The Cross & Redemption

Ask ten believers what spiritual means and you will get atmosphere, feeling, and fervency. Paul wrote twenty-three of the Bible's twenty-six occurrences of the word, and he never once uses it of a feeling. This article traces what it actually marks — a source and a realm — and what that settles about a brother who has fallen.

A graphic circulating online asks how a man never under the first covenant could be redeemed from transgressions under it. The question carries a premise it never states: that the only redemption there is, is redemption from covenant transgressions. Paul says guilt reached men who never had a covenant to break, and so does the remedy.

Believers are told to plead the blood over their homes, their children, their fears, even their thoughts. But where did the practice come from, and does Scripture, rightly divided, command it in any dispensation? A study of the blood across Passover, Israels program, and the mystery revealed to Paul.

Good Friday and a Sunday-sunrise resurrection are tradition, not Scripture. The Lord gave one sign — three days and three nights in the heart of the earth — and only a Wednesday cross and a Saturday-evening rising can pay it. A study of the high sabbath, the two sabbaths, the Passover, and why no day is a holy day for the Body.

The Bible speaks about marriage to mankind before the law, to Israel under the law and the kingdom, and to the Body of Christ under grace. Read as one rule to one people, it binds commandments God never gave us. Rightly divided, the Lord's strict word to Israel and Paul's word of grace each fall into place — and grace gives far more than the law.

Christ is the end of the law for righteousness, not a base it is rebuilt on. The righteous man under the law kept it; the man under grace has righteousness imputed without works. Paul withstood Peter at Antioch over a walk that put the Body back under Israel's law, and to rebuild that law is to make yourself a transgressor.

Tradition stacks archbishop over bishop and a clergy over the laity. Paul is simpler: two offices, bishop and deacon; bishop, elder, overseer, and pastor are one man and one work; the qualifications are for entering the office, not a standing audit; and ordination is the recognition of a proven man, never a sacrament.

Why would God create man, knowing he would fall — and would it not have been kinder never to create at all? Answered on the only ground where it can be answered, the revelation given to Paul: God made the world to display the exceeding riches of His grace, and grace must have something to redeem.