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Mark 10:45
“Even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Christ secured our salvation through both His active obedience to God’s law and His passive obedience of suffering throughout His life and preeminently on the cross. His atoning death achieved several things, one of which is the defeat of sin, death, and the devil (Col. 2:15). Today we will consider another view of the redemptive significance of the atonement: the ransom theory.
The ransom theory of the atonement finds support in texts such as Mark 10:45, where Jesus tells us that He gave His life “as a ransom for many.” A ransom is a price paid to secure the freedom of another, so our Lord’s death served in some sense as a payment to free us or to rescue us. That the ransom was made “for many” and not for all tells us that our triune God had a very specific group in view when Jesus died on the cross—namely, His elect.
In any case, noting that Christ’s death constituted a ransom leads us to ask, To whom did Jesus pay the ransom that frees us? Some early Christians contended that our Lord paid the ransom price to Satan to free us from bondage to him. Certainly, Scripture does teach that in our fallen state, we are enslaved to the devil (John 8:34–44; Heb. 2:14–15). Nevertheless, the idea that God, in Christ, would pay a ransom to Satan is problematic at best. Satan is a mere creature and an evil one at that, so how could the most holy Creator need to pay the devil anything? Dr. R.C. Sproul says it best: “It is inconceivable that God could owe a debt to Satan.”
Petrus van Mastricht writes that Christ “the Mediator had to deliver up the redemption price not to the devil, although he had the power of death over those to be redeemed (Heb. 2:14), because in court one does not make satisfaction to the warden or the executioner, but to God as the Judge.” In other words, Satan did have dominion over our Creator’s sinful people not because he possessed it inherently by right but because God handed the human race over to the devil when Adam sinned. The devil became “the ruler of this world” (John 14:30–31)—the head of the ungodly world system in opposition to God—but the Lord did not surrender His sovereignty and status as Judge to Satan. God, as head of the heavenly court, demanded a ransom payment so that we could be released from His sentence of slavery to sin, death, and Satan. Jesus paid that price with His own blood.
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
God owes Satan nothing, and we owe the Lord everything. Yet we cannot pay the price that the Lord required to release us from slavery to sin, death, and Satan. Only God Himself can do that, and He did so in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ through His atoning death on the cross. We pay nothing for our salvation, but we do owe the Lord our gratitude for His saving work, gratitude that we express by endeavoring to serve Him.
For further study
- Psalm 49:15
- Jeremiah 31:11
- 1 Timothy 2:5–6
- 1 Peter 1:18–19
The bible in a year
- Psalms 116–118
- 1 Corinthians 2