-In Whom. In other words, in God’s beloved Son, Jesus, this One Who has been given the Kingdom. He is the One Who reigns over it, and He is the only Way into it. He is the One, and there is no one else. In other words, if you don’t have Jesus, you don’t have redemption. You are still trapped in the domain of darkness.
-Jesus is the One in Whom we have the redemption, the release, the setting free of a slave by paying the required ransom. We were being held captive as slaves in this domain of darkness, and it was our sins that both put us there and kept us there. The price for our release was that which would expiate (atone/provide forgiveness for) our sins. God’s holiness and justice did not allow Him to simply overlook our sins, yet His limitless love for us compelled Him to forge a way for us to be forgiven. We know from Scripture that without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins (Hebrews 9.22), and that it is impossible for anything but the blood of an innocent and righteous human being to suffice as payment for the sins of mankind (Hebrews 10.4, 9.12, 1Peter 1.19). Thus the shed blood of Jesus becomes the only satisfactory atonement for our sins (Matthew 26.28). Paul states elsewhere that our redemption and forgiveness is specifically through Jesus’ blood, the precious pure blood of the Lamb of God (Ephesians 1.7).
-Forgiveness. The standard definition means to stop feeling angry or resentful towards someone for something they did, something bad, some offense or transgression. But this is not what God means by forgive. The word in the Greek means to send away, to let go of something, completely and in total. This is what God does with our offenses, our sins, as far away as the east is from the west (Psalm 103.12), in the depths of the deepest sea (Micah 7.19), never again to hold them against us or revisit them. Gone. They are completely gone. And when you think about it, one normally cannot simply stop feeling angry about an offense as long as the offense remains. You gotta take care of the problem, otherwise it will sit there and fester and poison the relationship. Somehow, you gotta let it go. You gotta let it go. That is forgiveness, and that is what God did with our sins.
-Yes, the problem was (and is) sin. It was sin which had put us in the domain of darkness and kept us there. The word is hamartia, to miss the mark, and boy, do we ever. It describes our deeds, but it goes deeper, as it is an inborn condition of the heart, the inescapable tendency to depart from the order given by God and to establish oneself in one’s own position and to go one’s own way. It is finding satisfaction and fulfillment and pleasure in something or someone else to the exclusion of your Creator, behaving independently and self-sufficiently apart from Him. It is a state we are born in-to, and a lifestyle we cannot avoid. It is inevitable - those who are in the flesh cannot not sin. It manifests as both a falling away from a relationship of faithfulness towards God as well as living in opposition to what He wants, disobeying His commands and law. And the penalty, the wages of sin, is death (Romans 6.23). Left to ourselves, without divine intervention, we would not only live out our lives as slaves to sin, but would also be forced to pay the full penalty of sin, physical and spiritual death, separated forever from our Creator, away from His breathtaking goodness and love, from His indescribable peace and joy, away from His Light, consigned to outer darkness forever (Matthew 8.11-12, 25.30). But good news, joy of joys, we have been delivered from this fate through Jesus, through faith in His blood!
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