One Thing and Another

When reading the Scripture, one thing often leads to another.  It happened the other night while reading the first chapter of Ephesians.   Verse 7 said, "In Him, we have redemption through His blood..."  Without hardly a mental pause, I thought immediately of the story of Hosea and Gomer.  Unlike like today's preaching, in my teenage years I heard a lot of sermons based on Old Testament stories which was my first introduction to this unusual Biblical couple.  As a way of illustrating how Israel had turned away from God, the prophet was told by the Lord, "Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom...for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord."   (Hosea 1:2)  Hosea did as the Lord commanded only to have his wife leave him for another man only to be told to go and get her back by paying the one with whom she was living a certain amount of money.  Hosea went and bought her.  Or, to put it another way, he redeemed her. 

 

Redemption is not a word used a lot in this culture of ours.  And even sadder truth is that the word is hardly used by the church anymore.  Maybe it is called something else in our day.  If not, then the church itself might be in need of redemption.  It is not a common thing for people of our day to see themselves in need of being redeemed, but this is exactly what the Apostle Paul is saying that Christ has done for us by dying on the cross. 

 

The cost of our redemption is not the fifteen shekels of silver,the homer of barley, and the measure of wine used by Hosea, but the very blood of the Son of God.  Through that shed blood we have been bought back from the power of sin and evil.  When we turned away from God through our first act of disobedience, we were in doing so choosing to serve not God but everything opposed to Him.  Through the blood of Jesus that choice can be turned around.  Because of His blood we no longer have to live sold out to the evil one.