"For He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son He loves in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins" (Colossians 1:13–14).
Most pastors and Bible teachers can testify that when they preach and teach about sin and judgment, about redemption, and about the blood of Christ, there are people who object. They feel that Christianity should be “positive” and “uplifting,” and that all this talk of judgment and the need for salvation is “negative.” They regard as “gruesome” any discussion of the blood of Christ.
These prejudices on the part of many Christians are a hangover of liberal theology. The liberal view that God is just a big Santa Clans in the sky who overlooks sin has permeated our culture and infects the minds of Christian people. The good news of the Gospel, though, is not that God overlooks sin, but that He has dealt with it.
If God overlooked sin, He would be a God without moral standards, without character. But the true God is a holy God. He has integrity, and He will not overlook sin or clear the guilty in His court. Sin and guilt must be dealt with, not passed by.
Paul writes that those who were predestined by God for salvation were redeemed through the blood of Christ. His blood was poured out in death for the atonement of sins. In the sacrificial system, the animal was killed as a symbolic substitute for the sinner. In the same way, the blood of Christ, displayed before God on the altar of His body on the cross, is proof before God and man that a perfect substitutionary sacrifice has been made and that God is satisfied.
Redemption in the Bible means to buy back from bondage. The Hebrews were in bondage to Pharaoh, but God redeemed them. This is a picture of the bondage of humanity to sin and death from which Christ redeems His people. God did not pay a price to Pharaoh or to Satan to redeem His people because Pharaoh and Satan were only God’s unwitting henchmen. We deserve to be enslaved to wicked forces, so God puts us under Pharaoh and Satan. When it comes time to redeem us, it is God who must be paid, for He is the ultimate Owner. God accepts the blood of Jesus Christ as payment, and sets us free from slavery and makes us adopted sons.
If the price God paid Himself to move us from slaves to sons is His own Son, then when Ephesians 1:7–8 says that we were redeemed “with the riches of God’s grace that He lavished on us,” what or who are these “riches”? Christ Himself. All riches are in the Son, and He has been given us. Fellowship with Him today.
