Redemption: Renegotiating the Value of Creation

Exodus, Exodus 1:1-14

Post last updated on September 18, 2024

 Image credit:  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Genesis 46:8-27 recalls the names of those who entered Egypt with the patriarch, Jacob. The Bible’s second book, Exodus, records the nation’s subsequent rescue from that country. The deliverance became necessary by reason of a change in Egypt’s rulers: The former regime had welcomed Jacob, but another king, who eventually rises to power in Egypt, became Israel’s oppressor (Genesis 47:1-10, Exodus 1:8). As such, between Jacob’s initial arrival in the country and the departure of Jacob’s descendants, lies a bitter history of Israel’s bondage, founded as it was in its experience of an unexpected and changing situation in respect to Egypt’s seat of power. This disappointment, however, becomes the setting for the surprising character of Israel’s deliverance. Jacob first entered Egypt with his family, but many years later Moses would depart that land with an entire nation of people. It is, then, in the recollection of Israel’s servitude in Egypt that the means of its deliverance possesses its significance. The Israelites offer a sacrifice, according to the command of God (Genesis 12:21-30). They then escape eastward, through the Red Sea, and into the wilderness under the leadership of Moses. This is the result: Israel becomes (as it were) the servants of God when they are freed from Pharaoh’s bondage, and this is an idea expressed in a single word, redemption.

Redemption now retains a range of definition in the broader culture, sometimes made shorthand in literature and film for both renewal and vindication, but its use in scripture is helpfully summarized in a variety of places. For instance, the 1939 edition of the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, traces a definition that begins in the ownership of property and develops into the recovery of that property by the payment of money. “From this start,” the entry notes, “the word ‘redemption’ throughout the Old Testament is used in the general sense of deliverance.”¹The longer quote is as follows: “The idea of redemption in the Old Testament takes its start from the thought of property (Leviticus 25:26; Ruth 4:4 ff). Money is paid according to law to buy back something which must be delivered or rescued (Numbers 3:51; Nehemiah 5:8). From this start the word ‘redemption’ throughout the Old Testament is used in the general sense of deliverance.” See the specific quotation here; otherwise, in the “International Standard Bible Encyclopedia Online,” ed. John Nuelsen James Orr, Edgar Mullins, Morris Evans, and Melvin Grove Kyle, International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1939),  https://www.internationalstandardbible.com. Among other things, this means that we should expect to see redemption’s initial association to “recovered property” become an integral part of whatever other ideas the same word is later made to refer. Leviticus 25:23-24 illustrates this point. There, we find a peculiar aspect of Israel’s law in respect to property. Whenever someone sold his land in Israel, the law required that the land’s buyer was to later provide opportunity for the seller (or family members) to repurchase the same land that he had already sold.²Adam Clarke (1762-1832) added this devotional note when he wrote in respect to this law in his commentary on scripture. “As God in a miraculous manner gave them possession of this land, they were therefore to consider themselves merely as tenants to him; and on this ground he, as the great landholder or lord of the soil, prescribes to them all the conditions on which they shall hold it. This one circumstance was peculiarly favorable to their advancement in religion, in righteousness, and true holiness; for feeling that they had nothing which they could call their own upon earth, they must frequently, by this, be put in mind of the necessity of having a permanent dwelling in the heavenly inheritance, and of that preparation without which it could not be possessed.” This meant that sale of land, moving in one direction from the original owner to the buyer, was reversed and recovered by its original owner in a transaction called redemption. As such, in respect to land, the idea of sale and purchase intrinsically possessed and predicted the idea of its recovery and return.

It is unsurprising, then, that when the LORD sends Moses to announce that he will deliver the Israelites from Egypt and its burdens, he instructs Moses to use this particular word: “Wherefore say unto the children of Israel, I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will rid you out of their bondage, and I will redeem [emphasis added] you with a stretched out arm, and with great judgments” (Exodus 6:6). Though the word, redemption, appears in the Bible once before this occasion (Genesis 48:16), it is in respect to Israel’s deliverance from Egypt that the word is repeated frequently enough as to require initial and fundamental association with Israel’s rescue. Redemption, then, most fully enters into the biblical revelation with the Exodus, and it is emphatically named there as the character of God’s deliverance of Pharaoh’s bondsmen.

* * *

That said, this use of the word redemption exists beside another feature of the Exodus: Pharaoh’s insistent claim that the Israelites are as his servants, even as the LORD declares that he will free Israel for himself. Several passages illustrate this, highlighting the way that God’s command to Pharaoh that he free the Israelites, simultaneously reveals that God has called Israel to serve him (Exodus 4:22-23).³Also, Exodus 7:16, 8:1, 8:20, 9:1, 9:13, 10:3, etc. Therefore, the eventual change of Israel’s status is not merely a confirmation of Israel’s freedom from Pharaoh, as if Israel, after departing Egypt, could now wander off into the wilderness in search of a new identity and meaning in the world beyond. Instead, the reader necessarily observes that the cause of Israel’s detachment from bondage in Egypt becomes the cause of Israel’s attachment to her redeemer. As such, there was no way for Israel to conceive of itself except as a delivered people, noting the particular circumstances of her deliverance. We can imagine someone replying to this as a simplistic presentation of Israel’s condition, postulating some other possible liberation by which Israel could have escaped Egypt unto another set of opportunities; and yet, significantly, no other deliverance actually came to Israel in history. Israel’s historical situation, then, illustrates the need for a fuller understanding of redemption.

The Apostle Peter would write in his first epistle that the believers were not redeemed with silver or gold, but with the blood of their savior (1 Peter 1:18); and so, a transaction is, of course, assumed in the idea of redemption; but Peter, in first noting the currency of a commercial transaction, directs our attention to another kind of redemption, where it becomes necessary for a man to further reflect upon the price paid for his salvation and what that expense entails for the life that follows. In Israel’s case, there was no other temporal power that, realistically speaking, could deliver Israel from Pharaoh’s power. If Israel would be delivered from Egypt at all, it would be at God’s initiative. Israel’s new life, then, must wholly subsist in the kind and quality of life that God gave Israel through his intervention on Israel’s behalf and, after the fact, no other definition of life could exist for her. This, in turn, predicts the way that Christians should think about the unique character of their salvation: Man’s sin has made him unredeemable outside the very kind of salvation provided for in Jesus Christ. And this is what Peter is getting at in his epistle, that the believer’s redemption is not the same kind as occurs in the marketplace; consequently, it carries different characteristics than commonly connected with a purchase. It meant something very different for Israel to be the servant of God and not the servant of Pharaoh; but in either case, Israel is subjected to obligations that revealed her identity, and there was, ultimately, no alternative identity available to Israel if she would be free from her bondage in Egypt.

* * *

Indeed, we may here reflect upon the persistent truth that freedom, for a man, never exists as an absolute, unqualified principle. In one way or another, he abides in a world of many unavoidable relations that define and direct his activities. One can never be free from all things, even if he were foolish enough to hope for it. Even so, we should say something more than this, since Israel’s deliverance predicts the character and scope of her new relation to the LORD. From the very moment that Moses announces God’s intention to deliver Israel (Exodus 6:6), Israel’s deliverance was understood as God’s work and, thereby, Israel was from that point onward reconceived in relation to God as her redeemer. However, in this fact lies more than a confirmation of God’s power and authority; by redemption, the LORD incorporates Israel into his larger purposes, which we may now observe by a longer quotation. We again note Exodus 6:6, now surrounded by its immediate context.

And God spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am the LORD: And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them. And I have also established my covenant with them, to give them the land of Canaan, the land of their pilgrimage, wherein they were strangers. And I have also heard the groaning of the children of Israel, whom the Egyptians keep in bondage; and I have remembered my covenant. Wherefore say unto the children of Israel, I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will rid you out of their bondage, and I will redeem you with a stretched out arm, and with great judgments: And I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God: and ye shall know that I am the LORD your God, which bringeth you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. And I will bring you in unto the land, concerning the which I did swear to give it to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob; and I will give it you for an heritage: I am the LORD. (Exodus 6:2-8)

Israel’s freedom from Egypt’s bondage, we hereby learn, delivered the Israelites unto a participation in the promise given to Abraham (confirmed in a covenant to him in Genesis 15:2-18). Israel’s demise and disappointment, it will be remembered from Exodus 1:8, arose when a new king ascended the throne in Egypt, but the LORD effected Israel’s deliverance when he asserted his power over that same Pharaoh, ordering a redemptive sacrifice to deliver Israel (Exodus 9:16-17). The Passover sacrifice became the occasion for her freedom from Pharaoh’s bondage, but that occasion was conditioned and predicted by the promise that God gave to Abraham. In other words, Israel’s deliverance—obtained and experienced, as it was, in the Exodus—brought Israel into promises and privileges that preceded its actual deliverance. In this way we may consider how God’s redemption is always founded upon powers and relations that are outside of us, which then result in privileges that are otherwise out of our reach—in a salvation that is beyond our right. Redemption, then, finds the children of Israel delivered from Egypt and brought unto a new relation with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That relation was provided by the Passover sacrifice and secured for whoever observed it. Redemption proceeds from the mind of God, becomes evident to us in the promise of God, and extends into a great deliverance.

* * *

As such, we may confirm Israel’s redemption from Egypt as the act of God, displayed in the Passover sacrifice, but we also observe the benefits of that redemption in respect to God’s former promise to Abraham. These two acts—the promise and the redemption—do not exist apart from one another in the history; again, the former predicts the latter. This is why, I think, the Lord Jesus eventually spoke of circumcision as a Jewish obligation, rooted in the practice of the Patriarchs (John 7:22). The law of circumcision identified the Israelites—by that time obligated to stipulations of the Sinai covenant—as a people united to Abraham and the promises made to him. In other words, Israel was a people that owed their existence to God’s grace, to their inclusion in a promise that preceded them, to a promise made to Abraham. This, in turn, is why the Sinai covenant later takes the particular form that it does, initially and emphatically recalling that Israel was as a people that God had already delivered from Egypt by the time that the commandments are ordered in the desert. Indeed, the very first words that introduce and frame the stipulations of the Sinai covenant—what is often called the “Decalogue” or the “Ten Commandments”—highlight this fact: “And God spake all these words, saying, I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exodus 20:1-2).

In other words, the announcement of the Law and its obligations begins with a confirmation that Israel was already a “new” people, rescued from Egypt—that no other existence was possible for that people. The Passover sacrifice creates that people, separating them from Pharaoh’s dominion; later, the Law is given at Sinai to instruct and preserve “redeemed” Israel until the time that Jesus’ own sacrifice and resurrection supersedes the order of the Old Testament, uniting those who were children of Abraham under the Old Testament to Jesus Christ himself, thereby granting them benefits that subsequently belong to the Christian (Galatians 3:16-29, Romans 3:19-26; also, Hebrews 9:6-10).⁴In this way, the Passover sacrifice predicts the salvation of men in the creation of the church by the offering of Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 5:7, Ephesians 5:2), while the events of Sinai foreshadow truths about sanctification, entering as they do at the first Pentecost, effected by the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2). Israel’s deliverance from Egypt was rooted in the promise to Abraham, forecasting (or typifying) the way in which the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus Christ would later effect a greater, eternal redemption (Hebrews 9:12)—providing for everlasting life and all that properly belongs to human experience.

The immediate point is that Israel was already delivered from Egypt by the time the stipulations of the Law were announced at Sinai. Consequently, Israel’s freedom from Egypt associated her with the obligations that belonged to life outside of Egypt; and so, while I am not presently making a statement about the status of individuals within covenant Israel, with Israel’s deliverance we see the pattern that predicts the character of redemption in the New Testament: Salvation is effected and granted to the believer by a gracious God, who then reorders the believer’s life by commands, according to his own character and purpose. It is upon this logic that Paul writes in Romans 8:2 of obligations that are associated with one’s status as a believer: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” Paul (as I understand him, here) uses “law” ironically to reference and highlight the authority of the Spirit—thereby contrasting the present age with the former. He, accordingly, strongly affirms the believer’s obligation to God as a complimentary element of the believer’s deliverance from sin’s bondage.

Israel’s deliverance from Egypt, then, does not loose her from obligations, but it radically changes the sphere and orientation of its activities: Servitude is reconstituted in Israel’s relation to their Redeemer, and the idea of a servant reinvigorated with honor and meaning as priestly work in God’s presence (Exodus 19:6). Similarly—and again citing the logic of Paul’s assertion in Romans 8:2—the believer’s freedom from the Sinai covenant and its law (Galatians 3:25) does not free the Christian from obligations to righteousness; it confirms it (Romans 8:3-4). Grace, too, has her obligations (Romans 6:15-18).

The sequel to this post is Redemption: The Purchase of a Postscript.