In our modern evangelical, evangelistic vocabulary, the key word is “saved”, to get saved, to be saved. You hear it a lot. It’s like… we were drowning, in a burning house, or being attacked by a bear, and someone came in and rescued us — we were saved, WHEW.
Theologically, we were trapped and steeped in sin and headed for a godless, lifeless eternity, and Jesus came to our rescue and saved us through his death on the cross. The focus, when we talk about being saved, is on the dire need we were in and the act of rescuing us.
For many Christians, that is what it is all about – Jesus has saved us from sin and we are going to heaven. I asked an evangelist in Mongolia, when I was there, what his vision or goal was, and his reply was, “To save people from this awful place.” I assume he didn’t mean Mongolia, because he didn’t have a career of helping people emigrate; he meant that the world is an awful place, and if people get saved, they will be able to go to heaven when they die.
Recently, I have been digging into another word that some people might use interchangeably with “to save”, and that is “to redeem”. But I think there is a strong difference.
In the olden days, if you owed someone money and had to pay before the end of the week, you could go to the pawn shop, pawn something of value like a watch or something, and take care of the debt. At the end of the week, when you got your paycheck, you came back and redeemed your watch. Why? Because it had value to you, you needed it, used it, wore it. You wanted it for the days to come.
To me, redemption looks forward – it is about the here and now (I redeem my watch), and about the future (because I need that watch every day, I use it every day, I wear it every day). Our redemption is not only something Jesus accomplished: it is also all about the future, from now, every day on earth, and on into eternity.
The German word for redemption is “Erloesung”, to be released or set free. I think of the verse, “If the son sets you free, you will be free indeed”, and I link that in with “I have come that you might have life, and have it in abundance.”
Before we were ever born, according to Psalm 139, God created all of us with gifts and abilities, with potential and a plan, with hope for a good future. And then we were born. And the world and the flesh and the devil began binding us, fencing us in, so that we were no longer free to be who God created us to be, to fulfill all he wanted to call us to.
I think of all the things that have held us bound:
we have been bound in sin,
bound in guilt and shame,
bound in habits and addictions,
bound in fear and anxiety,
bound in anger and regret and bitterness.
The list goes on and on of all the things that hold us back from living the kind of life God meant for us when he created us.
I began this journey of discovery of the depth and breadth of redemption about two years ago, maybe, when I got stuck on a verse in Isaiah that contained the word redeem, and the question popped up in my head, “I wonder what redeem means, anyway?” And I found a list of 16 – 18 synonyms in my dictionary for “to redeem”. Some of them were pretty obvious and some led me in new directions.
To redeem is to free from captivity by paying a ransom
You all know that one, I am sure.
Jesus said, he gave his life as a ransom for many.
To redeem is to restore
To redeem is to repair, to heal our brokenness
To redeem is to bring us into unity with God
To redeem is to rescue
To redeem is to make good on a promise
And so on
As I explored each of those words, I thought, “Wow, I wonder if people realize that this is supposed to be what their life in Christ is like?”
I still have areas of my life that the Holy Spirit is working on to bring freedom, to heal, and to restore. Some of those areas I am probably not even aware of, or only vaguely conscious of, but God is steadily at work. I am grateful that the work will continue until I am promoted to eternity.
Molly Deatherage 