Video Series: Communal Culture Episode 6: Redemption for the Father’s House

⬤Marcia: This little girl, Fanny, was a slave in Virginia. In 1862, she ran away with a group of slaves to Union Territory, where she was adopted by a Civil War nurse. She became widely known as a “redeemed slave child,” and news articles posted their picture, announcing: “Redeemed in Virginia!”

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⬤Brian: Shalom! Welcome to Bridges to the Bible! I’m Brian Johnson!

⬤Marcia: And I’m Marcia Johnson!

⬤Brian: Alright, I’m confused here. This girl looks white; how could she be a slave?

⬤Marcia: Well, she was one eighth black, and according to their laws, that meant she was black. But because she looked white, she became a poster child for the abolitionist movement. And so they used all kinds of pictures of her in this movement, so I guess the question is was she really freed? Because it kind of seems like she was exploited. What does it mean to be redeemed?

⬤Brian: Yeah, that’s a really good question. This is part six in a series on the communal nature of Biblical culture. Visit BridgesToTheBible.com, where you can download the episode guide, which contains study notes to follow along, discussion questions. and more.

⬤Marcia: So far in the series we’ve looked at eastern versus western thinking, honor/shame, names and naming; we looked at the bet av (the father’s house), and last time we looked at the patriarchal family structure within the bet av.

⬤Brian: Today, we’re going to look at the threats to the bet av, and how they overcame them by being redeemed. We also want to look at what it means when we say that we have been redeemed.

⬤Marcia: Well, how do we know what their greatest threats were?

⬤Brian: To understand what their greatest threats were, we need to understand what their greatest values were. There are three that we’re going to focus on. The first one is God or the gods, because this applies across the Ancient Near East. So this is who do you worship, who do you think is looking out for you, who do you trust? And this could be a national god or local gods. Secondly: family, or more broadly people. We’ve talked about the bet av and how this is the basic building block of society, and this is people taking care of each other, and this is an economically self-sufficient unit, but also you’re part of a larger community. And finally: your land. We’ve talked about how important the land was to them; there’s something that’s passed on from generation to generation.

⬤Marcia: We have a lot of these same values: we value God, our family, and either our land or our homes.

⬤Brian: So what sort of threats are there against our God, family, land?

⬤Marcia: Well a few I can think of are: maybe there is a major health issue that happens to us, or there’s a natural disaster that destroys our home, or maybe there’s an economic disaster: we’ve lost our job or we’ve lost our savings. That’s why we buy insurance, and we also have government programs that can help us out.

⬤Brian: They had some similar sorts of threats as well and others too. Let’s let’s imagine that the bet av is a tower, a strong tower that you can flee to for protection. So what sort of issues or threats could assault the tower of our bet av?

⬤Marcia: It could be threats to any of these. So first, looking at threats to their faith or their trust in God or their gods, it could be that they’re being led astray by a false prophet; it could be that maybe they were worshiping the wrong god; could be that they’re falling into idolatry, which happened with the Israelites; and it could be that they were just disappointed with or didn’t think their god was coming through for them.

⬤Brian: Yeah, that’s a good point. For instance, for family or people, well, we’ve got: what happens when somebody becomes sick or injured; or what if you’ve got like a death in the family, or worse somebody gets killed or murdered.

⬤Marcia: However, death is a natural part of the cycle of life. The more unexpected would be if there was a death of a son and there was no heir left to pass on the family line; or the death of a son with nobody left to care for widows and orphans.

⬤Brian: And another thing that could happen to people would be slavery: if you got into debt and you need to sell yourself as a slave in order to get out. Or alternatively, someone comes in, some invading army or so, and captures you and brings you into slavery.

⬤Marcia: And if you’re under oppression by others, they might be really taxing you heavily or abusing you in some other way.

⬤Brian: And then finally for land, a few things: you could have a year of just bad crops that could happen; that there’s maybe a plague, a bunch of locust plague, for instance; or there’s a drought or a fire, something that could happen. Your land is your job; this is your income, and this could lead to starvation. Likewise there’s a potential loss of your land, and what happens if, once again you have debts, and so you have to sell your land; or like with the slavery, an invading army comes in and seizes your land or destroys what’s growing there.

⬤Marcia: And exile is a culmination of all of these threats together: some loss of God, people, and land.

⬤Brian: Right. For them the gods were generally considered territorial, so if you are taken from the place where you’re at, where you’re living, is the god going to follow with you? Or has he abandoned you or is he just not strong enough or unwilling to save you from exile?

⬤Marcia: And people-wise, if you’re in exile, you’ve been separated from your people, or they’ve been taken away, or there’s a loss of natural national identity.

⬤Brian: Yeah and then your land: this is your ancestral land that you are being taken away from. And when you’ve got so many things piling up, it’s not long before the tower collapses!

⬤Marcia: And they didn’t have insurance like we do, and usually the government didn’t help. So what did people do in Biblical times when all these tough situations hit?

⬤Brian: The solution is they need to be “redeemed.”

⬤Marcia: What do you mean? I redeem gift cards, not people or land.

⬤Brian: Well, think back to our opening story about the slave girl: she was taken out of slavery. In order to be redeemed, you are bought and set free. And the theme of redemption is really interwoven all throughout the whole Bible really.

⬤Marcia: Well in our culture, we oftentimes redeem ourselves; we can overcome our weaknesses through self-improvement.

⬤Brian: And that, most of the time, was not the case in the Biblical world. They relied on somebody else to redeem them.

⬤Marcia: So they might have needed redemption from loss of their family or their land. Tell me more: how did redemption work?

⬤Brian: Well, think about it: the Torah is the foundation of the laws of the people of Israel, and so this is what establishes what redemption should look like. For instance, what does it look like for people to be redeemed? Look at Leviticus 25: “If a stranger or sojourner with you becomes rich, and your brother beside him becomes poor and sells himself to the stranger, then after he is sold he may be redeemed. One of his brothers may redeem him, or his uncle or his cousin may redeem him, or a close relative from his clan may redeem him.” You’ve got some sort of close relative redeeming the person, buying them back out of slavery. So how would land be redeemed?

⬤Marcia: Well, earlier in Leviticus 25, we see: “If your brother becomes poor and sells part of his property, then his nearest redeemer shall come and redeem what his brother has sold.” Can you think of a Biblical story where people or land were redeemed?

⬤Brian: I think the classic story of this is the story of Ruth and Boaz. It starts with this couple Elimelech and Naomi and their two sons. They go to a foreign land, the land of Moab, because of a famine in the land of Israel. There they get wives for their sons and then Elimelech and his two sons proceed to die, leaving three widows.

⬤Marcia: They lost their whole bet av: God, people, and land! God-wise, Naomi lost her faith in God; people-wise, they were separated from their people, and they didn’t have any husbands left to watch over them; and land-wise, they didn’t have an heir, so there wasn’t going to be any family that the land could be passed on to.

⬤Brian: So they had a choice of how to proceed: on the one hand, you’ve got one daughter-in-law who decides to go back to her father’s house and be safe there. The other though, Ruth, didn’t choose that; instead, she chose to go with Naomi and stay with Naomi. She would rather give up her father’s house to be part of Naomi’s family, what was not really left of it. But also because she admired Naomi’s God and people, and so they returned to Bethlehem,

⬤Marcia: And there Ruth starts gleaning in the fields of Boaz (he’s a kin of Elimelech, Naomi’s deceased husband), and Ruth asks Boaz to redeem her. He agrees he buys Elimelech’s land; he takes both Ruth and Naomi into his household, his bet av. He marries Ruth, and he fathers a child to her.

⬤Brian: All three areas of God, people, and land were addressed by this redemption. It starts out with Naomi: faith in God was restored, and Boaz brought them into his bet av, so they’ve got protection, and they fathered an heir to pass on the family name and to pass on the land to which he had purchased, redeemed. On top of that, we look at Ruth: she gave up her gods of her nation; she gave up her family, her people; and she gave up her country. And what did she get in return? She got a new God; she got a new people, a new family; and she got a new country out of it, that was better than before.

⬤Marcia: That was a great example of how redemption worked within the bet av, but let’s take a look at the biggest story of redemption in the Bible, where God redeemed his people out of Egypt.

⬤Brian: Yeah, so the Israelites in Egypt were in a pretty bad spot. Being slaves, they were effectively in exile without God, people, or land.

⬤Marcia: They were living in a land with thousands of foreign gods, and their God had been silent for centuries. Had he forgotten about them? They were oppressed living in slavery; they weren’t a nation, and Pharaoh’s killing their baby boys. And they were not living in the land that had been promised Abraham.

⬤Brian: Right. God redeemed them then out of Egypt. Look what it says in Exodus 6: “I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from slavery to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment. I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and I will bring you into the land I swore to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob.” So what do you see here?

⬤Marcia: He’s establishing a relationship with them! He’s their God, he is bringing them to be his people, and he is bringing them to a land. I can see why this Exodus is such a key event in scripture.

⬤Brian: And on top of that, this is what forms the core identity of the people of Israel: we were slaves in Egypt, and God redeemed us. And this also is what forms their core identity, their core understanding of who God is: God is the one who brought us out of slavery, who redeemed us. And this is repeated over and over throughout the scriptures. For instance, at the beginning of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 it says: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” This is how God is identified.

⬤Marcia: And the prophets referred to God as Israel’s Redeemer. Isaiah 43 says: “But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you O Israel: fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.”

⬤Brian: So God redeems them, brings them into the land. That’s great! The problem is then they turn away from him and follow other gods, and God warns them over and over to repent. And they don’t and so he says, I’m going to send you into exile as a result. And he warns them repeatedly before he finally does it. But even more repeatedly than the warning is after the exile, I will gather you; I will bring you back. For instance in Ezekiel 36 it says: “I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land.”

⬤Marcia: By the time of the New Testament, the people were really waiting for a new Moses. They wanted somebody who would redeem them from the oppression that they’re under and gather in the exiles. Think about the expectations that people had at the time of Jesus: you remember the story where the risen Jesus was walking with these men on the road to Emmaus. They didn’t know it was him, and look at what they commented to Jesus in Luke 24: “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.”

⬤Brian: So this happens at Passover time, when they’re remembering the whole Exodus event. Generally we think that the Jews of that time just wanted physical redemption; they wanted the Romans kicked out. But when you look at the Exodus, there was a physical redemption, but also a spiritual redemption that God worked as well.

⬤Marcia: And there was still the sense that the full return from exile hadn’t happened yet because the majority of the Jews were still living outside the land of Israel. And the ones who were living in the land were oppressed by the Romans. They also really needed their relationship with the Lord renewed; that’s why they were hoping for Jesus to redeem them.

⬤Brian: So what does it mean for us to be redeemed?

⬤Marcia: Paul describes this in his letter to the Colossians: “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” Jesus redeemed us from sin; he paid for our redemption with his blood. We’re all in exile, our relationships with God, other people, in the world overall; it’s just really broken, and we need to be redeemed from exile.

⬤Brian: So how are we redeemed from exile?

⬤Marcia: There’s lots of calls in scripture to repent or to return. Actually in Hebrew those are both the same Hebrew word: shuv. It means you’re going in one direction, and you turn around and go back the opposite way. You’re changing your behavior. So think about Naomi: she had to return to Bethlehem to her roots, and then she and Ruth were redeemed.

⬤Brian: And the prophets frequently called the people to repent of their ways and said: if you repent, God will restore you. One example here in Jeremiah 15 it says: “Therefore thus says the LORD: if you return, I will restore you.” The word “return” here is shuv. The word “restore” here is another form of shuv, which would mean I will cause you to return.

⬤Marcia: Likewise, at the time of John the Baptist and Jesus, both of them basically had the same message over and over: “Repent! For the Kingdom of God is at hand!” The Kingdom of God is where people submit to God’s rule and reign. And Jesus just wants to redeem anybody who’s willing to repent. We’ve got to stop going our own way, turn around, and return to God. And this isn’t just a one-time thing; it’s a continual process.

⬤Brian: So not only did Jesus redeem us in the past and continues to redeem and reshape us now; he’s also going to redeem us in the future. If we go to the end of the Bible in Revelation 21 it says: “And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.” So what we’re seeing here is we’ve got a restoration of God with us; and then we will be his people, this new identity, a new community, a good community; and a dwelling place, the holy city, a new Jerusalem, a good place to live.

⬤Marcia: So God redeemed Israel out of Egypt, and he continued to redeem his people. And Jesus redeemed us and is redeeming us, and there’s a great redemption that’s coming.

⬤Brian: Right. And God’s not just aiming to just restore things to how they were. He’s trying to create a new creation, something better than before. Today we’ve looked at the core values of the people of the Bible: God, people, and land, and how God redeemed each one of them.

⬤Marcia: We’ve looked at how the family was redeemed with Ruth and Boaz, how the nation was redeemed through the Exodus, and how the world was redeemed through Jesus. We look forward to the final redemption in the new heavens and the new earth, and he’s calling everyone to repent, continually turning back to the Lord.

⬤Brian: Continue the conversation at BridgesToTheBible.com. I would encourage you now to turn to the discussion questions. Coming up next time, we’ve got the final lesson in this series on communal culture. We hope that you’ll join us. Until next time, SHALOM!

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