His Wounds My Ransom

When most people hear the word, “ransom”, they generally think of kidnapping. The word ransom has not always been associated primarily with kidnapping. In the Bible times a ransom was the price paid to gain freedom for a slave.

Jesus said He would give His life as a ransom for many. (Mark 10:45)

In Hebrews 9:15, it tells us that Jesus “died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant.”

Bridges then asks us, “What does it mean to be set free from sins committed under the first covenant?”

Bridges then goes on and tells us that, the apostle Paul answered this question in Galatians 3:13, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.”
Christ shed His blood and gave His life as a ransom to redeem us from this curse. We must remember that as Jesus hung on the cross bearing the curse in our place and experienced unimaginable agony, and He did all of that in our place.

God is transcendent in His majesty and sovereign in His authority. Every sin, even if it small in our eyes, is an assault on that authority. God has commanded us to be holy as He is holy. Therefore, each sin is an insult to His character.

Bridges reminds us that we should not try to justify God for the exactness of His Law or the severity of its sanctions. After all, God is God; He is the Creator. He is the One who brought the whole universe into existence by His spoken command. He is the One on whom each of us depends for life and breath. He is the One who has the absolute right to establish the rules of the game, the laws by which we are to live. And He is the One who has the right to attach sanctions to those laws for breaking them.

The primary purpose of the Law, is not to curse us but to lead us to Christ.

Knowing that Christ paid our ransom price, Bridges asks us to whom the ransom was paid? It was paid to God acting in His capacity as Judge. It was God’s justice that Jesus satisfied. It was His cup of wrath that Jesus emptied. And it was His curse that Jesus bore as He paid our ransom price.

His Wounds Have Paid My Ransom