Following Judah's Lion

The Extravagant Domain of Redemption

Col.1:14 - In whom we have redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of sins.

Redemption. So nice and clean sounding. So transactional in its definition and so religious in its understanding. We have suggested that redemption mirrors a person who enters a pawn shop in which a particular item lies captured by the debt that had been borrowed upon it and that man pays the debt and frees the item from the ownership of the lender. What an antiseptic and passionless object lesson with which to make an unwieldy and earthly attempt at a revelatory definition of divine redemption. To say that narrative scratches even the surface of the redemption offered by Christ is to say one drop of water defines the oceans of this world.

Without going any further it must be understood that this redemption about which we wish to reveal and explore is only made effective by personal faith in Jesus Christ its Author. Divine redemption is never conferred on a faithless sinner regardless of how he remains faithless, whether it is by the rebellion of his own will or the ignorance of the offer itself, the result is the same. Faith activates this redemption and without faith God will not be pleased to redeem that which was lost. Some would teach that all sinners were redeemed by Christ and that even those who have never heard are somehow redeemed by divine decree in spite of their unbelief but this is unbiblical and in fact blinds us as to a crucial element of our gospel commission.

To begin let us address what stands in need of redemption and why. The sin of Adam, the first sin ever committed by a man, was a monstrous transgression against the loving Creator and in fact doomed the entire human race that would come from the loins of Adam. Every person born would now come forth as a sinner with the sentence of death hanging securely over his head. It is impossible to fully estimate and digest what an affront sin is to Almighty God, and the extent of its judicial breach before the Judge of all living. We can describe it as minor and major, mortal and venial, black and white, but in reality it does deep despite to the infinite and eternal holiness of the Great God and it must receive the penalty of which it so richly deserves. Not just death, but the awful second death which is eternal death.

So there you are, presented with the most powerful evil ever devised in the spirit world and voluntarily received by Adam so that all of humanity stands condemned and damned before the sinless and Holy God. But God is never without a plan, never at the mercy of circumstances however unexpected they may seem. We can only appreciate but never fully understand the omniscience of Almighty God and His timelessness that “sees” every moment of every particle of time containing the history of every molecule in the entire universe with one perpetually comprehensive, pre-revisited, and interconnected observation unaffected by past, present, or future thoughts or events. So mankind stands in eternal need, but the Eternal God comes with an eternal plan. And that plan has at its center God Himself.

Redemption is not only God’s plan, it is God, because redemption is the loftiest apex of love and God is love. So the unexpected situation of mankind meets the unexpected revelation of God’s plan of love, redemption. Mankind has been lost but God will provide an avenue, the only avenue, for eternal reclamation we call redemption. But the price and power of this redemption must be deeper than anything ever imagined by a human heart or mind. What could possibly pay the entire price for the eternal breach of God’s justice? Is there anything good that can surpass the deepest evil called sin? It would be one thing to provide for one sinner’s redemption, a one for one exchange, but how could God provide redemption for the entire human race? The evil contained in the collective sin history of mankind is beyond an exhaustive inventory which would include the acts, motives, thoughts, and evil nuances of every fragment of human disobedience. So any act of redemption must deal with all of this sin, individually and collectively, past, present, and future.

The power of this redemption must surpass anything imaginable and with more spiritual power than it took to speak creation into existence. God could not just speak this into reality, this would require an act of such enormous mystery that no mortal could even believe it solely on his own mental perceptions. The Redeemer God would have to guide and empower any sinner to receive the knowledge of redemption itself, such would be the august nature of divine redemption. Its magnificence would be shielded from the natural understandings of the carnal religious instincts of human sinners. In short, the natural man receives not the things of God, neither can he know them.

Even the angels, living in the very dwelling place of God, are dumbfounded as to God’s redemptive plan because what will unfold will confound the wisdom of the angels themselves. Gabriel is summoned to bring a message to a priest named Zacharius that his barren wife would give birth to a son named John. God tells him that he would be struck dumb as a sign and that this son will be great in God’s sight. Before Gabriel can leave the Lord God gives him another message, this time to be delivered to one of the daughters of Abraham, a handmaiden from the loins of Judah. An insignificant and obscure young virgin living in a meaningless town called Nazareth. Can we imagine Gabriel as he listens in intent reverence and obedience as the Creator commands him to give this revelation to this virgin named Mary.

The angel named Gabriel could understand on some level the miracle that the Lord was going to bestow upon Zacharius, but when he received the message he was to give this Mary, well, Gabriel must have been at a complete loss. What was God saying? Why was the Holy Spirit going to interact on such an intimate level with a fallen daughter of Adam? And what would result from this overshadowing that would produce Mary’s pregnancy? What Gabriel could not understand and what a fallen man could never comprehend was that God would enter the human race through a borrowed womb and leave it one day through a borrowed tomb. That first impregnated cell would be Emmanuel, the sinless Son of God unfolding in one single, sinless cell separate from sinners and yet in a fully human form.

This was no ordinary conception, this conception was an incarnation that unfolded a revelation that unfolded a salvation that culminated in a glorious and eternal coronation. This was the blossoming of the seed that was sown before the foundations of the world, and in reality this seed is an inherent part of the very nature of the eternal God. The incarnation is the clearest and most powerful revelation of the Creator Himself. It wasn’t something the Father “thought up”, it was a natural outflow of who God is and has always been and indeed will always be. And by definition, the incarnation is God. And this plan was God Himself drawing His fallen creatures to Himself through Himself. And the mystery was that the most powerful act of redemption would be birthed through an obscure peasant girl who lived in an obscure village and would give birth in another obscure village in the most obscure places within that village. The mystery of mysteries.

This newborn of Bethlehem was redemption. This newborn of Bethlehem is redemption. God was, is, and always will be redemption. And on that day of Mary’s deliverance, somewhere in the land of Judea, grew a tree. Just another tree from the continuing creation of God, but a tree with a redemptive future. This tree would be hewn from the earth and molded into planks for Roman use. This tree would provide the wooden showcase, the wooden altar, the wooden bar of justice, upon which the redemption of Christ would be executed, literally and judiciously. Now to the earthly eye there appears nothing more than a Jew being punished at the strong hands of the Romans and the strong request of the Jews. To the angels there appears the Son of God dying but without a reason.

But to the Father’s eyes there is His eternal offer of redemption, offered to the rebellious humans made in His image and rejecters of His Word, the same Word that now dies. So when Adam rejected God’s Word in the garden, he was rejecting God Himself. And the only avenue of redemption is to receive God’s Word again, the Incarnate Word whose obedient sacrifice pays in full for Adam’s disobedience. In the garden it all centered around God’s Word and now at Golgotha it again all centers around God’s Word. Adam fell through disobedience, but this redemption can only come by faith since obedience is not possible for any fallen man, all his acts are unworthy in God’s sight. Only the act of His Son can be received as redemption, and the dominion of this redemption is extravagant.

So gaze once more at this dying form, covered in a scarlet robe of His own skin, and counted between two of Adam’s offenders. And lo He suffers at the hands of not just the Roman executioners, but at the hands of His Father who was pleased to see Him bruised. I for one can never digest that truth from Isaiah’s pen, that God the perfect Father was pleased to see His Son in this condition on behalf of those who despised and rejected Him. To us there is no justice in this, that the innocent suffers at the hands of the guilty. The fairness of it all breaks down in the human mind because redemption on this level sheds all of the neat, judicial transactional understanding and ends up with a bloodied and dead God, which on any and every level, cannot be fathomed. Bow your heads ye sons of that wretched man Adam and look away, but not for long, because you must lift up that prideful and rebellious head again and see what your sins have wrought and indeed demanded, and see what the Christ and His Father have provided through their holy arrangement.

This redemption could not be bought by silver or gold or precious jewels, this could not be purchased on the currency of a thousand cattle on a thousand hills, and not with the galactic wonder of creation as the payment. This redemption must be transacted by the Incarnate Son and His holy veins that since Bethlehem had contained the six quarts of forgiveness which when shed would be multiplied like loaves and fishes to provide the offer of redemption to Adam’s entire family. There is no limit to this sacrifice and no parameters to this redemption.

Personally. The sins of one lone sinner are so universally damning that Christ’s death would still have been required for the salvation of one sinner. Do not diminish the depth of redemption as it applies to your own sin and reconciliation, for your rebellious blemishes upon God’s judicial record would do enough insult to God’s holiness as to require all of hell itself just for your punishment were it not for Christ’s intervention. And your sins would not require one less stripe, one less thorn, one less punch, or one less ounce of bloodletting and suffering to pay for your own personal redemption. Please do not consider your transgressions as a small part of a greater whole and with that Christ’s sufferings for you required a tiny and easily endurable portion, no, your personal sins were so monstrous and so unthinkable before God the Father that the cross in its entirety was required at the hands of your sins alone.

Collectively. The redemption that was purchased at Calvary was a sacrificial offering for the sins of the entire world. Please do not limit it to some tortured and misguided definition of “world” contrived in the minds of theologians who cannot bring their pitiful minds to embrace the expansiveness of Christ’s redemption. The Messiah died for the sins of the entire world and every single sin of thought, word, and deed committed by every son and daughter of Adam. The Scriptures teach that Christ died for the sins of the entire world, and that our gospel is not to inform sinners that they are saved, but to inform them that they can be saved. That is not just some grammatical nuance, that is the difference between heaven and hell. So we, the redeemed, stand in the midst of a great company of forgiven sinners who owe our entire eternity to the redemption that has come upon us by faith and faith alone.

Eternally. The redemption and its extravagant dominion extends fully into eternally. This is no period of probation or trial, and this redemption does not lie in wait to evaporate upon the first sign of failure by a saved sinner. This carries with it the ironclad promise of eternal life whose dispensation clearly reflects its own Scriptural definition, eternal. There will be no annual inventory or no revisiting of any sins for a future assessment, oh no, this redemption erases the handwriting of sins that was against us and renders any resurfacing of our sins against us as impossible. We are secure in eternity, and it seems as if Christ Himself chose to wear His wounds eternally as an emblem of our redemption and greater still His glory. Rest and rejoice, my brothers and sisters, Christ has won our redemption forever.

So this divine redemption is without limit in its domain, personally, collectively, and eternally. And to understand just a portion of its wonder is to see its extravagance. The extravagant domain of redemption is revealed in the expanse of heaven itself, and more particularly, it lives in the very Risen Christ Himself for all eternity. And if you listen with the ears of faith, you just might hear the praises of the redeemed being offered up to the One Who sits upon the throne, the Redeemer Himself.

Do not wait until heaven, let us worship and praise Him for all eternity beginning now.