“For you know that God paid a ransom to save you from the empty life you inherited from your ancestors. And it was not paid with mere gold or silver, which lose their value. It was the precious blood of Christ, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God. God chose him as your ransom long before the world began, but now in these last days he has been revealed for your sake.”
1 Peter 1:18-20 NLT
We hear much these days about “ransomware”. This is a phenomenon peculiar to the internet age in which we live and is a high-tech version of extortion. It is mainly directed against companies or high worth individuals with a valued set of data that they want to protect. So along comes a computer program, opened up by the recipient in error, that encrypts their data and it is usually followed by a message that demands a payment in an untraceable form of currency before the data can be de-encrypted. A more old fashioned form of “ransomware” is kidnapping, where someone is taken against their will and held somewhere secure until a “ransom”, a sum of money usually, is paid by a relative or friend of the kidnapped person.
But the ransom that God paid was in a different league. In a sense, mankind, human beings, have been kidnapped by sin. The life of perfection that God designed for us became corrupted, and we can read the sad story in Genesis 3. The beings that God created were never robots or zombies, unable to do anything that would go against their Creator’s wishes. Sin probably started in Heaven, when Lucifer, the highest angel, decided that he wanted to be like God. We read the consequence of his efforts in Isaiah 14:12-15, “How you are fallen from heaven, O shining star, son of the morning! You have been thrown down to the earth, you who destroyed the nations of the world. For you said to yourself, ‘I will ascend to heaven and set my throne above God’s stars. I will preside on the mountain of the gods far away in the north. I will climb to the highest heavens and be like the Most High.’ Instead, you will be brought down to the place of the dead, down to its lowest depths”. Satan next appears in Genesis 3:1, in the garden, “The serpent was the shrewdest of all the wild animals the Lord God had made. One day he asked the woman, “Did God really say you must not eat the fruit from any of the trees in the garden?”” But we know the rest of the story – “When Adam sinned, sin entered the world. Adam’s sin brought death, so death spread to everyone, for everyone sinned” (Romans 5:12).
But God had a plan, eternal in its significance, to redeem mankind by paying a ransom. It wasn’t to be paid with the cryptocurrency favoured by modern criminals. Or even gold or silver or any other form of worldly currency. It was to be paid with the blood of God’s own Son, Jesus. Sin could only be redeemed by the shedding of blood, – “In fact, according to the law of Moses, nearly everything was purified with blood. For without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness” (Hebrews 9:22) (emphasis mine). We read more from the writer to the Hebrews, “ ... But now, once for all time, he has appeared at the end of the age to remove sin by his own death as a sacrifice” (Hebrews 9:26b). In Hebrews 10:22, we read of the consequences of our redemption by Christ’s death at Calvary, “let us go right into the presence of God with sincere hearts fully trusting him. For our guilty consciences have been sprinkled with Christ’s blood to make us clean, and our bodies have been washed with pure water” (emphasis mine).
Before the creation of the world, God had a plan for the redemption of sinful man. Through God’s grace, the plan is still active, the invitation still open. We pilgrims have accepted but many around us haven’t. Let us not miss the opportunities we have to play our part in the redemption of those in our families and communities. Christ died for all; how can we not tell others?
Dear Father God. Thank You for Jesus, Your loving Son. For what He did at Calvary we are eternally gratefully. Amen.
Being a Pilgrim 