“old church” concept: the Gospel clearly says that Jesus came “to give His life
a ransom for many.” But people put this together with the prophecy in Isaiah
53 and draw all sorts of unwarranted – although very tempting – conclusions.
“Surely,” we read, “He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we
esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for
our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our
peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone
astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the
iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:4-6)
The idea is that He suffered so that we don’t have to – that His suffering
appeased the wrath of God, the Father, so that we would not have to bear the
consequences of our sin (just like the Old Testament scapegoat), thus that He
suffered for us, on our behalf. But that simply isn’t what the passage means.
What it means is that Jesus bore the brunt of human evil in His life, carrying
it as a burden of graft and persecution against Him, graft and persecution that
He only suffered so that He could answer it with truth and compassion. And
we are healed by His stripes, that is, by the brutal treatment given to Him, if we
see the horror of it all, observe His response to it, and determine not to do in
our lives what the people did to Him. (See Divine Providence 275)
Of course we read in the Gospel of John that John the Baptist said, “Behold
the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” (1:29) But the Writings
(in Doctrine of the Lord 15) are very clear that this is a mistranslation, and that
what it really says is as just mentioned, and further, that He bore, or carried
the abuse heaped on Him as a clear manifestation of the abuse that had been
heaped on the Word, which He then embodied.
The application to our lives now is frightening if we take it seriously, and
at any rate constitutes a graphic warning about how we treat the Word. It’s not
that we might really hurt the Lord, who we know will continue to love and care
for us just as He did the disciples after His resurrection, but when we abuse the
goods and truths of the Word we put our own salvation – our own spiritual
health – at risk.
It’s in this context that the concept of a ransom comes up. Normally we
think of a ransom as the price that one person pays to free another from
captivity. Did the Lord pay this price? Well, yes, yes He did. He suffered –
He endured and overcame temptations of all kinds – in order to free us from
captivity – from our own sins as well as the influence of the hells. But it’s not
a ransom without responsibility. It’s a price the Lord paid to rectify the whole
order of things so that we could take the responsibility that was being withheld
by the corrupting influences of this world and the next.
Going back to our first reference from Arcana Coelestia 2034 it was
about freeing us from the compelling power of the Word misapplied – in
97