Purpose of This Series of Posts

Part 2 , Part 3 , and Part 4 are written. Honestly, I probably wrote too much and got too far into the definitions of “redeem” and “redemption” in this first post. You should skim this one, but catch the outline at the beginning. The others are shorter.

In this series of posts I hope to chat in an organized way with those who, having read the New Testament, are already aware that the doctrine of “eternal security” (or “once saved, always saved”) has serious scriptural difficulties. My goal is to show you that what you have already understood deep in your heart as you have read your Bible is what the Bible actually teaches. I cannot tell you how many people have told me, “I always knew these things were true” after listening to me teach.

If you have not read the New Testament, I have to ask you to read the passages I show you; otherwise, you will just be taking my word against someone else’s, and there will be a lot of Scripture in these posts. Take them slow.

When Paul was called before the Roman governor Felix, “he reasoned about righteousness, self-control, and the judgment to come.” This terrified Felix (Acts 24:25). The importance of “righteousness, self-control, and the judgment to come” is closely tied to a correct understanding of the main purpose of the atonement.

I don’t claim to understand God’s whole counsel and plan in sending Jesus to die on a cross and rise again, but I do understand the main purpose of the atonement. It is stated repeatedly in Scripture. (I won’t hold you hostage on what passages those are. Titus 2:11-15 is the most thorough, but verses like Acts 3:26, Romans 14:9, and 2 Corinthians 5:15 concisely state the purpose.)

Rebooting our Understanding of the Atonement

I use “reboot” in the title purposely. If you try to amend, adjust, modify, or add to the idea that God punished Jesus in order to appease his wrath towards us, you won’t understand what I am writing. If you bought into the idea that “God is merciful and wants to forgive sin, but he is just and must punish sin,” then you won’t understand what I am writing because that idea, despite being popular, is false.

1. God has always forgiven sin without sacrifice and without blood.
2. There is a judgment to come at which Christians will be judged by their works (by what they did).
3. At that judgment, those who “patiently continued to go good” by “sowing to the Spirit” will receive eternal life, but those who were self-seeking and did not obey the truth because they “sowed to the flesh” will reap corruption (die).
4. The purpose of Jesus’ death and resurrection was to ransom us from our slavery to “the god of this world,” to free us from the dominion of the desires of our body, to purge our past sins–and even our past lives–by his blood, and thus reconcile us to God and empower us, both in desire and ability, to do good so that we can face the final judgment with confidence.

I know I have written about these things before, but I am hoping in this series to chat about these things in an organized way, hoping it will be engaging and memorable. I will be thinking about covering these main 4 points, but because I am chatting, I will be bringing up important overall points as well.

Also, because this is a chat, I am hoping for comments and questions!

Rebooting Redemption

“Redemption” is a great word, especially in the New Testament. According to my Bible app, which can only search the King James Version, “Redeem,” “redeemed,” or “redeeming” occurs 11 times in the NT.

Lutrosis (Strong’s number 3085)

In Luke 1:68, Zacharias prays over the newly born John the Baptist, saying that God has visited and redeemed his people. In this verse, the Greek word is lutrosis, which has a primary meaning of “ransom,” but carries the idea of deliverance or liberation (studybible.info). What Zacharias meant by being ransomed was …

“… salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us;to show mercy toward our fathers, to remember his holy covenant,the oath which he swore to Abraham our father, to grant to us that we, being delivered out of the hand of our enemies, should serve him without fear.”

This word is also used in Luke 2:38 where Anna, the very old prophetess, is talking about the newborn king with everyone “looking for lutrosis in Jerusalem.” Hebrews 9:12 says Jesus entered the “holy place” of the temple in heaven, “once for all” with his blood, because he had obtained “eternal lutrosis.”

Hebrews 9:12 is interesting because 3 verses later he says Jesus’ death (“a death”) occurred for an apolutrosis, not just a ransom, but a “release by payment of ransom” (studybible.info) for transgressions that occurred under the “first covenant.” Rather than discuss Hebrews 9:15 here, let’s look at epilutrosis, and the verses in which it occurs.

Epilutrosis (Strong’s number 629)

Hebrews 9:12-15 is a whirlwind of deep ideas. As I touch on those, remember that I am prioritizing the clear main purpose of the atonement, not the many deep truths covered in Hebrews! Nonetheless, since my research on “redemption” brings us to this passage, let’s at least address them.

Old Testament priests were mortal and sinned. They had to bring the blood of bulls and goats into the “holy place” of the earthly temple and cleanse it regularly (cf. Exodus 29:38-44, where the daily offerings are to sanctify the temple so the Lord can meet with Israel at its door). Jesus, being sinless and immortal, offered his blood to cleanse the heavenly temple “once for all,” and this “cleanses our conscience from dead works,” so we can serve the living God.

There is controversy over what “dead works” means (Heb. 9:14), but we do not have to trouble ourselves with that definition because they are being left behind no matter what they are. All my readers, whether they agree with me overall or not, will agree with me that we must go on to “living works,” which are works empowered by the life of Jesus in us, for apart from him we can do nothing (Jn. 15:5).

Finally, we see in Hebrews 9:15 that Jesus has mediated, or we can just say, established a “new covenant” because he has “released by ransom” the transgressions committed under the first covenant.

Let’s pause here and comment on “Jesus paid the price.” What price does the Bible say he paid? He can’t have paid everything because Jesus himself said we have a cost to count (Luke 14:28). The price we have to pay, in context, is renouncing everything we have (Luke 14:33).

Jesus “paid the price” for several things, but above all, he paid the purchase price for us. He bought us.

You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. Therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s. (1 Cor. 6:19b-20).

If you call on him as Father, who without respect of persons judges according to each man’s work, pass the time of your living as foreigners here in reverent fear, knowing that you were redeemed, not with corruptible things, with silver or gold, from the useless way of life handed down from your fathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish or spot, the blood of Christ. (1 Pet. 1:17-19)

The nice thing about my stated purpose of chatting is that we can run down important rabbit trails. This one is really, really important.

Look at those two verses. Do they take your breath away like they take my breath away? That is not a rhetorical question. Maybe they don’t. Maybe you are doing so well at glorifying God in your body and spirit that you’re not convicted by 1 Corinthians 6:19-20. Maybe you’re so comfortable with the idea that God will judge you impartially according to your works that your fear is not fear and trembling, but a healthy respect.

By the way, the word “reverent” in 1 Peter 1:17-19 above is added. Peter uses the word phobos, from which we get the English word “phobia.” It just means fear. It can mean any kind of fear. In fact, we have to combine the word “fear” in 1 Peter 1:17-19 with the word “trembling,” which Paul uses in Philippians 2:12, where he tells us to work out our salvation with “fear and trembling.”

Now, it is both true and vitally important that Philippians 2:13, the very next verse, says that God is at work in us so that we can both want to and do his will. I love the idea that energein, the word Paul used for “work,” is also the word we get “energy” and “energize” from. I am relatively sure most translators would not object to my saying that God is “energizing” us to desire and do his good will.

That said, Paul did not write Philippians 2:13 to contradict Philippians 2:12. We have to “work out” our salvation with fear and trembling “for” or “because” we are energized by God through his Spirit. There would be no sense in telling a non-Christian to work out their salvation in any manner because God is not energizing them by the Holy Spirit. We, however, because we are saved, and thus moved by God to desire and do his will, we sure better go ahead and do it.

Never let us think that because we are saved, things are just going to happen. Paul never thought that way. He disciplined his body like an Olympic athlete to bring it under subjection because he did not want to be disqualified (1 Cor. 9:24-27). And we must not try to twist “disqualified” into anything other than being condemned on the last day because Paul contrasts disqualification with being in the faith in 2 Corinthians 13:5. In other words, to be disqualified is the opposite of being in the faith.

And 1 Corinthians 9:24-27 is not the only place where Paul describes his fight for salvation at the future resurrection. He talks about “pressing forward” so that “by any means” he might attain to the resurrection in Philippians 3:7-15.

Pay attention, too, to the connections between these verses. In Philippians 2, Paul tells us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, and in Philippians 3 he gives us a picture of what that looks like.

I’ve chatted my way to a long post, so let’s stop here. What we have looked at today, I think, is how we are called to live and how to think about the coming judgment, though all I was trying to do was define redemption. We have to live and think that way even though Jesus died for us, our sins have already been forgiven, we are empower by the Holy Spirit, and our past sins have been purged (cf. 1 Pet. 3:8-9).

As we go through redemption more in the next post, hopefully, covering all 3 of the words for “redeem” that we have not covered, we have worked our way back to the outline I gave in the introduction.

Chats are slow … but thorough, and my favorite way to teach (and learn). You’re getting to journey through the Scriptures with me the way I do it. If my chains of verses leading to other verses don’t just fall into place easily, I’m probably off track. But when we can swing through the Scripture like a gibbon through a forest, you can know we are on track with something powerful.

I love watching gibbons. They’re so free and happy, they might be the loudest celebrators in the jungle!

Also, I have not edited this yet, so if you catch typos, please tell me in the comments. I am pretty sure I will get around to editing this, maybe when I move the group of posts to Christian-history.org or into a booklet.

I will link future posts in this series here.