ‘The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mark 10:45). The imagery implies that we are held in a captivity from which only the payment of a ransom can set us free, and that the ransom is nothing less than the Messiah’s own life. Our lives are forfeit; his life will be sacrificed instead. F. Büchsel is surely correct that the saying ‘undoubtedly implies substitution’. This is made plain by the combination of the two adjectives in the Greek expression antilytron hyper pollōn (literally, ‘a ransom in place of and for the sake of many’). ‘The death of Jesus means that there happens to him what would have had to happen to the many. Hence he takes their place.’34 A parallel expression (perhaps an echo of it) occurs in 1 Timothy 2:5–6, ‘Christ Jesus...gave himself as a ransom for all men.’
It is instructive that the Jewish historian Josephus used similar language when he described the Roman general Crassus’ visit to the Temple in Jerusalem in 54–53 BC, intent on plundering the sanctuary. A priest named Eleazar, who was guardian of the sacred treasures, gave him a large bar of gold (worth 10,000 shekels) as lytron anti pantōn, ‘a ransom instead of all’. That is, the gold bar was offered as a substitute for the Temple treasures.35
What then, first, is the human plight, from which we cannot extricate ourselves and which makes it necessary for us to be redeemed? We have seen that in the Old Testament people were redeemed from a variety of grave social situations such as debt, captivity, slavery, exile and liability to execution. But it is a moral bondage from which Christ has ransomed us. This is described now as our ‘transgressions’ or ‘sins’ (since in two key verses ‘redemption’ is a synonym for ‘the forgiveness of sins’36), now as ‘the curse of the law’ (namely the divine judgment which it pronounces on law-breakers),37 and now as ‘the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers’.38 Yet even our release from these captivities does not complete our redemption. There is more to come. For Christ ‘gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness’,39 to liberate us from all the ravages of the Fall. This we have not yet experienced. Just as the Old Testament people of God, though already redeemed from their Egyptian and Babylonian exiles, were yet waiting for the promise of a fuller redemption, ‘looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem’,40 so the New Testament people of God, though already redeemed from guilt and judgment, are yet waiting for ‘the day of redemption’ when we shall be made perfect. This will include ‘the redemption of our bodies’. At that point the whole groaning creation will be liberated from its bondage to decay and be brought to share in the freedom of the glory of God’s children. Meanwhile, the indwelling Holy Spirit is himself the seal, the guarantee and the firstfruits of our final redemption.41 Only then will Christ have redeemed us (and the universe) from all sin, pain, futility and decay.
Secondly, having considered the plight from which, we need to consider the price with which, we have been redeemed. The New Testament never presses the imagery to the point of indicating to whom the ransom was paid, but it leaves us in no doubt about the price: it was Christ himself. To begin with, there was the cost of the incarnation, of entering into our condition in order to reach us. Certainly we are told that when God sent his Son, he was ‘born under law, to redeem those under law’ (Gal. 4:4–5). Jeremias wonders if Paul was alluding to ‘the dramatic act of entering into slavery in order to redeem a slave’, just as the giving of the body to be burnt (1 Cor. 13:3) may refer to being ‘branded with the slave-mark’.42 Beyond the incarnation, however, lay the atonement. To accomplish this he gave ‘himself’ (1 Tim. 2:6; Titus 2:14) or his ‘life’ (his psychē, Mark 10:45), dying under the law’s curse to redeem us from it (Gal. 3:13).
When indicating the costly price paid by Christ to ransom us, however, the commonest word used by the New Testament authors was neither ‘himself’ nor his ‘life’ but his ‘blood’. It was ‘not with perishable things such as silver or gold’, wrote Peter, ‘that you were redeemed..., but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect’ (1 Pet. 1:18–19). The writer to the Hebrews, steeped as he was in sacrificial imagery, emphasized that Christ was victim as well as priest, since ‘he entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood’.43
But what is meant by Christ’s ‘blood’? Everybody agrees that it alludes to his death, but in what sense? Picking on the threefold assertion in Leviticus 17:11–14 that ‘the life of a creature is in the blood’ or ‘the life of every creature is its blood’, and the even more straightforward statement of Deuteronomy 12:23 that ‘the blood is the life’, a strangely popular theory was developed by British theologians at the end of the nineteenth century that Christ’s blood stands not for his death but for his life, which is released through death and so made available for us. Vincent Taylor, C. H. Dodd and even P. T. Forsyth were among those who developed this idea. Its origin is usually traced back, however, to Bishop B. F. Westcott’s Commentary on the Epistles of John (1883), in which he wrote:
By the outpouring of the Blood the life which was in it was not destroyed, though it was separated from the organism which it had before quickened.... Thus two distinct ideas were included in the sacrifice of a victim, the death of the victim by the shedding of its blood, and the liberation, so to speak, of the principle of life by which it had been animated, so that this life became available for another end.44
Just so, Christ’s blood was his life first given for us and then given to us.
In his later commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews Westcott was still teaching the same concept. Blood is life ‘regarded as still living’, and ‘the blood poured out is the energy...made available for others’.45
James Denney was outspoken in his rejection of this thesis. In his book The Death of Christ (1902) he urged his readers not to adopt ‘the strange caprice which fascinated Westcott’, who distinguished in the blood of Christ between his death and his life, his blood shed and offered, his life laid down and liberated for men. ‘I venture to say’, he continued, ‘that a more groundless fancy never haunted and troubled the interpretation of any part of Scripture’ (p.149).
Then in 1948 Alan Stibbs’ excellent Tyndale monograph was published, The Meaning of the Word ‘Blood’ in Scripture, which should have laid this ghost to rest for ever. He makes a thorough examination of the occurrences of ‘blood’ in both Old and New Testaments, and has no difficulty in demonstrating that it is ‘a word-symbol for death’. True, ‘the blood is the life of the flesh’. But ‘this means that if the blood is separated from the flesh, whether in man or beast, the present physical life in the flesh will come to an end. Blood shed stands, therefore, not for the release of life from the burden of the flesh, but for the bringing to an end of life in the flesh. It is a witness to physical death, not an evidence of spiritual survival’. To ‘drink Christ’s blood’, therefore, describes ‘not participation in his life but appropriation of the benefits of his life laid down’.46 We cannot do better than conclude as he does with a quotation from Johannes Behm’s article on ‘blood’ in Kittel’s Dictionary: ‘“Blood of Christ” is (like “Cross”) only another, clearer expression for the death of Christ in its salvation meaning’ or ‘redemptive significance’.47
The ‘redemption’ image has a third emphasis. In addition to the plight from which, and the price with which, we are ransomed, it draws attention to the person of the redeemer who has proprietary rights over his purchase. Thus Jesus’ lordship over both church and Christian is attributed to his having bought us with his own blood. Presbyters, for example, are summoned to conscientious oversight of the church on the ground that God in Christ has bought it with his own blood (Acts 20:28). If the church was worth his blood, is it not worth our labour? The privilege of serving it is established by the preciousness of the price paid for its purchase. That seems to be the argument. Again, the redeemed community in heaven are singing a new song which celebrates the worthiness of the Lamb:
You are worthy to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
because you were slain,
and with your blood you purchased men for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation.48
A remembrance that Jesus Christ has bought us with his blood, and that in consequence we belong to him, should motivate us as individual Christians to holiness, just as it motivates presbyters to faithful ministry and the heavenly host to worship. We detect a note of outrage in Peter’s voice when he speaks of false teachers who by their shameful behaviour are ‘denying the sovereign Lord who bought them’ (2 Pet. 2:1). Since he bought them, they are his. They should therefore acknowledge and not deny him. Paul’s urgent summons to us to ‘flee from sexual immorality’ is based on the doctrine of the human body and who owns it. On the one hand, ‘Don’t you know’, he asks incredulously, ‘that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?’ On the other, ‘You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honour God with your body.’49 Our body has not only been created by God and will one day be resurrected by him, but it has been bought by Christ’s blood and is indwelt by his Spirit. Thus it belongs to God three times over, by creation, redemption and indwelling. How then, since it does not belong to us, can we misuse it? Instead, we are to honour God with it, by obedience and self-control. Bought by Christ, we have no business to become the slaves of anybody or anything else. Once we were the slaves of sin; now we are the slaves of Christ, and his service is the true freedom.