Ransom Paid to Save!

You may or may not have ever heard the name Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Hauptmann was arrested, incarcerated and eventually executed for being the perpetrator of one of the most famous kidnapping cases in American history. His victim, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, was the 20-month-old son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The case was a complex one. It involved a series of ransom notes ranging from $50,000 upwards to $100,000, received over a period of several weeks. A payment of $50,000 was eventually paid. Some ten weeks after the baby was kidnapped, his little body was found, partly buried and badly decomposed, about four and a half miles southeast of the Lindbergh home on the rural outskirts of Hopewell, New Jersey. The head was crushed, there was a hole in the skull, and there were some missing body members. The Coroner’s examination concluded the child had been dead about two months and that death was caused by a blow to the head.

A super-intensive investigation by many different law-enforcement agencies eventually led to Hauptmann’s arrest two and half years after the crime. After his conviction by a jury for first degree murder, Hauptmann was electrocuted at 8:47 p.m. on April 3, 1936 after several appeals. The crime was exceedingly heinous, and the case is a fascinating one about a ransom that was paid but failed to save. A sad and tragic story.                       

 Let’s look much further back in history to the day another famous crime took place, and a ransom paid at the same time and place! The apostle Paul describes it in Galatians 3:13 with these words: “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’).” We don’t have space to dig very deep here, but Paul is teaching that Jesus made a ransom payment that paid off our debt of sin, a debt He did not owe and that we could not pay! The word picture Paul paints is from the slave market. The Greek word translated by the English “redeemed” means to buy up at the marketplace. The term involves the idea of going into a slave market and paying the price to take somebody completely out of slavery and setting them free! Thayer’s Greek Lexicon defines “to redeem” as “payment of a price to recover from the power of another.” The term is used metaphorically by Paul in Galatians 3:13 of Christ freeing men and women from the dominion of the law at the price of His vicarious death on the cross. Don’t miss it — by hanging on the “tree” of the cross, He became a curse “for us,” that is, in our place (Deuteronomy 21:23 * Acts 10:39 * Acts 13:29). Isaac Watts’ rousing song asks, “Was it for crimes that I have done He groaned upon the tree?” The answer is yes, yes! — for at the cross “the Mighty Maker died for man, the creature’s sin” (verses 2 and 3 “Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed?”). The unspeakably glorious and good news is “He Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree” — and if we die to sin and live for righteousness, then “by His stripes we are healed” (1 Peter 2:24). At the cross Christ paid in full the ransom sin demanded to set us free. That ransom fails to fully save only if we fail to trust and obey our Redeemer (see Galatians 3:26-29 * Romans 6:4-6, 16-18 * Colossians 2:10-13 ). Praise be to God!

 “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace” — Ephesians 1:7    

by: Dan Gulley, Smithville, TN