Redemption in Christ- Ephesians 1:7

Having seen that redemption means we have been delivered from sin, we will now examine how that deliverance is manifested in our lives. We will focus on four ways we have been set free from sin. The first is found in Galatians 3:13-14, in which we find that Christ has “redeemed us from the curse of the law”. What is meant here by the law as a “curse”? The law is seen as a curse in that it cannot save us, but can only show us our need of a savior. Those who try to be saved by keeping the law will become enslaved by the law, and sin tries to persuade us we can save ourselves through obedience to the law. Christ thus frees us from sin’s persuasiveness, from sin’s attempt to persuade us we can ever save ourselves through our own efforts. The second is found in Mark 10:45, in which we find that Christ came “to give his life as a ransom for many”. The word ransom here is lutron in the Greek, which is part of the compound word apolutrosis, and refers to the price paid to buy a slaves freedom. Jesus here gives His life to purchase our freedom from sin, for the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), and we all owed a debt we could not pay and were therefore slaves to sin. Christ paid the ransom to buy our freedom from the penalty of sin, which is eternal death. Christ thus also frees us from the penalty of sin, paying the price (death) to buy our freedom from the wages of our sin, an eternity in hell which our sin deserves. The third is found in 1 Peter 1:18-19, in which we find we were not “redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ”. The redemption here is from a way of life, from a lifestyle, with the reference here being not to salvation but to sanctification. The term “empty way of life” is mataios anastrophe, literally “erroneous mode of conduct”, or way of living, a lifestyle. We have been redeemed (set free) from the way of living we learned from our “forefathers”, from the ways of thinking and acting we inherited from other people, set free from our bondage to ways of behaving learned from others. Christ’s death on the cross here (seen in the reference to His precious blood), not only redeems us from the penalty of sin but also from the power of sin, delivering us from sin’s hold on us so we may change our “mode of conduct”. The fourth is found in Romans 8:23, in which we find that we “wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies”. This is a reference to the future deliverance of the entire created order from its “bondage to decay”, which will include the deliverance of our bodies from any effects of “decay”. Christ’s death thus also will free us from the pervasiveness of sin, seen in the decay to which the entire created order has been subjected, and our bodies will one day no longer be subject to decay or death. We have thus seen the comprehensiveness of the redemption which is ours in Christ, for He has provided freedom from sin’s penalty, power, persuasiveness and pervasiveness. May we learn to use the freedom provided us that we may “live our lives as strangers here in reverent fear (1 Peter 1:17).