04/10/11
Three Themes of Redemption in the Old Testament
Hudson UMC
We have spent the last several weeks in Lent exploring some classic passages that speak of sacrifice and atonement. By doing this, I hope that we have come to a more complete understanding of what the sacrifice of Christ means. When we considered the story of Adam and Eve, we saw that God took the initiative to sacrifice, that humanity would not be doomed to clothe themselves but be clothed by God, symbolic of God’s mighty providence over our world of space and time. In the story of Abraham and Isaac, we saw God providing a substitute for the very best that Abraham had to offer, teaching us that it is only when we trust in what God provides and not in our own ability to make an offering that we will rest secure. The story of Passover highlighted the idea of sacrifice as a ransom, a price paid to liberate the people. Finally, last week, we saw in the ritual of the Day of Atonement that the mere shedding of blood alone is not sufficient to atone for the sin of humanity, but something must be driven out of the community, rejected, scorned, and radically excluded as a bearer of sin.
When we looked at these themes, we primarily looked at key passages that display, better than perhaps any others, the issues at stake. However, this week, the last week before we more specifically focus on the events of Holy Week, I felt it would be appropriate to draw out three primary themes of redemption as we see them in the Old Testament. By focusing on these themes, I hope to emphasize that, when we take the insights we gain from the Old Testament and apply them to the death of Christ, we are not free to simply pick and choose which theme is our favorite, but must understand that these themes overlap with and interpenetrate each other in a dynamic and powerful way. Some of the ideas we have already seen over the last few weeks will pop up here and there today as well, but where the main focus before was the distinction between the themes, the focus of today will be to see their interweaving.
The first of these themes is associated with the Hebrew word Padah and refers to the dynamic and powerful nature of God’s redemption of Israel. The most classic example of how the Old Testament speaks of this aspect of redemption is the exodus from Egypt. There are many psalms, one of which we have just heard, which recount how God led Israel out of its captivity with an outstretched hand and a mighty arm, plundering the Egyptians and fulfilling his promises to his people. The idea here is that God is far more powerful than even the mightiest nations.
An important facet of this is that the emphasis is on the tremendous cost of redemption. Israel was not freed from Egyptian slavery without a cost. The firstborns were killed. The only reason that Israel was spared from this horrible fate was because God intervened and provided a sacrifice to substitute for the Israelite firstborns. The emphasis is on radical deliverance and liberation from oppression in all its forms. We see redemption from Egypt to the Promised Land. This theme of redemption also manifests itself as deliverance out of divine judgment and alien oppression into the liberty of the kingdom of God. When God’s people were held prisoner by things that are not God, we see God entering into the situation and delivering mightily when there seemed no hope. We can see this in the story of David and Goliath, where deliverance came to Israel from an unexpected source.
We see this theme at work when we see people redeemed from the terrible power of sin and guilt. When human beings were unable to deliver themselves from their fallen state, God took the initiative and forgave when he was the offended party, something that we can see in our world today is not all that common among human beings. God’s people find themselves enslaved by evil over and over again. Part of redemption is the breaking of oppressive and addictive structures and liberating the people for abundant life.
In the New Testament, the place we see this the strongest is in the resurrection of Christ from the dead. God had delivered his people from Egypt, from the Philistines in a different way, from the Babylonians, and others. In Christ, God delivered his people from a even greater enemy: death itself. As those who are bound to Christ through the Holy Spirit, we are promised that we, too, will join in Christ’s victory over death. A major thing we need to understand about being redeemed in Christ is that, in Christ, we are victorious over that ancient enemy, death.
The second major theme of redemption in the Old Testament is associated with the Hebrew word Kopher which refers to the price of the redemption we have just been talking about. The primary stories that illustrate this theme of redemption should seem very familiar, because we have been considering them throughout Lent. The main stories are the story of Abraham and Isaac and the Passover. In this case, the penalty or hardship that was coming upon a person or nation was deflected and endured by someone or something else. It is interesting to notice that God never finally eliminates suffering or hardship, but deflects it, providing a substitute to suffer it in place of the other.
This is powerfully shown to us in the suffering and death of Christ. Over and over again, we read in the Old Testament that the sin of humanity is so serious that blood must be shed, something must die to atone for it. When we see Jesus on the cross, we do not simply see a tragedy, that the best human being who ever lived was dying as the result of false accusations. We see the amazing compassion of God that, rather than standing by idly while we bring the punishment for sin on our own heads, entered into our brokenness and willingly laid himself down to suffer on our behalf and in our place. At the end of the day, it was not the Jews who put Jesus to death, nor was it the Romans. In a sense, it was all of us, but even that does not get back to who is really responsible. It is God the Father who offered up God the Son as an atoning sacrifice through God the Holy Spirit. The dreadful price of redemption was not born merely by a human, but by a human who was also the fullness of God. God suffered, bled and died, so that we might be delivered.
It is as the wonderful hymn by Charles Wesley says, “Tis mystery all, the immortal dies, who can explore his strange design? In vain the firstborn seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine. Tis mercy all! Let earth adore; let angel minds inquire no more.” Nothing else demonstrates to us that God is not like human beings more than the death of Christ. Who among us would enter into a covenant with people who were not, and would not ever be worthy of it, who would continually let us down; and not only let us down but deliberately attack us over and over and then, after many years of this, intentionally endure tremendous suffering and death just to preserve the bond of love with these unholy people? The fact of the matter is that history teaches us that human beings simply don’t do this, especially in the West and especially in America where we are so deeply influenced by the idea that we need to be looking out for what is best for us. Our God’s mercy and compassion are so strong that they sometimes baffle us as incomprehensible.
The third major theme of redemption in the Old Testament is associated with the Hebrew word Goel. If the first, dynamic theme was primarily concerned with the mighty act by which redemption was worked out, and if the second, cultic, that is to say, the sacrificial, theme was primarily concerned with the tremendous cost of atonement in the shedding of the blood of a substitute, this third theme is personal in character and is mainly concerned with the person of the redeemer. When we see this theme in the Old Testament, we are struck by the fact that redemption is not something that just anyone can do, but that the nature of the redeemer is crucially important to the redemption.
The shortest and clearest example in the Old Testament illustrating this theme is from the book of Ruth. Ruth was a pagan woman who married an Israelite who died early in their marriage. She chose to return to Israel with her mother-in-law, leaving behind all her family and friends and moved to a foreign land. She began to gather the bits of grain that were missed in the harvest so she could survive, a common practice of widows at the time. She found out that Boaz, the man who owned the field that she was gleaning from, was a close relative of her late husband and that, if he wanted, he could redeem her, which at the time meant marrying her and having children with her ensuring that her late husband would still have an inheritance. What this means is that for Boaz to redeem Ruth, he had to give up either all or part of the inheritance he might be able to give to any other children he might have.
What we need to notice here is that it was not as though just anyone could redeem Ruth; only a close relative of her late husband could. If no close relatives were interested, she would have been out of luck. The other thing we need to notice is that redemption is costly, that one has to make a significant sacrifice to do it. After all, this is why the other relative in our reading refused to redeem Ruth; he did not want to compromise the inheritance he was planning for his own children. Redemption was not something that one did lightly because, in spite of a desire to help another person, to actually redeem them involved a willingness not only to help, but to make one’s own life harder, to make incredible sacrifices, and even limit one’s resources.
A very common way to think about the atonement and the nature of redemption according to Christian faith is to think of it entirely in terms of legal satisfaction and is often spoken of as an external relationship, that is, relationships that impact us on the outside, but do not go to the core of who we are and fundamentally change us. It most often takes the form, “We have a debt, God pays it, so we are free.” Now, there is certainly an element of this in the Bible and I would not want to say that God does not relieve us from the tremendous burden of our sin, because he does, but the Bible speaks of a redemption and atonement that is far greater, far more dynamic, far more personal than that way of thinking implies.
We learned from the last several weeks that atonement and sacrifice is an act of extravagant grace from God as he provides a reconciliation that we could never achieve on our own. We learned that our sin is so serious that it cannot be dealt with unless blood is shed and something dies in our place. We learned that the sacrifice that God wants is not the best of what we have, but God wants to give the sacrifice that he provides that replaces the best of what we have and we trust in faith that it is indeed, for the very reason that God provided it, a better sacrifice than anything we could come up with. We learned that when God’s people are in bondage, God moves decisively and provides dramatically for the deliverance of his people. We learned that we cannot understand atonement simply in terms of sacrifice, but must think it out also in terms of one being exiled and driven out of the community on our behalf and in our place.
When we combine all these things with these three major themes of redemption in the Old Testament, we see that salvation as taught in the Old and New Testaments and affirmed by the church throughout the ages is not a dry, flat transaction that looks just like every other religion’s understanding of sacrifice. We find that salvation is multi-faceted and complex in its simplicity. We see that when we say that God has saved us by coming among us in and as the man Jesus Christ we don’t just mean that God has waved his magic wand, but has done a dynamic and powerful thing beyond what we ever could have expected. When we remember the interpretational framework set up by the Old Testament, we see that when we say we are saved because of what God has done in Christ, we are saying that God has done an absolutely mighty deed, on the level of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, to free us from our bondage to sin and death, that God has done so at incredible cost to himself, laying down, not just another life, but God’s very own life so that we might live, and that our salvation is something that neither we nor anyone else could have done but only the God who is who he is and was willing to make a sacrifice so that we might have an eternal inheritance, that we might be, as Paul says, children of God and if children then heirs, heirs of God and fellow-heirs with Christ.
Next week we will leave the topic of atonement as our dominant focus, but we will not ever leave it completely behind. We Christians need to reclaim the fact that atonement is a really big deal. We have lost some of the most important aspects of our faith when we portray God as simply a generous banker or when we think of our salvation as if it were nothing more than a cosmic bailout that did not fundamentally change the kind of people we are. We need to remember and rejoice in the fact that God spent thousands of years interacting with the people of Israel, shaping their patterns of language and life, continually guiding them, even when they didn’t want to be led, all so we can understand what God does when he comes among us and shapes the world forever afterward. We are indeed the people of God and we have been bought with a price. God’s unbridled love and mercy for us is far greater than we can think. Let us love God in return, as his people, the people he died for, and let us go and share that love with others for whom Christ died, who do not yet realize it. Let us pray.
AMEN
Brilliant thank you!
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