A Ransom

Every ancestral heritage is a mixture of light and dark, good and evil; our ancestors, as imperfect as they may have been, are also part of God’s eternal purpose. (1Co 10:1-4) We should be thankful for what we can learn from them, yet cautious: our responsibility is to emulate what is noble and good and let go of the rest. (5-6)

While we should pursue any strength and goodness we find in our ancestors, we ought not seek our identity or security there; they cannot heal our broken relationship with God or give to God a ransom for our souls. (Ps 49:7)

We each do need a ransom because we have all sinned against God by breaking His law, the Mosaic Law in the Hebrew scriptures, the Torah (Mt 5:19), which makes Him very angry with us. (Ro 1:18) No mere mortal, dead or alive, can help with this because we all have the same problem: we are all sinners. (Ro 3:10)

The penalty we all deserve for our sin is eternal, spiritual death. (Ro 6:23) Justice must be served: we each either need to suffer eternally for our own sin or we need to find someone else who is willing to take our place and suffer on our behalf, someone who does not deserve to die. But who could do such a thing for us? And who would do so, even if they could? (Ro 5:7)

Yet our biggest problem isn’t the fact that we deserve God’s wrath because of what we have done; our biggest problem is that without God’s help we will keep on breaking Torah; we don’t want to be governed by God and obey His commands; in our natural state we are at enmity with Jehovah God and cannot submit to His Law. (Ro 8:7)

It’s impossible to be in right relationship with God like this (Ro 8:8), but it’s how we all are when God lets us go our own way. So, we not only need to be saved from the penalty of our sin, but also from its power, from the very nature which causes us to sin, to violate Torah; in other words, we actually need to be saved from ourselves (Ro 7:23-24): we need a miracle from God. (Jn 3:5-7)

There is only one Man who is willing and able perform this miracle for us: the Son of God, the God-Man Jesus Christ. (1Ti 2:6) Christ is not a sinner, so He doesn’t deserve to be punished for our sin, yet He is willing to be punished for us, to reconcile us to God by dying in our place, to be punished on our behalf so He can reconcile us with God. (2Co 5:19)

And Jesus Christ is also able to save us from ourselves, to give us a new, divine nature, new hearts that love Him and want to obey Him (2Co 5:17), and to write His laws into our minds and hearts. (He 8:10-12) He is both willing and able to transform us from rebels into His own likeness and righteousness. (Ro 8:4)

Even so, most of us will naturally keep looking for some other way to be reconciled with God (Mt 7:13-14); we don’t want to give ourselves over to God and let Him save and heal us. We want to do things our own way, so we make up religions that make us feel good, which maintain our sense of control and give us what we want, and so we trample underfoot the Son of God. (He 10:29)

Though we can do nothing to save ourselves, finding our salvation in God will indeed cost us everything; if we are unwilling to give ourselves entirely up to Him, hanging on to our old life, we will be lost. (Mk 35-36) But we have no excuse (Ro 1:19-21), no way to escape if we neglect so great an offer (He 2:3); we’ll just be storing up wrath for ourselves against the day God’s righteous anger is revealed. (Ro 2:5-6)

So, how do we find our eternal salvation in God? We receive His Son Jesus Christ by faith as our Eternal King and Savior and believe on Him (Jn 1:12-13), submitting to Him as Lord, trusting and knowing He has died in our place and reconciled us to God, and that He is transforming us into His image. This faith in Him is a supernatural work of God in our hearts wherein He reveals to us what Christ has already done to save us and gives us His spiritual life. (Ro 3:25-26) We cannot make this happen through an act of our own will; it is the work of God. (Ja 1:18)

Until we realize this supernatural work of faith in our hearts we can seek it from God, turning away from all which displeases Him, earnestly obeying Him as well as we can and meditating on what He has revealed to us about ourselves and His Son in the Holy scriptures. (2Ti 3:15) We can also ask others to pray for us, working out our own salvation with fear and trembling (Php 2:12), surrounding ourselves with those who have found Him and are seeking Him, and continue pursuing God until we find Him and He rewards us with faith in His Son. (He 11:6)