Redemption: The Purchase of a Postscript

Post last updated on September 19, 2024

 Image credit:  The Cleveland Museum of Art

This post is a sequel to the earlier article, Redemption: Renegotiating the Value of Creation.

The Exodus account forcefully introduces and then centers the idea of redemption as a confirmation of God’s creation, connecting our understanding of the two in the recognition of God’s purposes. By several elements that are first highlighted in the Exodus—evident in the way that redemption is displayed in Israel’s rescue from Egypt—we more easily understand how that an act of redemption, later and ultimately displayed at the cross, confirms and extends God’s purposes in the founding of a new creation (1 Corinthians 5:17). By the ultimate act of redemption at Calvary, God’s original purposes are revived, some of which seemed forever frustrated by the Fall. These and other considerations, in turn, deepen the believer’s estimation of salvation, moving it beyond shallower conceptions where redemption is reduced to the forgiveness of sins.

To be sure, the connection of redemption to man’s forgiveness is warranted, and even required by scripture.¹Paul writes in his epistle to the Colossians that the believer in Jesus Christ has his redemption through the blood of his savior, adding “even the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:14). Paul writes similarly in Ephesian 1:7. Even so, whenever we read Paul’s epistles, our mind must also turn to the earlier mention of Israel’s redemption from Egypt, where the Passover sacrifice was so indelibly joined to redemption as to found, form, and condition Israel’s new life as God’s pilgrim people, who then began their journey to Canaan. In other words, redemption began a new and particular way of life. The shallower conception comes at great cost: Failures to observe the connection between God’s creation and his redemption is a failure to understand the facts that first disclose and then qualify the character of life. The two possess their connection, we may rejoice, in the persistence of God’s will. That comes to us in the goodness of his purpose.

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Even were we to try and conceive of redemption merely by its basic association to property²As I mention in the article previous to this one, the 1939 edition of the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, traces a definition of redemption 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.” See the specific quotation at https://www.internationalstandardbible.com/R/redeemer-redemption.html; otherwise, the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia Online. Translated by Translator. Edited by Series Editor, Series International Standard Bible Encyclopedia Online. (and the commerce that inevitably follows its possession), we must still carefully regard what this might mean for our understanding of man’s salvation. If redemption assumes the idea of property and, accordingly, also assumes the connection of a commercial transaction to desire, what, then, is the cause of a sinner’s redemption? What is the reason for this purchase? Should we think of it as we might in a man, who wanders the aisles of a store with extra money in his pocket, discontented until he finds a bargain upon which to spend his spare money? Of a child who tugs at his mother’s blouse because a toy that he had never imagined before (and, thus, never desired) is suddenly spied on the shelf in front of him? Or do we think of the kind of purchase, such as a woman might make when she buys a dress because it is finally available at a discounted price? These and such illustrations fail to describe the cause of God’s redemptive work, because they rather tell of the ways in which all of us are given to impulsive reactions. In other words, our reasoning often lacks the justifiable connection between desire and action, which lies in purpose. Our purposes are too often imagined in the moment, servants to whim or condition. They are, certainly, founded in desires, but too often in the kind that arise in the anticipation of self-fulfillment, which might be called lust. And yet, insofar as God’s promise to Abraham stands prior to his work of redemption in Egypt, we may also distinguish his faithfulness as a feature of divine action. Our ways, which are reflective and cursory, contrast to the way that God declares his purposes in promises, and then binds himself to their fulfillment in action. Both their initiation and their performance proceed upon the unchanging character of God.

When we further meditate upon the idea of redemption, our thoughts must eventually yield to the astonishing consideration that God’s purposed, redemptive work has centered upon the purchase of that which, itself, had no purpose at all—or, rather, upon that which had been lost to its original purpose by the corruption of sin. The irony is obvious, and it means that our redemption lies in a particular understanding of God’s desire, one unencumbered by his self-interest. We don’t know quite what to make of this, that God’s purposes are not bound up in necessity, but located in his character. A man or a woman makes an exchange of money for goods and services, for he is compelled by a variety of conditions. Man is bound by contingencies within nature, but our LORD is free from these; he needed not do anything at all in an obligatory slavery to his creation. In fact, in purposing man’s redemption, the LORD ultimately pursued a rather unnecessary enterprise.

This unnecessary pursuit, nevertheless, obtains an ironic character in the way that it was eventually accomplished in a quite necessary way, in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. When God purposed to deliver man from sin and corruption, he subjected himself to a variety of conditions as a man—as the servant of God, under the obligations of the Mosaic Law (Philippians 2:7-8, Galatians 4:4-5). We don’t know quite what to make of this until we recall its name, which is Love. Lust may propel a man to misassign purposes and misuse action—to justify sin in reason, for it is his own pleasure that he so often seeks; God is so much love³1 John 4:16 as to desire to reinvest purpose and confirm hope in a world that lost the center of meaning when it forfeited the knowledge of God. Redemption makes a man free insofar as it returns him to God’s purpose, disclosed in his will. We, in return, embrace our obligations as properly belonging to our identity as creatures. This relation is but confirmed and strengthened in our redemption.

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The same correlation between redemption and obligation, however, also predicts the eventual character of their refusals—the imposition of alternative or substituted obligations, now ordered by man. This, in turn, eventually yields actions in which man’s purposes are attributed to God, justified, and then pursued with all the relish of a convert. This is one of the ironies of modern “secularism,” that, ultimately, it cannot refrain from moral and spiritual aspirations. Recent iterations of Progressivism are at least this. The privileges and obligations that actually belong to the created order are refused or redirected, for even the privileges afforded by that order assume obligations that sometimes restrict men from some of their pursuits; and yet, contrarian aspirations persist, so that a litany of projects then follow, glossed with virtue, and recommended to the rest of us as progress. As such, an older quip, “I don’t see anything wrong with it” eventually became something like, “but look at all the good that can come,” and then, more recently, the very righteous-sounding, “how can we not do something about this?” These and other such lines of reasoning proceed upon a denial about the true character and inclination of our fallen desires, which then becomes the basis of a reordering, which also results in malpractices. Varied in ways, too many political and social efforts, nonetheless, share common cause in man’s inclinations to live, but live a life understood apart from God and the facts of his world, even as they employ his name. It is, then, in a dangerous refusal of the past that the future is assumed. Redemption, properly understood, recalls man from this error, highlighting the ways in which a believer’s created endowments are reemployed by the Spirit, aspiring to the day in which the whole world will receive the fuller character of Christ’s purchase (Romans 8:19-23). The gospel confirms this when it proclaims Jesus’ death but also his resurrection; and the Lord predicted and assured this when he departed to the Father and sent the Spirit (John 16:7).

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Recalling the relation of commerce to redemption, we might conclude this way, that it is as if some will not make purchase of the wares available at market, but neither will they live contentedly without the satisfaction of their basest desires; they will seek their fulfillment another way: Such a man must make room among the other peddlers, selling for cheap that which no one before him saw much need. This man desires what no one else has been willing to sell; and so, he then builds and sells what no one else makes, which means that lust sometimes becomes a man’s justification for his creative work, and a man’s work becomes the evidence of his idolatry. The consumer, then, becomes a manufacturer, and a manufacturer, eventually, a salesman, for he cannot enjoy in solitude what he desires alone in the dark; all lusts must eventually find concourse with others. And so, our merchant will flood the bazaar with what is forbidden, hawking there what God has refused as the gift of his creation.

It is in this wicked reconstitution of order that human will is justified in the consideration of mere plausibility—the open-ended, imagined good, bereft of its created purpose. Absurdities—which now include promises lately made plausible by technologies of various sorts—now seek to defy the facts of God’s will. Nevertheless, in these we note that unregenerate man still seeks a new creation. As it is, they can only aim at a modified, impoverished version of the first: Men imagine children without marriage—or even women—and billionaires contemplate a colony on Mars. And by a world that they have sought to reorder, they also seek a kind of vindication. References to redemption, then, are increasingly conflated with ideas about man’s self-justification, purposes and their expressions established through his self-love.