How is it that God is able to take sinful people and make them right before Him? How is it that we who are lost and dead in sin can become the very friends of God and part of the family of God and spend eternity with Him? That is a miraculous thing, isn’t it? What a wonderful gift the Lord has given us! The majority of humanity spurns and ignores and mocks salvation, yet it is the precious consideration of the child of God. We are looking at the word redemption today. I am certain I have dealt with this word before in the “Word from the Lord” broadcast, but I am going to review it again because we are talking about salvation and this issue of redemption and what that means to us is so pivotal to our lives. I trust this will be a blessing to you even if we have gone through this fairly recently already.
1 Peter 1:18 says, “knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ.” We find here that our redemption is accomplished only through the “precious blood” of the lamb. “Unblemished and spotless the blood of Christ.” There is only one remedy for our sinful situation. That is the blood of Jesus Christ. This verse calls it the “precious blood of the lamb.” Christ is often called the Lamb in the Scriptures, but primarily in the book of Revelation. So, when we see it here in the book of 1 Peter, we know that Peter has something specific in mind. The lamb of God was slain for our sins that we might be redeemed.
What does it mean to be redeemed? We have looked at other words throughout this process such as justification and regeneration. What does redemption mean? We saw before in our studies of this that there were three different Greek words that were translated as “redeemed or redemption” and they all speak of different aspects of the slave market at that time. Most of these writings were written to Greek people who understood the slavery system of their day. Slaves at that time were purchased out of a slave market, but the word purchased was “redeemed.” . . .
