I would like to ask you to use your imagination with me for a moment. Imagine that you are at home in your bed, and you’re lying awake trying to get to sleep—except you’re not in the home that you live in now. Your home is a thatch-roof hut, with a dirt floor and small gaps in the roof that allow moonlight to shine in on your bed. You’re trying to go off to sleep, but the heat from the eighth-straight day over 100 degrees won’t allow you to get comfortable just yet. So you just listen to the sounds of the night—you can hear some kind of activity down at the river (probably some animals), and you hear the sound of something that almost sounds like footsteps approaching your hut.
Then suddenly your home is glowing from the light of torches, and as you turn to look toward the door you see men coming at you quickly and grabbing hold of you. You try to fight but then you feel a sharp pain in your head, and then nothing.
When you come-to some time later, you still don’t know exactly what’s happened, but you know its bad. You’re lying on your back, and its too dark to see anything, but you can tell there’s a board about six inches in front of your face. You can’t see anyone else, but you can hear their sobs and smell the odors that arise when people are kept in tight quarters. You can feel a slight rocking motion that tells you that you must be on a boat.
Well, after what feels like an eternity in this condition, the brightness of daylight suddenly floods the room, and men come down a ladder into the room and start forcing all of you to climb up one by one. You emerge onto the deck of a ship where you’re chained together with the person in front of you and behind you, and then you’re forced to march off of the ship into a crowd of people who look like they’ve gathered to see some kind of spectacle. And all of sudden it dawns on you—you’ve been kidnapped, and you’re about to be sold as a slave.
Imagine the feelings that would hit you in that moment—fear, despair, perhaps anger or rage. Your freedom has been stolen from you, and now you are in bondage, with seemingly no hope at that time.
Now imagine that as the bidding for you begins, one man steps out of the crowd, outbids all of the others, and buys you. After the man pays his money, he walks over to you. He doesn’t look like an ogre but you’re still not really sure. And then this man says to you, “I want you to know that I didn’t buy you to make you my slave. I bought you to set you free. I paid that price for you to buy your freedom, so don’t worry about what’s going to happen to you now. I bought you to rescue you from all of this, and not only to rescue you, but to help you as well. In fact, if you’re willing, I want to adopt you as my own child. I’ll provide for you, take care of you and watch out for you. I’ll teach you and train you and show you how to thrive in this new place. What do you think?”
What would you be feeling at that moment? What would you think of that man? I want you to keep this picture in your mind—this picture of freedom from slavery—because it’s the picture that lies behind the word that we’re going to talk about today. Today, we’re going to be looking at the word redemption. This is a beautiful word that conveys a beautiful idea about what Jesus has done for us. So we’ll take a quick look at what the word redemption means, and then we’ll talk about what it means that God has redeemed us.
I. What does the word “redemption” mean?
The word redemption conveys a picture like the scenario that I had you imagine in your mind a moment ago. Redemption is the act of paying a price to free someone from slavery or debt. We can see this very clearly in the way that the word is used in the Old Testament. First of all, this word was used in everyday life when someone was buying back some land that they had to sell [READ Lev. 25:25–27].
Second, this word is also used frequently to describe what God did when he delivered Israel out of Egypt. God used this word in his first encounter with Moses to announce what he was going to do for the people. In Exodus 6:6 the Lord commanded Moses to, “Say, therefore, to the sons of Israel, ‘I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from their bondage. I will also redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments.” Notice the phrases that are parallel to the word “redemption:” bring you out from under the burdens, deliver you from bondage. That’s the idea that we’re talking about with the word redemption.
The people of Israel also used this word to describe what God had done for them in freeing them from Egypt. In a prayer to God in Psalm 74:2, Asaph writes, “Remember Your congregation, which You have purchased of old, Which You have redeemed to be the tribe of Your inheritance.” So both God and the people of Israel understood that deliverance from Egypt in terms of redemption.
Third, the Old Testament also introduces the idea that we need to be redeemed from our sins. Psalm 130:7–8 says, “O Israel, hope in the Lord; for with the Lord there is lovingkindness, and with Him is abundant redemption. And He will redeem Israel from all his iniquities.” So the idea here is that our iniquities (or our sins) have placed us into some kind of bondage, some kind of slavery or debt that we need to be released from, and it is in fact the Lord himself who can redeem us.
Now please notice that this is different from the way that we often use the word “redemption.” If you follow sports you’ll often hear people talk about how a team has a chance for redemption when they play a team that beat them earlier in the season. Well, that’s really closer to the idea of revenge than the biblical idea of redemption.
So again, the biblical idea of redemption is the act of paying a price to free someone from slavery or debt, and the New Testament tells us that this is exactly what Jesus did for us when He died on the cross. God sent His Son into the world to redeem us, but what exactly does that mean for us?
II. What does it mean that God has redeemed us?
A. He has set us free from our slavery to sin and our debt to Him—Col. 1:13–14
Follow along with me if you would as I read these verses [READ Col. 1:13–14]. Take a closer look at the language of these verses. The first part of v. 13 speaks of spiritual slavery. First Paul writes that God rescued us, which tells us that we were in danger. Without Jesus, we are only fooling ourselves if we think we are safe and secure, because in reality we need to be rescued. And rescued from what? The domain or power of darkness. Darkness is a word picture for sin and the separation from God that it brings, and before we accepted Jesus we were under the domain or under the power of sin. We were in bondage to it, but by redeeming us God broke the chains of sin and cast them from us, making us free to come into the kingdom of His beloved Son, into a new domain with a new Lord—one who rules over us for our good and not for our destruction.
So God set us free from our slavery to sin and he also set us free from our debt to Him. We see this in the last part of v. 14 when Paul writes that through Christ’s redemption we have also received the forgiveness of sins. The idea of forgiveness brings up the concept of a spiritual debt that we owed to God, and Col. 2:13–14 tells us that our debt has been forgiven [READ 2:13–14]. Now friends I know that people get excited on The Dave Ramsey Show when they get out of financial debt, so I think we can get a little bit excited when we can look to Jesus and say, “We’re debt free!” “Jesus paid it all—all to Him I owe—sin had left a crimson stain—He washed it white as now!”
By redeeming us, God has set us free from our slavery to sin and our debt to Him. But what’s more…
B. He has purchased us to adopt us as His own sons—Gal. 4:4–5
Turn with me to Gal. 4:4–5 [READ Gal. 4:4–5] I imagine many of you are familiar with the old Westerns where one man would save a town from a group of bandits. The plot usually goes like this—one day in a small, out-of-the-way frontier town, a renegade gunslinger comes riding in. Now the gunslinger is really just passing through on his way to another town until he crosses paths with a beautiful, eligible female who tells him that the town is oppressed by a gang of outlaws. But the gunslinger still isn’t totally convinced to take on the outlaws until he discovers that it’s the same group of bandits who left him for dead 10 years ago. So a final showdown is set-up for high noon wherein the gunslinger kills all of the bad guys and liberates the town from their oppression. The townspeople then want to make him their mayor, but he refuses, and when the beautiful, eligible female begs him to stay, he tells her that his heart is far too restless to be tied down, so he kisses her and then rides off into the sunset.
Well, it makes for a great story that the gunslinger freed the townspeople, but have you ever realized that afterward, he leaves them to fend for themselves. Yes they’re free, but they’re still unprotected from future threats. Now friends my point is this—when God redeemed us, He not only set us free, He also stuck around to take care of us. In fact, Gal. 4 says here that God adopted us into His own family. Like the man in our opening story, God not only purchased us out of slavery, but He went on to make us part of His family, so that now He has promised to be a Father to us—to provide for our needs, to protect us, to teach us and train us to be like our spiritual brother, Jesus Christ. What an incredible act of grace that God has performed for us—to receive us into His own family.
So how are we to respond to all of this? What should our attitude be toward God?
C. He is worthy of our utmost honor and respect because of the price that He paid for us—1 Peter 1:17–19
Turn with me to 1 Peter 1:17–19 [READ 1 Pet. 1:17–19]. When I was in high school, we always had a fundraiser that was called “senior slave day.” This was a day where the seniors would sell themselves as slaves to underclassmen to raise money for their party on the night of graduation. This was always a great time and it was always fun to see how much the underclassmen were willing to pay to buy one of their friends in the senior class. Every senior wanted to go for a high price because it was a badge of honor.
Well spiritually speaking, we have a badge of honor in the price that God was willing to give to redeem our souls. Peter stresses that we were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold—this is the best that the world has to offer, and yet in the end it just tarnishes like everything else. Oh no—God didn’t give something as invaluable as silver and gold. He redeemed us with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ. God was willing to send His own Son into the world and to have His Son shed His blood to redeem our souls. And Peter says that remembering Christ’s precious blood should lead us to conduct our lives in the fear of God, which is an attitude of the utmost honor and respect.
So where does all of this leave us today? First, we can rejoice in the freedom from sin that we have in Christ. Jesus has set us free so that we don’t have to give in to our sinful desires anymore. Sin is no longer our master and we no longer have to live under its command.
Second, we can remember that rather than a harsh master we now have a loving Father in God. Our heavenly Father loves us and has promised to take care of us, and He has shown us the right way to live and helps us walk in it. And because of the tremendous price that He paid to make all of this possible, we should show Him honor as our Father and redeemer.
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