Every Spiritual Blessing Part 2

Last week we covered 

God’s overwhelming sovereignty 

God’s eternal timeline 

God’s incredible gift 

God’s astonishing invitation 

God’s magnificent purpose 

Today we are going to cover the next three spiritual blessings. 

1. God’s Supreme Purchase 

Redemption through his blood. 

Redemption means to be bought back. It carries the sense of being released from slavery. 

It also carries the idea of a ransom…but the ransom wasn’t paid to satan. The ransom was owed to God and paid to God. 

There is a compelling picture of redemption in the Old Testament book of Hosea. 

To paint a picture of the unfaithfulness of Israel, God told Hosea to go marry a promiscuous woman. He went and married a woman named Gomer. When I tell you she was promiscuous, I mean she was rough. She was a woman of the night, if you will. (We don’t know if being named Gomer might have made her go off the rails a little bit, but I’d think it’s possible) 

Anyway, Hosea married her and they had a few kids. 

Then she left him, apparently went back into her old lifestyle.

We are not told how she ended up there, but the implication is that when she betrayed Hosea and committed adultery, she found herself homeless and unable to care for herself, so she ended up in slavery. 

Hosea redeemed Gomer off the auction block.

Hosea purchased her back. She was his. She walked away. He bought her back. She had forfeited her right to his love, but he loved her anyway. This is an astonishing picture of what God has done for us. 

We are Gomer. We are the unfaithful bride. 

In Christ, you can be redeemed, saved from certain destruction, simply because of God’s faithfulness and love.

Hosea 13:14- God speaking about his people: I will ransom them from the power of Sheol (hell). Death, where are your barbs? Hell, where is your sting. 

This is the verse Paul quotes in 1 Cor. 15, one of the most clear and concise pictures of the gospel in all of the New Testament. 

Death has been swallowed up in victory.[j]

55 

Where, death, is your victory?

Where, death, is your sting?[k]

56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. 57 But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!

One more thing to point out…

Redemption was purchased, the ransom was paid, not with silver or gold but the precious blood of Christ. Watch this… the penalty for sin is death, the ransom for death is life… and the life that purchased our redemption had to be a perfect, spotless life, uncorrupted by sin. There has never been any human being qualified to pay the penalty for our sin and purchase our redemption, so God did it. What the law couldn’t do, what we couldn’t do, God did it when the blood of Christ ran red on calvary’s cross. 

2. God’s Amazing Grace 

Forgiveness of trespasses. You can’t have redemption without forgiveness and you can’t have forgiveness without redemption, the two go hand in hand. 

True forgiveness means to give up the right to punish someone for a transgression. The picture of God’s forgiveness in the Bible is astonishing. 

He casts our sin into the depths of the sea and he casts our sin as far as the east is from the west. Absolute, total forgiveness. 

The need for redemption and forgiveness removes any notion that we can earn salvation. No amount of good deeds can take away the guilty sentence. Our sin places us into a debt that we could never repay. Our sin places us into a prison cell from which we could never escape. It places us onto an auction block with a redemption price that we could never afford. We are spiritually bankrupt. 

But God paid the debt, and God forgives the sin.

When God forgives your sin he deals with your sin debt entirely. He pays off the debt and closes the account, so that you cannot incur more debt. The debt caused by your sin, past, present, and future is paid in full. 

What about the sin I commit after I’m saved? Do I have to be saved again? No! It’s paid for!

Do I have to ask forgiveness for every sin? Well, you should, but not for judicial reasons. Judically you are not guilty. Not even for relational reasons. You are adopted into the family of God and that cannot be revoked. 

We repent often and ask forgiveness for our sins for the sake of our fellowship with God. My relationship with God cannot be taken away but my fellowship with God, my closeness, my intimacy with God is certainly affected by my sin. 

Some of you need to have your sin debt paid today. I’m going to give you that opportunity in just a couple of minutes. 

3. God’s Incredible Mystery 

The mystery of his will. All things will culminate in Christ. This world is not going to last forever. It’s all coming to an end one day. 

When it does a few things are going to happen: 

-Every human being who has ever lived, including you, will stand before God in judgment. Not to determine guilty or not guilty, that will have already been determined. Apart from Christ you are guilty already. In Christ you are declared not guilty. 

The judgment at the end of time will simply be to hand out the sentence. The sentence that your sin debt requires: separation from God for all of eternity. 

Don’t be offended by this. Some people say “how could God send anyone to hell?” The better question is “why would anyone choose to go to hell when the penalty has already been paid?” 

-Every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord. He is Lord already, but on that day even those who deny him will bow before him. Those who claim he doesn’t exist will bow before him. The demons of hell and satan himself will bow before him and declare that he is Lord. The question for us is: will you bow before him as Savior or as Judge? 

-All things will be made new. 

This will happen in his time. No man knows the day or the hour. If you hear or read anyone saying they know, he is either a con artist or a lunatic. Nobody can know the mind of God or the timeline of God. Here’s what I do know: it could happen at any moment, and when it happens it will be too late to be saved. 

In closing, I don’t want you to lose sight of the reason for all of this. Why would God do all of this for you and me? Why would he redeem you and purchase you back? Why would he forgive you of all of your sin and erase your sin debt? Why would he make you and me, specks of dust living on a speck of dust floating in the vastness of the universe, why would he make us a part of this wonderful, mysterious, plan? 

Because God loves you with an indescribable love. A love that cannot be contained in the whole of the universe. I love that beautiful song: 

Could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made; were ev’ry stalk on earth a quill, and ev’ryone a scribe by trade; to write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry; nor could the scroll contain the whole, though stretched from sky to sky.

Have you experienced this love? It will change your life, and it will change your eternity.