Church: Reformed Baptist Church of Franconia | Text: Matthew 20:28 | Date: May 23, 2021 | Speaker: Fred Zaspel

That I’ve decided I can’t finish in one message or they will start serving popcorn in the lobby or something on the way in. Today we’ll look at the doctrine of redemption, and I think we’ll finish that up next week. We’ll begin that study in Matthew chapter 20.

I’ll begin with verse 20: “Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee, that’s James and John, came up to him with her sons and kneeling before him, she asked him for something. He said to her, ‘What do you want?’ She said to him, ‘Say that these two sons of mine are to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left in your kingdom.’ Jesus answered, ‘You do not know what you’re asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?’ They said to him, ‘We are able.’ He said to them, ‘You will drink the cup, but to sit in my right hand and my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared by my Father.’ And when the ten heard it, they were indignant at the two brothers because they beat them to the question.”

That was a Zaspel insert. That’s not part of the inspired text.

“But Jesus called them to him and said, ‘You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you, but whoever would be great among you must be your servant. And whoever would be first among you must be your slave. Even as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.'”

Let’s bow for prayer. Our Father, as we come to investigate further and glory and revel in this great salvation that you’ve accomplished for us in Christ, we pray that you’ll give us an understanding now specifically of this great doctrine of redemption and give us through it a greater appreciation of our Lord Jesus and what it cost him to deliver us from our sin. We pray in his name, amen.

I’ll be focusing this morning especially on verse 28—well, I’ll start with verse 26: “It shall not be so among you, but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

In this passage, which we can’t take the time to expound this time, you can see here there’s some jockeying for prominence among the disciples, particularly in the full consummation of Christ’s kingdom. They want certain recognition. And Jesus turns the question and says that those in this kingdom are not like those in that kingdom. The Gentiles lord it over their subjects, but that’s not the way it works here. If you want to be great, you must be a servant. And then he gives himself as the model of it, verse 28: “Even as the Son of Man came, not to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.”

So your jockeying for position among others in the kingdom of Christ is exactly opposite of the way the King himself has behaved in humbling himself and becoming a servant for the sake of his people. And then he identifies the nature of his service to his people. He came not to be served, but to serve—specifically to give his life a ransom for many.

Categories Of Our Lostness

Biblical writers are very careful to provide a very pointed description of the awful lostness of our condition without Christ. And there are various categories of our lostness. Let me just highlight a few of them before we go on so we can come to understand this doctrine of redemption.

The first is a judicial category: guilt. Now, I have learned over the years that when I mention the term “guilt,” I need to clarify. Because many, if not most people, when we mention the term guilt, think of emotion. “I feel guilty.” The term guilt in Scripture generally has the idea of a judicial category. Whether you feel it or not, you are guilty before God. You stand condemned because of your sin. We have violated God’s law. We have affronted his majesty. We’ve offended him greatly. And it’s an infinite offense, violating his law and offending God himself; and because of that, we’ve fallen under a divine curse. We stand under judgment and under condemnation and under divine wrath. Guilt as a judicial category.

We’re not only guilty before God, we’re also indebted to God. It’s a commercial category. We’re indebted to God. We have stolen, as it were, or robbed from God in violating his law. We have robbed from him, as it were, the glory that is due him. And as a result of our sin, we’re indebted to make amends for it. And so we have this debt to God, and that’s why we’re taught to pray, for example, “Forgive us our debts.” It’s a commercial category of our offense to God. The problem, of course, is that our debt is too great for us to pay. We can’t pay it ourselves. How do we get out of debt? What do we do to be saved?

So there’s the judicial category: we’re guilty. There’s the commercial category: we are indebted to God. And then there’s what we might call—let’s call it for lack of a better term that I can come up with anyway—a kingdom category. We’re enslaved to Satan. We’re under the dominion of Satan. We have as the god of this world, the prince of the power of the air, Satan himself. This all harks back to Genesis chapter 3, when man surrendered his rule over creation to Satan. We’ve fallen under Satan’s rule, a fact reflected, for example, on the Mount of Temptation, when Satan said to Jesus, “If you’ll bow down before me, I will give you all these kingdoms of the world.” It’s not an idle boast on his part. These are his kingdoms. The world lies in the lap of the devil, and we find reflections of that elsewhere with regard to our own experience: that apart from Christ, we were lost and enslaved to sin.

Ephesians chapter 2 expounds it in some pointed ways: that we walk in lockstep with the devil. He rules over this world and we then are in bondage to sin in our bondage to Satan. Satan in 2 Corinthians chapter 4 has imposed a blindness on all of those who don’t believe. The reason, Paul says, the reason they don’t believe is because Satan has imposed this blindness on them so that they cannot see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

So there’s this judicial category: guilt. There’s this commercial category: indebted. There’s this kingdom or dominion category: we’re under the dominion or in the enslavement of Satan. And then there’s this moral category: we are enslaved to sin. Moral corruption. This has to do with not what we do, but with what we are. Our souls are twisted. We have a propensity to sin. We’re not sinners so much because we sin, but we sin because we’re sinners. At heart, we are twisted against God, and there’s this blindness and enslavement to sin that the man without Christ has. So this has to do with what we are and how we sin.

We’re enslaved to sin, we’re in bondage to the devil and under his dominion, we are indebted to God, and we stand guilty and condemned before God. That’s the problem that the gospel has to face, and that’s what it must answer if we are to be saved.

The Doctrine Of Redemption

Now the gospel addresses that problem in these dimensions of our lostness under this doctrine of redemption. Redemption. Now the word “redeem” has the connotations of a liberation, a deliverance, to set free, to release. But don’t leave it there if you’re taking notes. Redeem does not mean, and redemption does not mean, just a deliverance. It’s a specific kind of deliverance. It’s a deliverance by the payment of a ransom.

We don’t understand the doctrine of redemption until we see that it’s not just a release, a liberation. It’s liberation through the payment of a ransom. Now it is true that the New Testament on occasion does use some of the general terminology like to “deliver” or “transfer” us out of one kingdom into another. And even the word “save” has those connotations of rescue and deliverance. But the specific terminology that is dominant in the New Testament in this regard is this language of redeem, or redemption, or purchase, or the word that we have here in verse 28: “to give his life a ransom for many,” to pay the ransom price of deliverance. The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many. Redemption is the payment of a ransom price to purchase deliverance and to purchase freedom.

Now we could take a good amount of time—I’m going to do it just in a minute or two here, just in broad brush—we could take a bit of time here to look back at the Old Testament background to inform this idea of redemption. And it’s really strong in the background in the Old Testament, the Mosaic Law. We have, for example, the firstborn belonging to God—man and beast. Remember the Exodus from Egypt? The firstborn was to be killed. God spared it from the Israelites if they had the Passover, the blood of the lamb slain. From then on, God claims the right of the firstborn. They belong to me. And the life of the firstborn, both man and beast, could be redeemed. And there had to be the redemption price paid.

And so if it’s an unclean animal, the donkey, that could be redeemed with the slaying of a lamb. That was the payment price. If it was a clean animal, the clean animal could be redeemed as well. The life of a human, the firstborn that opens the womb, he says in the book of Exodus, he can be redeemed by paying the five shekels to the temple and so on. Land at times could be forfeited because you’ve fallen into poverty and you’ve got to sell it off. The next of kin could buy it back. If you would save up enough money, you could buy it back. That would be the redemption price, the ransom price that is paid.

If a family member fell into slavery because of indebtedness, he could be bought back out by a family member by the redemptive price. There’s an interesting example of this in Exodus chapter 21. If a bull gored a man to death, the life of that bull could be ransomed back and could be purchased at the stated purchase price. If that bull, by the way, were one that had gotten out before and had trouble with this before and the owner had been warned and it did it again, then the bull and the owner were to be put to death, unless a stated ransom price was given and they could be bought out and delivered. The point is, redemption is a release by the payment of a ransom. There might be other connotations that attach to it here and there, but that’s the meaning of the term.

And then we come to the New Testament; the terminology is broadly the same. And in fact, there’s some strong background in the New Testament world that informs the terminology of the New Testament as well. So that we come to the New Testament, the language of redemption is informed both by the Old Testament precedent under Mosaic law, but also the usage of the words in the Greco-Roman world around it.

So, for example, if a man is taken in battle, a POW, he becomes a prisoner of war and they find out that he’s an important guy back at home, they send a message back home and say, “If you pay X, you can have him back.” And they pay the ransom price and the prisoner is released. The same is true for slaves in the New Testament world. I think I mentioned in Colossians recently when we were talking about slavery in the New Testament world that most of the time slaves in the New Testament world were not that for life. They would anticipate a time for freedom. And one way of freedom was a rather ritual kind of a process called sacral manumission. Manumission is the freedom, liberation of a slave. Sacral has to do with sacred.

So you go to the temple. The slave has saved up enough money. He’s accumulated enough that he could buy his freedom. Or perhaps the owner himself is generous and he does it. But either way, you take it to the temple, a pagan temple, and you pay the ransom price and the slave then receives his freedom. Now he might be admonished by the priests of this pagan temple that he now belongs to the gods or something like that, but he has his freedom now and he’s a free man because the ransom price has been paid.

Now this term then, “redeem” or “redemption,” was a common term in the New Testament world. This is the regular word that would have been used in the Agora as well, the marketplace, to purchase things out of the marketplace for yourself. All of these redemption words that are used in the New Testament—redeem, redemption, purchase, ransom, like we have here in Matthew 20 verse 28—this is the most explicit of them. They all have to do with a purchase price being paid to effect deliverance. This ransom one is the most explicit because it’s a ransom price that is paid to bring deliverance. Everyone in the Greek-speaking world, if they would say these words or hear these words, they would recognize deliverance by payment of ransom. Deliverance by payment of ransom. That’s what this redemption terminology is all about.

Now we still have the word “redeem” in our vocabulary and general usage once in a while, but generally in our usage it has lost some of the specific ransom connotations. There might be a faint reminiscence of it in baseball. A batter gets into a slump and he redeems himself with a grand slam home run. There’s a faint remembrance now of the idea of buying it back. He does it there by his own efforts.

I’m old enough to remember, and I’m sure some of you are—because some of you are older than me—S&H Green Stamps. You remember those things? And you have Green Stamp Redemption Centers. Remember those? I have a footstool at home, one of my favorite footstools. It’s, I suppose, eight inches high. When we were first married, we were poor as a church mouse. One time when we were home visiting my parents, my mother gave us a box of some kind filled with these S&H Green Stamp books that had all been filled out. She had all the green stamps pasted in there. So we took it back and there was a Green Stamp Redemption Center in the city where we lived. We took it in and one of the things we got was this nice footstool. I still have it here. The house had to go through a few repairs over the last 40 years, but we still have it. Well, that’s the idea of redemption: buying back, delivering by the payment of a ransom.

The biblical terminology is explicit, and I’ve said this now probably 20 times. I want to drive that point so we see it: that when we hear the word redemption or redeem, or especially this word ransom, that’s what we’re talking about. Deliverance by payment of a ransom. And that, in short, is the biblical doctrine of redemption. Deliverance by payment of a ransom.

Now here in Matthew 20 verse 28, Jesus gives a wonderful and concise statement of the purpose of his incarnation as the Son of God. Why did he come? “I came for this purpose, not to be served. I came to serve and specifically my service is this, to give my life a ransom for many.”

Six Observations

Now let’s make some observations. I have six observations I want to make about that simple statement to help us understand this doctrine of redemption, and then next week we’ll unpack it in terms of its implications for us. Notice some things about this statement.

Number one, Christ’s purpose in coming is one of rescue. He comes to effect a deliverance. This is the service that the Lord Jesus came for. He came to deliver his people.

Number two, the specific means by which he comes to deliver us is the payment of a ransom. He rescues us by payment of a ransom. In Jesus’ world, his hearers would immediately associate this terminology with emancipating slaves or redeeming a prisoner of war by the payment of a ransom price. So one, the purpose of his coming is deliverance. Number two, he does this deliverance—he rescues us by payment of a ransom.

And then number three, the ransom price is his own life. That’s what he says here: “to give his life a ransom for many.” He’s pointing here ahead to the cross. And he says, “Here is how you are to understand the cross. It’s a ransom price being paid to deliver his people.” We find this reflected and we’ll see this in a little bit in Revelation chapter 5 and verse 9. You remember where the crowds in heaven are singing the praise of the Lamb who has taken the scroll from the sovereign’s hand? He’s going to carry out God’s purpose in redemption and in history. They’re singing his praise in Revelation 5:9. It says, “They sang a new song saying, ‘Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals for you were slain and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and nation and kindred and tongue.'” So the purpose of his coming was one of rescue. He rescues by payment of a ransom. The ransom price is his own life.

And once we’ve said that, we’ve also said—here’s our fourth observation—he pays the ransom in the capacity of a substitute. And there’s our doctrine of substitution that we saw a few weeks ago. Now, the idea of substitution is already implicit in this idea of ransom, because it’s his own life. But I want you to see one little preposition here that—I’m sorry to be so technical, but it’s very important—”To give his life as,” it’s translated here, “as a ransom for, for many.” That word “for,” that preposition for, that can have a lot of senses, a lot of connotations, different ones; but this particular Greek word—and in fact, there are several Greek prepositions that can be translated “for”—this particular word that’s used here means “instead of.” Instead of, and that’s all it means. To give his life a ransom instead of many. So he pays the ransom price in the place of others, in their place, paying the ransom. So the idea is that of a substitutional exchange; he gives himself instead of others as a ransom price.

Now this idea—I want to explore that a little bit more here before we go on to the further observation—but I want to explore that a little further here in the context because it’s reaffirmed and reinforced with a couple of details in the passage that we’ve read. For example, in verse—back up just a bit, I should have read this—verses 18 and 19: “We are going to Jerusalem and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and scribes and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified and he will be raised on the third day.”

Notice this expression; we find it in verse 18 and then again in verse 19: “Delivered over.” Delivered over. See, “We are going to Jerusalem, the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and deliver him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged,” and so on. This expression, “delivered over,” occurs several other times, both in the New Testament and the Old Testament, and it generally has the idea of a hostile act of handing someone over to their fate. So John the Baptist was handed over to prison; Jesus was handed over to Pilate; Jesus was handed over by Judas, and so on. And in the Old Testament, we find some examples of this expression, and it’s handed over to the wrath of God, handed over to the wrath of God, given over to their fate.

And then more explicitly, verse 19, he will be delivered over to the Gentiles or to the nations. Now that expression we find in the Old Testament several times, and it’s of God handing over or delivering over Israel to the nations for their punishment—specifically for their punishment. So for example, Psalm 106 verses 40 and 41: “The Lord was angry with his people and abhorred his inheritance. He handed them over to the nations and their foes ruled over them.” So it’s an act of judgment, an act of punishment, handing them over to receive their fate, which is punishment.

And then verses 21 and following, I want you to see another expression that he uses. And here it’s a metaphor: the cup that Jesus drinks. He said to her, verse 21, “‘What do you want?’ She said to him, ‘Say that these two sons of mine are to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom.’ Jesus answered, ‘You do not know what you’re asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?'” What’s the cup? What’s the significance of that cup imagery? And I think I’ve talked about this here before. It’s just replete with examples in the Old Testament. It’s a cup, specifically, of divine wrath. It’s the metaphor used consistently through the Old Testament and even into the New Testament of the cup of God’s fury, the cup of God’s wrath, God punishing sinners because of their sin. Find a graphic expression of it in the book of Revelation, where the cup of God’s wrath is poured out unmixed in full strength. God in wrath punishing sin with the metaphor of a cup, pouring it out. “I’ve got a whole cup of wrath here I’m going to pour out.”

Now Jesus says he’s come to drink that cup. Now why would Jesus drink the cup of divine wrath? And the answer is what he tells us here: He came not to be served but to serve, specifically to give his life a ransom for many. He will bear the wrath of God instead of his people, thereby paying the ransom price of their deliverance. And in fact, I’ll just mention this briefly, but verse 28 here almost every expression in the verse echoes what we saw a couple of weeks ago in Isaiah chapter 53. So he came to serve. You remember Isaiah? It’s the servant song that we read there. He came to give his life. We find that in Isaiah 53 as well. He delivered unto death; he delivered his soul unto death. Here we have in verse 28, “he came to give his life a ransom for, instead of many.” That’s the very idea of the guilt offering we saw in Isaiah 53 in verse 10: he came to make himself an offering for sin. And then even the idea of “many”—he came to give his life a ransom for many. That’s the common particularism that we find in the Scriptures with regard to Jesus’ death. But here it echoes Isaiah chapter 53 exactly. He gave himself, poured out his soul for many. I think three times in Isaiah 53 it says that.

So here we have substitution plus ransom. In fact, we put it together and say he came to ransom his people by means of his substitutionary death. I don’t pay much attention to the newspapers anymore, like most people. They’re dying. Their five-thirds lies anyway, something like that. Years ago I used to keep up with the newspapers and I could anticipate it every year at Easter time: they would have some expert, some theologian, some liberal theologian that they found somewhere to say something about Easter or about Jesus or about his death or resurrection—something about it that, see, it’s just really not what you really thought, what you’ve been taught it was. They always take some left view of things.

I remember one in particular, one year waiting for it, there it came. And they had some expert come on and say—the whole thrust of the article was—the idea of substitution is not, I forget his word, but it wasn’t palatable to the modern mind. “It’s too violent.” I think the headline said, “Christ’s Cross as Substitution: Too Violent.” It’s too violent. We can’t put up with that kind of thing. And in fact, “it’s nowhere in the Bible. Jesus never said that he came to give his life as a substitute for other people. That would be a terrible way to think about God.” And immediately, my mind went to this verse. There’s the word. He came to give his life a ransom for, instead of many. There’s the doctrine of substitution that he said didn’t exist. I’ll take Jesus’ word.

So we have: 1. Christ’s purpose in coming is that of rescue and deliverance. 2. He rescues us by payment of a ransom. 3. The ransom price is his life. And therefore, we saw number four, he pays the ransom in the capacity of a substitute in place of sinners.

Number five, he does so willingly. This was the very purpose of his coming. To give his life a ransom instead of many to effect their deliverance was not something wrenched away from him. This was his whole goal in coming. Behind this is what we have seen several weeks ago in the Gospel of John when we looked at redemption accomplished in its biggest picture: where the Father chooses a people whom he will save. And Jesus refers to them throughout the Gospel of John: “Those whom the Father has given me. Those whom the Father has given me.” Sometimes they’re called his sheep. He had come to rescue his sheep. And so we have the Father giving, choosing, and giving a people to his Son. And the Son, for his part, saying, “I’ll do it, I’ll save them.” And he goes on the mission of rescue and offers himself in salvation for their sins. Well, that’s the idea that we have here as well.

Last week, I think it was, we made the point that God the Father, astonishingly, willingly gave his own Son. God put him forward to be a propitiation by his blood. An astounding thing, that the Father would give his Son for that, but here the point is the Son himself for his part came willingly. The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom.

And then number six, which I’ve already mentioned, he does this for many. Again, this is an echo of Isaiah 53, but it’s also the common particularism that we find in God’s saving purpose. He comes to save his people from their sins. Well, that in brief is the doctrine of redemption. Christ delivers us by ransoming us with his blood. The ransom price was his blood, his life given in our place, taking the punishment of our sin and thereby purchasing our freedom. So that using just the generic term of purchase, Paul can say, talk about the church of God, which Christ has purchased with his own blood.

Objects Of Heaven’s Praise

One more passage I want to look at, and that’s Revelation chapter 5 that I mentioned earlier. This is just absolutely one of the high points of Scripture. We have in chapter 4 the Sovereign himself on the throne before whom all of creation bows and worships, both in human creation and the angelic world as well—all bow before him in praise for this God who rules over all.

And then chapter 5, there’s the question: who will take the scroll from his hand? That is, who will carry out his purpose in salvation and judgment? And there’s no one to be found, and there’s weeping, and “What are we going to do now? How will God’s purpose ever be fulfilled?” And then there’s rejoicing because this Lamb is found, this Lion who is a Lamb is found, and he goes up to the Sovereign and he takes the scroll from his hand. This, by the way, is Daniel chapter 7: the Son of Man ascending on a cloud to the Ancient of Days and receiving a kingdom. We find this in several passages, but this is what’s going on here. The slain Lamb receiving the authority to carry out God’s purpose in salvation and judgment.

And then notice in verses 9 and 10, what the redeemed in heaven sing about when all this happens. “They sang a new song saying, ‘Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals.'” Why? Why is the Lamb worthy? “Because,” it says, “you are worthy to take the scroll and open its seals for you were slain and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.”

There’s our language again. He purchased them, he bought them, and specifically he bought them with the price of his own blood shed on their behalf, dying in their place. Now the Lamb has the authority to save and to carry out judgment by this purchase with his blood. Christ secured a people from every people, from every nation and tribe under heaven. That’s what they say: “You by your blood, you have ransomed people for God out from every tribe and language and people and nation.” They were lost. They were condemned. They were indebted. They were under the dominion of Satan, enslaved to Satan, enslaved to sin, but Christ, by his blood, bought them out, redeemed them from it all.

And that, here in Revelation chapter 5, is the object of heaven’s praise: the risen, exalted Lamb who has accomplished redemption for his people. And in heaven, you can bet, this is what we’ll be singing about. And I think it’s striking here. Here you see the exalted Son standing in his glory, having received a kingdom in heaven. Think of that. But what stands out is that this exalted Son bears in his body the marks of our redemption, and heaven sings.

I’m going to read you a paragraph from Benjamin Warfield. I think he expresses this thought well:

“There is no one of the titles of Christ which is more precious to the Christian heart than Redeemer. There are others, it is true, which are more often on the lips of Christians: the acknowledgment of our submission to Christ as our Lord, the recognition of what we owe to him as our Savior. These things naturally are more frequently expressed in the names that we call him by. Redeemer, however, is a title of more intimate revelation than either Lord or Savior. It gives expression not merely to our sense that we have received salvation from Him, but also to our appreciation of what it cost Him to procure this salvation for us. It is the name specifically of the Christ of the cross. Whenever we pronounce it, the cross is placarded before our eyes, and our hearts are filled with loving remembrance, not only that Christ has given us salvation, but that he paid a mighty price for it. It is a name, therefore, that is charged with deep emotion, and is to be found particularly in the language of devotion. Christian song is vocal with it, as it should be.”

Whenever we hear this word—redeem, Redeemer, redemption, purchase, ransom—we must think immediately of the cross where Christ offered the ransom price that purchased our freedom. Next week, I trust we’ll unpack that and some of its implications for us. Let’s bow together and pray.