April 3, 2014

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WHAT JESUS DID FOR US

Revelation 1:4—6 (contd)

FEW passages set down with such splendour what Jesus did for us.
(1) He loves us, and he set us free from our sins at the cost of his own blood. The Authorized Version is incorrect here. It reads: ‘Unto him that loved us and washed us from our sins in his own blood.’ The words to wash and to set free are very alike in Greek. To wash is louein; to set free is luein; and they are pronounced in exactly the same way. But there is no doubt that the oldest and best Greek manuscripts read luein. Again, in his own blood is a mistranslation. The word translated as in is en, which, indeed, can mean in; but here it is a translation of the Hebrew word be (the e is pronounced very short as in the), which means at the price of.
What Jesus did, as John sees it, was to free us from our sins at the cost of his own blood. This is exactly what he says later on when he speaks of those who were ransomed for God by the blood of the Lamb (5:9). It is exactly what Paul meant when he spoke of us being redeemed from the curse of the law (Galatians 3:13) and when he spoke of redeeming those who were under the law (Galatians 4:5). In both cases, the word used is exagorazein, which means to buy out from, to pay the price of buying a person or a thing out of the possession of the one who holds power over that person or thing.
This is a very interesting and important correction of the Authorized Version. It is made in all the newer translations, and it means that the well-worn phrases which speak of being ‘washed in the blood of the Lamb’ have little scriptural authority. These phrases convey a staggering picture; and it must come to many with a certain relief to know that what John said was that we are set free from our sins at the cost of the blood, that is, at the cost of the life of Jesus Christ.
There is another very significant thing here. We must note carefully the tenses of the verbs. John says that Jesus loves us and set us free. Loves is the present tense, and it means that the love of God in Christ Jesus is something which is continuous. Set us free is the past tense, the Greek aorist, which tells of one act completed in the past–and it means that in the one act of the cross our liberation from sin was achieved. That is to say, what happened on the cross was one act in time which was for our benefit and an expression of the continuous love of God.
(2) Jesus made us a kingdom, priests to God. That is a quotation of Exodus 19:6: ‘You shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.’ Jesus has done two things for us.
(a) He has given us royalty. Through him we may become the true children of God; and, if we are children of the King of Kings, we are part of the most royal ancestry of all.
(b) He made us priests. The point is this. Under the old way, only the priest had the right of access to God. When the Jews entered the Temple, they could pass through the Court of the Gentiles, the Court of the Women and the Court of the Israelites–but there they must stop; into the Court of the Priests they could not go; they could come no nearer the Holy of Holies. In the vision of the great days to come, Isaiah said: ‘You shall be called priests of the Lord’ (Isaiah 61:6). In that day, every one of the people would be a priest and have access to God. That is what John means; because of what Jesus Christ did, access to the presence of God is now open to everyone. There is a priesthood of all believers. We can come boldly to the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16), because for us there is a new and living way into the presence of God (Hebrews 10:19—22).

Barclay, W. (2004). The Revelation of John (3rd ed. fully rev. and updated., Vol. 1, pp. 39—41). Louisville, KY; London: Westminster John Knox Press.

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