Friends, In this third installment, let’s find where the Bible says “Jesus paid a price for our sins.”  Blessings! Bob

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Spirituality Column #854

March 28, 2023

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Delightful Gift, Part 3

By Bob Walters

“Delight is what distinguishes a gift from a payment.” – Ephraim Radner, First Things

After two weeks of laying the groundwork for my distaste of the reflexive and widely unexamined modern Bible hermeneutic that endlessly declares “Jesus paid a price” for our salvation, let’s try to find this popular doctrinal misdirection in the Bible.

It’s what I did 15-20 years ago.

Modern Bible Christendom is fat with metaphors, allegory, and assorted other comparisons and story devices to tell us about the grand, divine transaction of Jesus’s life for ours.  Dying on the cross was a quid pro quo; Jesus “traded” something – His life – for our salvation, and thus paid a price for our forgiveness. His body on the cross and his blood on the ground were the payment Jesus made to save us.  It was a high cost to Him, and He bore this punishment that was otherwise ours to bear.

That should sound very familiar, because nearly everybody endlessly hears some version of that divine economic arrangement and bargain for salvation in church, hymns, worship, Bible study, Christian media, devotionals, corporate prayer, and virtually everywhere else “two or three” are gathered in the name of the Lord.  Jesus paid a price.

But there is one notable place it doesn’t appear – except only by the most glancing of blows, inattention to detail, and the observational inertia of expecting to see it there – and that is in the Bible; the Bible that is the Holy Truth of God and our treasure map to discerning, finding, trusting, and entering the Kingdom of God.

Early in my Christian life – and I was in my late 40s / early 50s at the time – Bible scholar George Bebawi, recently retired from the divinity faculty at Cambridge University, England and teaching a weekly Bible class at our church, noted this odd quirk of Western Christianity. We in the Western church tend to reduce the uncountable riches and gifts of God, Christ, and Holy Spirit to the consumerism of our culture.  To wit: any value demands a cost, and any sin demands punishment. Someone must pay the price! But wait. “Grace?”

George’s observation flew in the face of what I heard everywhere else in the church and studies of my nascent Christian walk; “Jesus paid a price.”  So, I took all the words I could think of on this transactional palate – bought, cost, paid, price, purchase, punishment – and, having just discovered how to use the concordance in the back of my Bible, I looked them all up.  And I threw in “ransom” and “redeemed” as well.

Um … with a couple of exceptions, the words basically did not / do not appear in any context with Jesus on the cross, our salvation, our forgiveness, or our being heirs in Christ of God Almighty adopted into the Kingdom of God.  I’d invite you to look for yourself.

I’m glad I added “ransom” and “redeem” because we misunderstand – or rather, we force a misunderstanding – that these always have to do with some payment of currency.  No, “ransom” is the condition under which freedom is attained: it may or may not include money.  In Jesus, it didn’t.  We are “redeemed” as a gift, in Jesus’ blood, as something unearned, like the sure forgiveness of sin we have through Christ.  Nobody buys it.

Two notable scriptural exceptions seem to be Paul’s parallel words in 1 Corinthians 6:20 and 7:23, where in each place we see the phrase, “you were bought at a price.” 

I’d only note two rules, as with any scripture: 1. examine the context, and 2. don’t build an entire doctrine off any single snippet of scripture.  Context in 6:20 is the brothel at the Corinthian temple of Aphrodite, so guard your body, and 7:23 is about not becoming a slave; guard your body and your freedom.  And consider, as Ken Bailey suggests, that “bought at a price” reminds us not of a consumer purchase, but who, in love, owns us.

That owner is Jesus, whose love secured our salvation.  What a delight!

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) ends next week with shocking Old Testament news.