Colossians 1:14 - The Efficacious Ransom

Yeah, we had an extra question and answer session on Sunday School Day, but it's a whole year, so we're looking like we're getting started here. So anyway, I don't like to cut it short, but I don't want to keep you forever.

It's time to just sort of see it.

How's everybody doing?

Excellent.

Yeah, you were a kid for the day.

That's good. That's always a good sign.

Well, pray for Charlotte. Her blood pressure is too high for some reason.

She had minor foot surgery on Tuesday. So probably tomorrow, it's not down in the morning. Well, she went to the doctor. She doesn't want to get on the medicine, but she doesn't want to get on it for a little while.

And get down and get off of it.

So pray for her.

She doesn't want to have to do that. She misses all of you, of course. And good to have you guys back.

Some of us have been a little under the weather lately, and lots of stuff going around. But we'll continue to pray for Virg as well. Do you know what he's going to have, Mr. Princeton?

I wish he wouldn't even take that thing.

Yeah.

It's dangerous.

I've heard him disappointed me. For, you know,.

Go look and see if he needs it. But I know the doctor.

He made us tell him, I don't want to do it. I've known people who do it.

You've had them, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

They're not fun, Mr. Princeton. You ever do the one with the chemical, Mr. Princeton?

Yes.

It's horrifying.

Very much so.

Yeah.

You don't have any control.

Yeah. None.

So Virg, if you're listening, don't do the chemical.

Don't.

You're not going to do that.

Yeah.

Well, anyway, we love you guys. Great to be back. I'm going to get back into Colossians today. Last time, I had Virg a little bit.

When we talked about the resurrection one more time.

The Meaning of Redemption and Ransom in Colossians 1:14

And so today, to remind you where we are, we're in Colossians 1 .14.

And it talks about, in whom we have redemption.

Through his blood and forgiveness of our sins. And that word redemption, if you remember, the Bible in the Greek is not really exactly redemption.

It's better translated ransom. It's the word for ransom in the New Testament. And so we're talking about the ransom. It is such an important aspect of all the different parts of salvation. If you want to just talk about salvation, it's a huge circle with a lot of smaller circles in it.

I don't know how many even.

I probably should know.

But I mean, I could probably name them all.

It might take 10 minutes.

But it's a bunch. It's a bunch of moving parts in there. And what's so fascinating is when God did that to us, the regeneration part happened. And I don't even know if it's even in time, really. I mean, I know we're in time, but it just happened so fast.

It's just, boom, and he saves you. He awakens you. And he does about 33 other things and gives you 33 other things and does things to you as he saves you, such as putting his love in your heart, such as putting his faith in your heart, and on and on.

So it's a big picture. And one of those aspects is the ransom aspect of it. And ransom, I think, doesn't get talked about enough in modern times. It was preached on more 150, 200 years ago. If you read some of the old sermons by Spurgeon or Whitefield or people like that, the ransom was talked about a lot.

I can remember Lester Roloff talking about it a lot in the early, like, 1980s before he passed away in a plane crash in, I think, about 1984-ish. I was actually called to preach at his funeral, Lester Roloff's funeral, and ran from it for a year thinking it was emotional, but it wasn't.

It was the real thing. But that was quite a man. You can still hear Lester Roloff on the radio, by the way. If you Google it, you can find him. You say, how does that work, to Google it and find him on the radio?

Well, because it won't be radio anymore, but it'll be on the internet. You should listen to a couple of his sermons. You wanna hear an old-time preacher. You're gonna think he's a country bumpkin when you hear his voice, but he's a PhD in theology from Baylor University, but he never let anybody call him doctor.

Anyway, I got off on Roloff, but he happened to be a great preacher sort of from the past that my life crossed with his, and I got to know him somewhat and cherish that. Well, he talked about the ransom a lot, so let's talk about it a little bit more today.

Context, Grammar, and the Whole Bible on 1 Timothy 2

Now, last time, if you'd, now, this was before I was gone on our two-week trip, so just to remind you where we were, we were kind of in this passage in 2 Timothy 2, verses one through eight, and we went down at least through verse six, and we were talking about the little word all because it's found many times in those six or eight verses, and the little Greek word all is pas, P-A-S, is how it looks in English letters.

Just as in English, it can mean one of two things. It can mean all, as in every individual thing, or it can mean all kinds of, which means some things in different types of bigger sets. So if you're talking about people, it could mean every man, woman, boy, and girl in the world that ever lived, if you said all people, or if you said all men, as the scripture says, means men and women, but, or it could mean some men and women from all races,.

From every race.

Some people from every race will be saved, which is what I believe it means, and if you were here the time before I left, you know why I believe that, and we went through that. I'm not gonna go through it again today, but I'm gonna pick up where we were, but we were gonna look at it in three areas.

One was in the context. You have to take everything in context. So what is that part of that chapter talking about? Who's it talking to? What's it talking about? And secondly, in other words, what's the whole idea that it's talking about?

And secondly, we're gonna look at it from the point of view of the grammar, but I'm gonna do that last. I'm not gonna do that today. And then thirdly, we're gonna look at it, how does it relate to the whole of the Bible?

Like if you look at every verse, rest easy, there aren't many, but if you looked at every verse where the word ransom is found, what does the Bible say about it? And you need to make it fit that. They can't contradict.

There can be no contradictions. God doesn't make mistakes. We can make mistakes. We can misinterpret one or both verses if they seem to contradict, but they don't contradict. We're just misinterpreting one or both of them.

So we have to get that right using the 10 rules of proper Bible interpretation, which include all these things I just talked about, like context, the grammar, the word meanings, and so forth, and all of the whole, it has to fit the whole Bible.

So where we were was we kind of went down through there and I'll just read it in case you don't remember it. I'm not gonna cover it verse by verse again. I'll just read it. This is 1 Timothy 2, 1. I exhort, therefore, that first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings, and for all that are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty, which Lord been dealing with me on that phrase just because I've been studying this.

It's not what the sermon's about, but that little phrase of living a peaceable life in godliness and honesty. I'm gonna get on a rabbit trail if I talk about that right now. So let's skip that and go to verse three.

For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who will have all men to be saved. Now, here is the question. I've heard some scholar, I need to try to dig up and remember who it was, but he said, it is not important what the Bible says.

What is important is what the Bible means. And that is so true because you can make it say anything you want it to if you take stuff out of context. That's what the scholar meant when he made that phrase.

It's kind of an interesting phrase when he pauses there and he says, it doesn't matter what the Bible says. And he paused and you're going, wait a minute. And then he quickly comes back and says, it's important what it means.

So does it mean that God will have all men to be saved? Because if it does mean that, then all men will be saved because God is sovereign.

He's all powerful.

He's all loving.

And if it's his will for all men to be saved, they will be. You can't argue against that. You can try, but you can't argue against it. All right, so maybe it means something else and it doesn't mean what it sounds like it means.

And there are passages in scripture. There are not many, but there are a few, what we call difficult passages that on the first reading, you'll get it wrong because you've got to have time to line it up with the whole Bible.

You got to have time to look at the Greek. You got to have time to look at the, in other words, the word meanings, the grammar, what the whole Bible says about the issue and what this context is talking about, or you'll get it wrong.

And this is one of those cases, I believe. So verse four says, who will have all men to be saved and to come into the knowledge of truth? For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself, and here's another one, a ransom for all to be testified in due time.

And that's what we're talking about from Colossians is this idea of ransom. So we're going to take a hard look at verse six. Where into I am ordained a preacher. I'm going to stop there because that's where today's message starts.

Is with verse seven.

Why "All Men" Means All Kinds of People, Not Every Individual

So now what, just quickly to go over what we talked about last time without going over it verse by verse, what we decided was, and if you disagree with me, it's okay. You should probably come to me in private and we'll talk about it.

It's okay, but this is what I believe. And I believe if you look at the context in verse two, it's talking about a type of person.

There went my glasses.

It's talking about a blind person though. It's talking about a type of person who most people don't like, a king,.

Or a very, very rich person.

And the reason the masses of population don't like kings and rich people is because they abuse people quite often. Hollywood wants to think all rich people are evil. That is not true. The wealthiest people in the Forbes 400 billionaire list give more billions of dollars to people in poverty across the world than anybody else.

So they're not all evil,.

But there's this sense and always has been in every generation probably since not too far after Adam and Eve, where the people that had the most were resented. Would you agree with that? All right, so when Paul is teaching his young preacher, Timothy, how to run a church and how to teach his people to be, he's saying, look, I want you to understand this.

I know it's easy for you to pray for your family members. I know it's easy for you to pray for your pastor, your deacons, your friends, but it's not easy to pray for some people. For example, kings that abuse you and maybe even take your daughters away and bring them into the castle and turn them into cooks or whatever they want to turn them into.

It's not easy to want to pray for them. And Paul says, but here's what I want you to do. I want you to pray for all men. Now, in that context, does he mean that he wants Timothy to pray for every human on the earth, which Timothy has no way of obeying that because he doesn't know them all, or does it mean pray for all kinds of men, including kings?

You see?

And in a normal, just if you read it like you'd read a newspaper, which is a good way. I love how Dr. Ryrie says you should read the Bible. He says, don't interpret literally because you can't always do that because Jesus is not a door.

He calls him a door.

So there are allegories, but he said, read it plainly. Like if you're reading a book, a fiction book, you can tell when it's allegory, right? It does allegories. Oh, I know what that means. It's just relating this to that, helping me understand this over here from that.

That's okay. Just read it plainly. So if you read this plainly and you understand how people are thinking and what Paul is telling him, trying to teach him, he's saying you need to pray, not just for the people you like, pray for people you don't like.

Pray for all kinds of people. And another problem you know he has, because you got me for a preacher. If you didn't have me for a preacher, you might not know this, but Jews did not think God would save a Gentile.

You've heard me say it a million times. Maybe I know that because I had a Jewish Christian person who was actually my mentor in the ministry when I was in my 20s and 30s. Maybe that's why I know that.

But I just know they didn't think God would even save a Gentile. And Paul was always telling them,.

Look, you're wrong.

He died for all men. But it doesn't mean every individual. It means Jews and Gentile men. That's what he means in those contexts. Well, this is very similar. So we went down through and we talked about that.

So since it's talking in that way that don't pray just for your friends, but for your kings, then I think God through Paul gives the reason for that in verse four. He said, here's why I want you to pray even for kings because some of them are elect and God's going to save them.

But you've got to do a couple of things on your part. You've got to give them the gospel and you've got to pray for them because God would have all men to be saved. Now, does he still mean, is he going to switch from all kinds of to every individual or is it still all kinds of men?

Kings, for example. I think it's still all kinds of men. God would have all kinds of men, some men from every race, from every order of life, from poor, poverty, to riches, to kings, to the lowest person in the social strata.

He's going to have some from all those groups saved is what I think this means. Because if it doesn't mean what I think it means, then every person who was ever born will be in heaven when you get there.

And Jesus will be proven to be a liar because he said, few there be that enter into heaven. So do you believe people that interpret this to mean all individuals are right or do you believe Jesus is right?

Like is Jesus telling the truth when he says, no, there's not very many really, it's just a remnant of the human race.

That'll make it to heaven.

And yet they're saying, well, let's keep going. So let's go to verse six. And he ransomed all. Now, does that mean he ransomed every individual in the whole world? Does it mean that he ransomed some from every kind of race, every kind of walk of life, kings, poor people.

He ransomed some from everything, which does it mean? Well, if he did ransom all individuals, they will in fact be in heaven because the price got paid for their sins. And you say, oh no, no, no, because they got to receive the gift.

Show me that in the Bible. Show me that you get saved by something you do. Do you believe in works, salvation? You say you don't. So now if you want to say, well, but they got to reach out and take the gift.

Well, there's a work.

Say, no, no, that's just faith.

What Jesus said when they said, what works must we do to enter the kingdom of heaven? He said, this is the work that you believe in me. So he said, belief is a work. So what we come to understand is that regeneration is a work of God and he does to us.

And once we're awake, then the rest of it are effects, including the belief, the repentance, the baptism, the going to church, the tithing, the loving each other. All of those are effects of the salvation.

None of them cause it. Now, once you get that down, then this all fits in place. But I will tell you this, everybody that's in heaven is going to be there by the blood of Jesus plus nothing, because the blood was the ransom.

Now let's just do this. Did you know William Webster was a born again Christian? The man who created the Webster's dictionary that you had to use in school and hated so much, right? We did so much work with dictionaries when I was a kid.

I guess they still do, or they have to do word searches and learn how to use a dictionary. Maybe it's all on the computer now. They don't have to. I don't know. That's probably the case. But anyway, Webster's, ransom.

Here's what it means. A consideration paid, in other words, an amount of money paid or demanded for the release of someone or something from captivity. It's bigger definition than that, if you look at the big dictionary.

So I'm gonna keep going here. Another meaning, to deliver, especially from sin or its penalty. Mr. Webster said that. A third one, to set free from confinement or danger. Another one, implies releasing from bondage or penalties by giving what is demanded or necessary for the release.

So when you ask, what is it that God the Father demands and considers necessary for you not to go to hell? It is that either number one, you pay for your sins by going to hell forever, or number two, someone ransoms you and pays for the sins in your place.

One of the two. And that's why Buddhism doesn't work. Islam doesn't work. Nothing else out there works because they don't have a son of God who gave his life for them. They don't believe in that. They don't have anything but their own sin.

They're gonna die in their sins. In fact, the Islamic people I've talked to tell me that they all have to go to hell for a little while. The problem is the Bible doesn't say you go for a little while.

It calls it eternal damnation. So they got that wrong. But anyway, naturally, that's all I'm gonna say about it. I don't wanna get stabbed like the other preacher friend of ours that some of us listen to on YouTube.

But anyway, I don't mind because I think probably before anybody made it up here, you would already be dead. So many of you have weapons in our church, including the one under here.

But anyway,.

To free from captivity or punishment by a price that is paid. Now, here's the last one. The ransom note, this is where Webster gives an example of what the word means. You know how they do that sometimes, like use it in a sentence.

You had to do that in school. Webster does this. Here's the sentence. The ransom note explained the terms under which she would be released. That's just what it means. Universally is what it means. So in the Bible, it doesn't have a different meaning either.

It literally means to be set free by the appropriate price that's paid. And the only price that any Christian I'm aware of that I would respect or believe knows God at all is that they believe it's the blood of Jesus that pays that price on our behalf.

So you have to agree with me that if God meant in this passage that he wanted all humans to be saved and that he gave himself a ransom for all individual humans, then they will all be in heaven because they're not saved by works.

They're saved by him having died for them. And I know what the modern preacher says because this is all he knows. But if he will go back and read sermons from 150 years ago, he will know more than this.

But what the modern preacher in seminary, coming out of seminary believes is that Jesus died to prepare a gift for you. And that gift is eternal life. And that he's offering it, but you gotta come up here and you gotta decide right now your eternal destiny by taking that gift.

And when you decide to take it,.

You save yourself.

Now they won't add that last part yourself, but I will add it because that's what you're doing. If you decide I'm gonna take that gift, then you're saving yourself by doing what that preacher told you to do.

Would you agree with that? He's got a prayer formula. Dear Jesus, come to my heart and say amen. Congratulations. Brother, let's baptize you. That is the gospel I grew up under. How many of you grew up under that gospel?

Raise your hand. That's exactly what you were told. Now I have to be quick and I learned this the hard way once. If you did that, it doesn't unsave you, okay? Because it was your desire to go down that altar that showed you were already saved.

You got saved in the pew back there when your heart changed and you wanted Jesus, that was regeneration. And the Bible says while we were yet in our sins as he quickened us, we didn't quicken us and the preacher didn't quicken us and the altar didn't quicken us.

The Holy Ghost did that when he called us. After that, you wanted to do all the other stuff and you did and those are effects, not the cause. And as Spurgeon so beautifully said, an effect can never be the cause of the cause.

So you're already saved before you got up here. And so, but most people don't know that, guys. Your friends, if you told them that, they will go, huh, what are you talking about? Oh, well, Brother David said,.

Well, then he's a cult leader.

That's exactly what they'll think. So you gotta be careful how you talk. You gotta give them baby bites. I was telling my kids this story when me and Charlotte first got saved. We were in a young couple's Sunday school class and they were about 10 years older than us, this couple, Frank and Patty Ford.

We still love them. We still go see them from time to time.

And their kids,.

Because we babysat their kids before we had kids. And he was a dentist and he had heard me. I was a new Christian, but I was zealous and I believed in sovereignty of God from my first month as a Christian.

I understood that. I understood that's how it was in the Bible, that God was in control of everything and there was the elect, there was predestination. All this was true from the Bible. I hadn't read Calvin.

I didn't even know who John Calvin was, but I had read Romans chapter eight and Romans chapter nine and Ephesians chapter one and in Acts where it says, as many as were ordained believed, I've read all those verses.

So I just thought, well, that's how it is. And so I would start to teach that to some people at First Baptist Mejia. And my Sunday school teacher, Frank, who was 10 years older, who was the dentist, he believed like I did.

He understood it was that way, but he knew most of the church didn't see it that way. And so he invited me over to dinner and now I know for lunch, I know it was just for this purpose. So I'm sitting at his table and he had a little baby that was still in the high chair, couldn't even toddle yet, couldn't crawl yet.

A baby that young. And he reached over and took a piece of roast, which is what his wife had cooked us and cut it up a little piece and stuck. He said, watch this, David. And he stuck that meat in that baby's throat and that baby started choking to death.

Well, he was a dentist,.

So he had tools shaped like this where he could get in there and get it. And he knew it, he wasn't afraid of it. I didn't know it, it freaked me out. So he let that baby choke for maybe 20 seconds, which was way too long for me and not even my baby, but I had babysat with that baby.

And he reached in and he gets that meat out and the baby's fine. He said, this is what you do when you teach that stuff to baby Christians.

Whoa.

So I never forgot that object lesson my whole life. And we have to be so careful how we teach things that people are not taught in church anymore. Even when they're true, we have to take it in little bits and make sure their mind is open because you can't stuff stuff in a closed mind anymore.

You can stuff beef into a baby's stomach, you know, it just doesn't work. But anyway, I mean, look at this in 1 Timothy that we're looking at, how easy do you think it would be for a brand new Christian to get that out of there?

This is one reason the Bible says that preachers and evangelists and things like that are given as a gift to the church. Like you need people that spend most of their time studying. You don't have time to do that, you're working.

You don't have time. So you need to make as much time as you can to do it yourself, but you're not gonna do all that kind of work. So someone has to do it. Now, what you do need to do when I stand up here and show it to you, you need to go home and verify that I'm telling you the truth that I didn't make this stuff up, right?

That's your job. So we believe that Jesus ransomed the elect and this is the only verse in the Bible that makes it sound like he ransomed everybody. He died as a ransom for all and they think that means all individuals.

I think it means all kinds of people. And I will tell you this, most time in Paul's epistles, especially because of his style of writing, and then you look at the context he's talking about, almost every time you see the Greek word pas, it would be better translated in English into all kinds of rather than all.

Jesus died for all kinds of people is a better translation. Do your own study, you'll find out that's the case. Now, that is really important there for verse six, but there's more. There's more proof to it than what I've already given you.

And I haven't, I've only covered Roman numeral one, which is context. We got two more major things to look at, such as the grammar, which we'll do that last, because I got to try to figure out how to cut that down where I don't want to make it where you're bored with it, because there's a big study on the grammar that I've done.

But the next thing is though, what about the whole of the Bible? How is this word used throughout the Bible? We are going to look at that today. But now this path, the context isn't quite over yet because first what we saw was Paul used this idea of praying for all kinds of people, including kings, that God wants all kinds of people, including kings to be saved, and that Jesus died to ransom all kinds of people, including kings who you hate and Gentiles who you hate.

He ransomed some of them too, but there's more proof than that. Look at verse seven. He's got Jews in the room that are disagreeing with him on this. Just like I have Gentiles all around America and churches that disagree with me on this.

But Paul is speaking to Jews and Gentiles and to the Jews in the room. Look what he does with verse seven as further argument for the case that Jesus ransomed all kinds of people, not just poor Jews, but rich Gentiles, kings.

Look at verse seven. Because of all this, this is what where into means. So he says, Jesus who gave himself a ransom for all kinds of people to be testified in due time, where into I am ordained. In other words, it's Jesus who ordained me.

Jesus called me to be an apostle. Look what he says. Where into I am ordained a preacher and an apostle, and I speak the truth in Christ. I lie not. So doesn't that tell you that they were having trouble understanding this passage that Paul's trying to teach even back then.

But he said, look, I'm not lying to you. I'm telling you the truth. And look what he says. I've been ordained a preacher and apostle and a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and in truth. I will, therefore, that men pray everywhere.

Now there's an interesting phrase. Everywhere, right there, means ein, which is a little word in. Pas, which is all kinds of. And then, let me think what the word is everywhere. Tapos, which means different places in the world.

So he means, I will that men pray in all places. All kinds of different places and countries in the world. Lifting up holy hands without wrath and doubting. So here we see that if you think that it doesn't include Gentiles and you're a Jew, he says, but I was called by God to be the apostle to the Gentiles.

So yes, Jesus died to ransom all kinds of people, not just Jews. So he's talking about that too, not just the kings. So all of that is in the context. Now, so Paul is exhorting Timothy to make sure that he and his future church members and other pastors someday in the future give prayers and thanksgiving for all kinds of men in the world, not just people that are like them, same color as they are, for example.

So in the South, we had the same issues as Jew, Gentile, only it was white, black after the civil war. Have you ever been into a Baptist church where they say they have closed communion? Raise your hand if you've ever been in one.

Yeah, Ashton's got kin folks that are one. Why do they have closed communion? Historically, it's easy to prove. They didn't think that black individuals had a soul. So they did not want them taking the Lord's supper.

So they made a rule and said, you have to be a member of this local church to take the Lord's supper with us. So when visitors came who were black, they'd say, are you a member here? And they'd say, no,.

Because they didn't allow them to be members.

Oh, well, if you're not a member, please abstain. And then they would do the Lord's supper and they didn't get to do it. That's the history of it. That's where closed communion came from. It's not from the Bible.

It's not in the Bible. In fact, it's anti-Bible. But the blacks and the whites, especially in the South of the United States, for years and years, it would be hard for white people to even think God would save a black person.

And that is history. Go study it. It's sick. It's sick. And those people claim to be Christians, but that is history. Now, that's the same mistake the Jew made with regard to the Gentile. It's no different.

It's called racial prejudice. And you bring it into religion and it's pathetic. God, Paul said, look, God is not like that. God died to save every kind of person. God saved to die. He died to save all kinds of people.

Some people from every race, and that's what pas means throughout Paul's epistles. All right, so we see that he's talking about the kings and authority and all of that. Now, if you want, I want you to just jot this down because I don't want to read these.

But if you want some biblical proof that people don't like kings and that that's what Paul is talking about, look at Proverbs 29. Two, but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn. Verses like that.

Another one, Psalm 10. Two, they secretly set up against the poor, these wealthy people. Psalm 37. 12 through 14. Proverbs 27. I'm sorry, Proverbs 22 in verse seven. The rich ruleth over the poor. And then 1 Samuel 8, 10 through 18 is really amazing because it's where God's talking to the Jews where they say, oh, we got to have a king.