What is the most precious thing to a person, besides their family? Is it not their life? Not only do we try to keep others from taking our lives, but we also don’t like others to control our lives. If someone did control our lives and took away our free will, would it not be considered slavery?
When the Christian church first started, the Roman empire was ruling the world. Just as today we have the rich, the middle class and the poor, they had people who were born free, slaves who had been freed, and slaves. What’s more, do you realize that any child born to a slave became automatically a slave also? As a slave, you had only three options for becoming free again: 1) Your master could set you free if he decided you had served faithfully (which would rarely happen because a master didn’t want to lose a good slave), 2) you could pay a price to your master to be set free (but remember you didn’t earn anything and hardly possessed any money, so this option was almost impossible), 3) or an outsider could set you free by paying the right amount of money to the slave master. This was called “The act of redeeming.”
Is there slavery today? You might say maybe in other countries. Unfortunately, we still have slavery here in the United States as well. I read an article a while back that I would like to share a part of: “An estimated 27 million people now are enslaved worldwide, half of them children under the age of 18. Roughly 80 percent are women. Tens of thousands labor daily in the United States with little or no pay under threat of violence, a threat all too often made real. Human trafficking generates $31 billion annually, making it the third most lucrative criminal activity behind narcotics and weapons trade. In the United States, victims are trafficked from at least 35 different countries, though most originate from China, Mexico, and Vietnam. States with large port cities or along international borders – California, Florida, Texas, and New York – have the highest incidence of modern-day slavery….Victims are typically recruited through deceit or trickery (such as false job offer, false migration offer, or false marriage offer), sale by family members, recruitment by former slaves, or outright abduction…”
It was kind of hard for me to think of slavery still being real here in the US. However, I’d like to take this a step further and look at a much bigger picture. Right now on earth there are really only 2 masters: God and Satan. When Adam sinned, he “fell under the dominion of Satan”, he and his descendants became “Satan’s lawful captive(s)”, because as we saw above, anyone born to a slave becomes an automatic slave. By sinning, “we have mortgaged ourselves to Satan…”. We are all victims that have been tricked, deceived, recruited, and born into slavery. (MYP 69, 51; TMK 83)
Now as a slave, we have only three options to be freed: our master Satan could set us free (I can tell you now that that will never happen), we could try to pay the price (but even if you lived 100 lifetimes and gave everything you had, you wouldn’t be able to buy back your freedom; did you realize you were worth that much?); or we can accept the fact that Jesus “has redeemed (us) from the slavery of sin”. The even more amazing part is that when Jesus redeems us, we do not become the middle class group of people who have been freed, we are transformed into upper class people, SONS and DAUGHTERS of the king!
So now we come to the question so many have asked. What did Jesus really do when He died on the cross? Did he come to appease an angry God? No, besides coming to reveal the true character of God and the true character of sin, He came to redeem us, to pay the mortgage price, to rescue us from the power of Satan. “Jesus Christ offered his life as a ransom for the lost, as the price by which he might purchase the right to re-create the sinner, and form again the image of God in the soul.” (ST, Dec 12, 1895 par9). We mortgaged our lives and sold ourselves into slavery and because we were worth so much, only Christ could pay the price to redeem us and make us his children again. Now that’s love! Let’s not live like we are still slaves.
No comments:
Post a Comment