The Redemption Paradox

“So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.”

Love gives us a different perspective on the difficulties of life. Seven years of hard work, day in, day out, is a high price to pay for a wife. Elsewhere, Jacob talks about serving Laban, and he says, “By day the heat consumed me, and the cold by night, and my sleep fled from my eyes.” So he was not unaware what Rachel cost him, but love gave Jacob a different perspective. He had a goal in front of him. Compared to that, seven years became but a few days.

The Paradoxes of Scripture

Scripture is full of paradoxes, parallel streams of truth that seem contradictory to the human mind, yet remain true all the same. The sovereignty of God and the free will of man. Scripture teaches both, though they seem to contradict. The deity and humanity of Christ. Scripture teaches both, though they seem to contradict. The problem is not with God or with scripture, it’s with our limitations, and that’s appropriate. Theologians who think they have God’s sovereignty or the mystery of the Word made Flesh figured out have not even begun to grapple with the issues. If we could understand everything God says perfectly, he wouldn’t be much of a God. The Bible teaches that he is. David, writing about the mind of God, says, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it.” He recognized when the use of all his faculties brought him no closer to the explanations some men seek.

That’s a paradox. It’s a place where you and I have to just stop and accept what the Bible teaches whether we fully understand it or not.

The Cost of Our Salvation

I was thinking this week about what we might call the redemption paradox, the work of the cross and all it involved.

On the one hand, we have a stream of biblical truth about the cost of our salvation to both the Lord Jesus and the Father. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he cried out with a loud voice. Luke writes, “And being in agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” Isaiah says, “His appearance was marred beyond human semblance.”

The suffering of the cross was real, intense and unparalleled. Our Lord bore the sin of the world. That’s one stream of biblical truth about the cross.

The Joy Set Before Him

But there’s another stream of truth about redemption. The writer to the Hebrews speaks of:

“… Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame.”

That phrase “despising the shame” doesn’t travel from Greek into English with perfect clarity. We often use “despise” to describe intense loathing. “I despise that man” means he disgusts me. I obsess over how much I can’t stand him. But Jesus did not despise the shame of the cross in that sense. In Greek, the word doesn’t convey hatred. Rather, it conveys indifference. When Jesus said, “See to it that you do not despise one of these little ones”, or when Paul wrote to Timothy, “Let no one despise your youth”, they were not worried about disciples hating kids or the Ephesians hating Timothy. No disciple of Christ passionately hated children. But even Christians do have a tendency to ignore children or overlook them, to trivialize or downplay their input when we are in the middle of our own important adult business.

Turning Seven Years into a Few Days

So when Hebrews says Jesus despised the shame of the cross, it’s telling us that compared to the joy of bringing many sons (and daughters) to glory, our Lord was indifferent to what it cost him. He considered it trivial. Compared to the love with which he loved us while we were yet sinners, he barely spared a thought for his own humiliation. We see the intensity of that love for his own in the Psalms. David writes, “As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones in whom is all my delight.” Paul writes, “The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” He didn’t love me because I was lovable or lovely. He loved me long before I ever did anything worthy of his love. But like Jacob, he could see the end product of his labor. That love is what drove him, and it overwhelmed everything else. It made it possible for our Lord to contemplate the cross in all its horror and say, “Not my will but yours be done.”

That’s the other parallel stream of truth about redemption. Like Jacob, our Lord looked forward to the moment when he could say, “Behold, I and the children God has given me.” He looked forward with the intensity and anticipation that turns seven years of hard labor into a few days, and turns the suffering of the cross into “despising the shame”. That’s a paradox, and the right way to deal with a paradox is to put one foot in each stream of truth and stand there firmly.

So then, when we gather to remember the Lord, we acknowledge the cost of the cross to our Lord, but we also celebrate with him the joy of our salvation and the love that took him there. That was the object all along.