[sunday meditations]

1 PETER 1.18-19

…knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.

Belonging to God’s covenant people demands living in honor and obedience before him. Having exhorted the Asia Minor Christians to live in such a manner, St. Peter now reminds them of their privileged status of being ransomed by the blood of Christ.

The concept of ransom is an old one, dating back to the ancient world. In Peter’s day, the Jewish people longed for Messiah to come and deliver them from the oppressing pagan nations. They kept in mind how God had delivered their ancestors, the Hebrews, from Egypt, and they yearned for God to do the same for them. Firmly they believed that Messiah would come and free them from the iron grips of the Roman regime, then make Israel the world’s ruling nation. This is, ultimately, the language of redemption, and ransom closely plays into it.

The one who has been ransomed has been redeemed; the earliest usage of the word comes from the slave markets, where slaves would be ransomed or redeemed—given freedom—for a monetary price. Ransom, and its compatriot redemption, is the language of freedom from slavery, harking straight back to the Exodus. The Jewish people expected a new exodus, this time from Rome instead of Egypt.

But the early Christians understood that the deadliest, most malevolent enemy power wasn’t the Roman Empire but, rather, the indwelling power of sin in a person’s life. The Christian conviction is that the arch-enemy of freedom is sin, and in Christ, sin’s power over a person is broken and dismantled, precisely through Christ’s shed blood.

That sin isn’t just something people do but also something that enslaves and ensnares, corrupts and dehumanizes, is portrayed again and again throughout the New Testament, not least in such texts as Romans 1-3 as well as Romans 7. The greatest redemption and liberation is what the historical Exodus pointed towards all along: Christ defeating and dismantling the enemy power of sin for all those who embrace him in faith and repentance. This redemption, this liberation, is done through ransom: Christians have been bought with a price from their slavery in the metaphorical and spiritual Egypt. God paid the ultimate price with the sacrifice of his son, and this was a sacrifice made not to please the devil (as some medieval theologians would have you believe) but to satisfy his own demand for justice on the part of his fallen image-bearers.

Understanding that the Exodus from Egypt pointed towards a greater deliverance, that being deliverance from the power of sin, makes understanding what Peter says here much easier. Peter says we have been ransomed from “futile ways” that we inherited from our forefathers.

“Futile ways” is a blanket term enveloping all those things—in heart, mind, and deed—which are characterized by death and decay. In other words, they are those things which are characteristic of fallen humanity, patterns of thought and behavior, on both the individual and corporate level, which are at odds with what God demands of his image-bearers, at odds with what genuine human living looks like. These ways are “futile” because they lead nowhere, except to death and destruction. Christ has ransomed his people from them in (at least) two ways: (1) Christians are freed from the legal guilt acquired from such sinful living, thus they don’t have to pay what they owe (since Christ paid it all, as the old hymn goes); and (2) Christians are freed from sin’s enslaving power, filled with the Holy Spirit, and are thus able, as St. Paul puts it in Romans 8, to “fulfill the just requirement of the law.” That is to say, Christians are enabled, not by anything in themselves but by the power at work within them, to live the sort of lives God desires of his people, holy lives that (by definition) stand in stark contrast to fallen modes of living.

“But what does it mean that these futile ways are inherited?” Peter could be speaking of generational sin (how the guilt of sin is, in some theological circles, thought to be passed on generation-to-generation). Or he could be speaking of the doctrine of original sin (how mankind, incorporated into Adam, is in league from conception with Adam’s guilt and rebellion). More likely, Peter is writing about the concept of enslavement to sin (how a person becomes enslaved to sin). Remember: he’s writing to a mostly Gentile church, and the pagan manners of living that had characterized the converts from birth were inherited through the pagan culture in which they lived. How culture influences our character is common knowledge to sociologists, and entire volumes have been written on the subject. However, what science fails to take into account is the nature of evil itself, and how evil is present and working in cultures, and thus inheriting futile ways isn’t just something of the mind, or of one’s upbringing, but of the presence of evil in both culture and within ourselves.

Ultimately, this deliverance, this ransom, takes place not by anything we ourselves do but through what Christ has done in his selfless sacrifice upon the cross. Whereas slaves would be bought with silver and gold coins, that which purchased freedom for God’s people is Christ’s blood. Peter portrays Messiah as a sacrificial victim without defect, as God demanded of sacrifices (Leviticus 1.3, 10; 3.1, 6). Christ’s sacrifice was made, at least on one level, to ransom stranded humanity from the shipwreck of its own making. Because of what Christ has done—that is, shed his precious blood—and because of what we have experienced—redemption from the greatest enemy, the indwelling power of sin—we must live in obedience and honor before him. This text doesn’t emerge out of a vacuum but follows on the heels, and is incorporated into the thought of, the previous verse about living in a manner that is pleasing to God. This is how exiles are to conduct themselves.