The Price of Redemption
By R.
WHILE salvation is offered to every one without money and without price, the religion of Jesus Christ is not a cheap religion. The miner gets out of the mine without its costing him a cent, but to do it, machinery is used that cost the mining company many a dollar. So while we do not have to pay in dollars and cents for the religion of Jesus Christ, it cost the highest price that Heaven could pay. In giving His Son, God gave Himself in His Son. He poured out all heaven with the gift, and Heaven has concerned itself especially for the past six thousand years in the salvation of man. The holy angels are constantly busy in ministrations to humanity. And Christ gave all He had and all that He was that He might redeem man. Altho He was equal with God and crowned with fulness of glory and power, He came down to the earth, was born of an obscure family, His cradle a manger, worked at the carpenter’s trade, and took His place among the unknown of this world, to begin a work that was to end only with the yielding up of His holy life,— and all this was a part of the price that Heaven paid for the redemption of man. He who had legions of angels responding to His word, became a lone exile, and submitted Himself to criticism, to slights, to hard words and unkind acts, to treachery and betrayal, to abandonment of friends, to insult, shame, and mockery, and to a long torturing death upon a disgraceful cross, the death of the worst criminals under the Roman law, and this He did to pay the price of our salvation. It is not a cheap price, but money, no matter how much of it, would have been. It was not the blood of bulls and goats. No, it was the precious blood of Jesus. And such a price was great enough to meet all the demands. Our salvation was fully paid. Christ met all the demands of God’s perfect righteousness. The price He paid was completely accepted and witnessed to by the law and the prophets. By meeting every demand which the law made on sinners, He upheld the law as perfect and just in its demands. He showed that these demands could not be laid aside; they must be met; and as the sinner could not meet them, for the sinner He would meet them. And now, so far as you and I are concerned, has He paid the price in vain? For what He did was not that humanity might evade the law and its righteousness, but that humanity in Him might also meet the demands of the law in righteousness. By submitting to His life, we may live His life, the life of righteousness that is witnessed to by the law and the prophets. If we do not submit, then for us His sacrifice has failed; for us He has paid the terrible price in vain. To make the righteousness of Christ available we must live the life He lived, the life He will now live in us. And so we give up all, even as He did, and thus pay our part of the great price of individual salvation. Thus in yielding our little, with His great, the full price of our individual salvation is paid. But this yielding is for life; it is to last the whole of our earthly pilgrimage from this time forward. God help us to make Christ’s work for us complete by entire submission to His holy will. But the law demands either full obedience to its commandments, or, failing this, the death of the transgressor. If, then, we refuse the price which Christ has paid for us, it follows that we must pay the price of death, for we can not of ourselves alone obey its high and perfect demands. We are too sinful and weak, and it is so holy. Then since we must give up this life in either case, how much better for us to give that life to Christ to make holy and beautiful and complete. The law says that we have sinned and must die, but we will die unto Christ, that He may live in us. Christ has paid the great debt brought on by the bankruptcy of humanity, and now we make an assignment of all we possess over to Him as our great Receiver. We are sure He will be able to make it pay out in this our mortal life in a profit for all eternity. R.