When God first created the world it was perfect. Genesis 1:28 tells us that God saw everything that He had made, “and indeed it was very good”. Genesis 2 recounts how God planted a beautiful garden in the east, in Eden, and in it he put every tree that was pleasant to the sight and good for food. In this paradise he put Adam and Eve and their task was to tend and keep the garden. God told them they might eat of every tree of the garden except one, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, lest they die.
As we know, they disobeyed God and ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and sin entered the world. The result of this disobedience was a curse, which fell on mankind and the world as a whole. Everything was changed. We call this event the Fall. The curse fell on the Serpent, or Satan, who had tempted Eve, on Eve and Adam and all their descendants, and on the ground itself. All of creation was subjected to the bondage of death and corruption (Romans 8:19-22). Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden lest they eat of the Tree of Life (Genesis 3:22-23) and gain eternity thereby perpetrating the curse and corruption forever.
Yet, even as God cursed the Serpent, he sowed the seeds of the hope of redemption, saying “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed, He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel” (Genesis 3:15).This is the first Biblical hint of the Messiah, who would come to redeem the world from the Curse. Thus even as God subjected the world to bondage and death, he began to work out its salvation.
Here too we see the beginnings of enmity, the deep hostility of Satan towards the seed of Eve, mankind, and the Seed of Eve, the Messiah, Yeshua (Jesus). From the very beginning Satan was working in opposition to God, and throughout all of history, we see Satan doing his very best to destroy God’s redemption plan. I call this the Great Enmity.
Before we can go further and examine in more detail God’s redemption plan, we must first understand what ‘redemption’ means. ‘Redemption’ is one of those esoterically Christian words we throw around a lot, although many of us have only a fuzzy understanding of its meaning. To non-Christians it probably has little meaning at all.
The word is first used in Scripture in Exodus 6:6 when God speaks to Moses, saying, “I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, I will rescue you from their bondage, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgements” (my emphasis). The Hebrew word used here is וגאלתי (vega’alti) and it can be understood as simply ‘to set free’ or ‘to liberate from bondage’. Yet there is a deeper connotation too. Elsewhere in the Old Testament the concept of redemption is linked with the shedding of blood. In Numbers 35 the Hebrew word,גואל (go’el), from the same root is used for the Avenger of Blood, who was appointed to put a murderer to death. Redemption is therefore linked to judgment and vengeance. When Israel was set free from Egypt there was a shedding of blood when the firstborn of Egypt were slain by the LORD. When we are set free from the bondage to sin it is also by means of the shedding of blood that occurred when Jesus’ was crucified. In Ephesians 1:7 we are told that “In Him (the Lord) we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins…”
In the New Testament the Greek words used to denote redemption contain the meaning of the buying out, or ransoming, of a slave in order to obtain his freedom1. The price paid for our deliverance is the shed blood of Jesus, “Not with the blood of goats and calves, but with His own blood he entered the Most Holy Place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption” (Hebrews 9:12). Isaiah 35:10 also describes those who, in the last days, return to Zion with singing as the ‘ransomed of the LORD’.
In short then, the concept of redemption includes connotations of deliverance from bondage, judgment, vengeance and ransom. So now, let us consider what is God’s plan for redemption and how he is executing it?
References:
- Torah, Prophets and the Writings : Volume 1 Genesis . 1987. Orenstein, Y. Yavneh Publishing House, Tel Aviv (in Hebrew)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Ham#Early_Jewish_interpretations
http://www.christianlibrary.org/authors/Grady_Scott/noahcurse.htm