Daily Manna · Day 35 · February 4
Redemption
“In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace;”
You have never told a living soul about that one thing. It surfaces in traffic and in the shower, and you deal with it the way you deal with everything, by filling the next hour.
The man who wrote this sentence was writing from custody. He calls himself a prisoner twice in the same letter, and it went out to churches in the province of Asia, with Ephesus at the centre of it. Ephesus was a magic city. Luke records that when the gospel took hold there, people who had practised curious arts brought their books and burned them in public, and somebody counted the value at fifty thousand pieces of silver. These were people with things in their past that had a price tag attached, and they had watched that price go up in smoke in front of their neighbours.
Into that, Paul writes: in whom we have redemption through his blood. Redemption is a market word, the buying back of a slave or a prisoner of war. He stops short of saying the debt was waived, or overlooked, or that God was never much bothered. He says it was purchased, and he names the currency in the same breath. And then, according to the riches of his grace, which he says overflowed toward us. The grace is lavish. It was not cheap.
The warning is not about whether God will forgive you. It is about what a thing bought at that price costs you when you keep carrying it unopened. Sins hidden do not stay the same size; they organise a life around themselves. The hour you keep filling is not free either. You are paying for it already, in a currency you never agreed to.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 35 is Above a Servant (Philemon 1:16).