Ransomed From Sin

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“At noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And at three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?”(which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).”

Mark 15:33

Main Readings: Hebrews 9 & Mark 15:33-16:8

Supporting Readings: Psalm 22 & Revelation 14

This morning, we arrive at the summit of Mark’s story – at the destination of the path Jesus has been treading since he came into the world. Everything up until now has been leading to and preparing for this special moment – the cross of Jesus.

Jesus, himself, has been readying his disciples - and us, through Mark’s account - for this crucial and climatic point in his life.

In chapter 8 he began to teach them that the Son of Man ‘must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again’.

Then in chapter 9, again, he said to them, ‘“The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. They will kill him, and after three days he will rise”’.

And then in chapter 10 - on the cusp of going up to Jerusalem, he said ‘“We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles, who will mock him and spit on him, flog him and kill him. Three days later he will rise”’.

Three separate and explicit declarations on Jesus’ part that the moment we’ve arrived at was surely coming.

That’s what those declarations do say. What they don’t say is what this moment was going to be for.

And that’s why Jesus also said what he said in chapter 10, verse 45, ‘For even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’.

He said it like this in chapter 14, verse 24, ‘This is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many’.

He said all these things so that we would know that this moment, here chapter 15, represents the purpose for which he came into the world. And so that we would know why he’s been zeroing in on it.

The reason is: that his death will ransom people.

What is ‘ransom’? ‘Ransom’ is the securing of the release of a person by the payment of a price.

Jesus said he would ‘ransom many’. So, let’s see how that ransom payment for people unfolds here in Mark’s account – on the cross - and what his ransom accomplishes.

Mark says in verse 33 that it was ‘midday and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon’. That’s not normal, of course.

I remember being in Germany during a total solar eclipse in 1999. I remember how strange it felt when darkness covered that area at midday also.

But this darkness that Mark describes I think was much thicker and blacker than the darkness during any eclipse.

It calls to mind the plague on Egypt, when the Lord told Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand toward the sky so that darkness spreads over Egypt - darkness that can be felt’.

That plague was a judgment—it was a sign of God’s anger against Pharaoh’s sin. And now, at the cross, darkness again signals divine judgment. It’s the first sign, in Mark’s account, that Jesus’ death is not ordinary.

This thick darkness reveals the gravity of sin and the intensity of God’s wrath against it.

The prophet Amos spoke of such a moment. He prophesied this: ‘The Lord has sworn by himself, the Pride of Jacob: “I will never forget anything they have done [he’s talking about their sin].

In that day”, declares the Sovereign Lord, “I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight”’.

So, what’s in view here, at the cross, is the holiness of God and the horror of sin—opposed to one another. God is holy and just. And sin is unholy; it robs God of what he deserves.

Psalm 7 says God is angry with the wicked every day. Romans 1:18 says his wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and wickedness.

Where he was to be feared, people have ignored him. Where he was to be honoured, people have honoured themselves. Where he was to be loved, people have loved lies.

It’s like in Noah’s day, when God looked down on the earth and saw that the inclination of people’s hearts was ‘only evil all the time’. And here in Mark, at the cross, as darkness falls, we get a glimpse of just how grievous our sin is to this holy God.

God’s judgement because of the sins of the people is, for those three hours, in ways we can’t even begin to understand, kindled against Jesus.

The clearest indicator of this is Jesus’ cry in verse 34 - ‘My God, my God why have you forsaken me?’ This is the second sign that his death is unlike any other.

It’s a cry of extreme anguish at the separation between him and his God.

The separation is owing to the sin. And the darkness is owing to the sin. God’s anger against sin directed at Jesus and the resulting anguish that created in Jesus’ heart.

So, we must ask: why was God’s anger kindled against Jesus at all? He committed no sin. No deceit was found in his mouth. Why would the holy and just God pour out judgment on his perfect spotless Son?

The answer is that Jesus was ransoming himself. He was offering his life in the place of others—paying the price for sin on their behalf.

He took our record of sins; the charges that stood against us, and he nailed them to the cross. In doing so, he owned them - just as though he’d committed them.

When we consider the depth and breadth of our sin—every selfish thought, every rebellious act—and then multiply that by the countless people for whom Jesus died, it becomes clear. And we take into account his divine holiness and purity. The burden he bore was immeasurable.

No wonder the wrath of God was poured out. No wonder the thick darkness of judgment covered the land. And no wonder Jesus cried out with the cry of the forsaken!

Mark records two other notable things for us—one essential, the other a powerful sign of the magnitude of what Jesus accomplished on the cross.

First, in verse 37, Jesus let out a loud cry and breathed his last. Second, in verse 38, at that very moment, the curtain of the temple was torn in two.

If we think Jesus’ death was merely incidental to the ransom, then we’ve misunderstood the moment. His death was not just a tragic consequence of physical, emotional, and spiritual suffering. His death was the decisive act—the final and pivotal moment—that achieved the ransom he had promised back in chapter 10.

The sin that had been laid upon Jesus carried with it an ultimate penalty: death. Scripture is clear—'the wages of sin is death.’ As Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians, ‘the sting of death is sin.’ In other words, the inescapable consequence of sin is death.

That means the ransom price to rescue a sinner from the grip of sin is nothing less than a life.

But not just any life. If one sinner dies for another, nothing is gained. The sum remains the same—death.

What is needed is a sinless life offered in the place of sinful ones. And there has only ever been one such life: the life of Jesus.

Hebrews 9 tells us, ‘Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.’ Shedding of blood means giving up life. Jesus’ blood poured out on the cross was his life laid down.

That’s why Jesus, back in chapter 14, said ‘this is my blood of the covenant, poured out for many’.

His blood shed was his life given. And his life given was the ransom payment for the lives of his people.

Death had a rightful claim on them. God's righteous anger was kindled against them. But Jesus gave his own life in their place—ransoming them with his death; purchasing their lives with his own.

The remarkable and supernatural tearing of the temple curtain from top to bottom at the moment of Jesus’ death is a powerful sign: the ransom has been paid; the transaction is accepted; the sin is cleansed away.

That curtain was the separating barrier between the holiest sanctum in the temple architecture where God presenced himself, and the people.

It was a place off limits to all except the high priest, and that only once a year. And even then, only by the shedding of sacrificial blood.

But at the moment of Jesus’ death, that dividing wall—representing our sin, which separated us from God—was torn down. Jesus, by his own shed blood, entered the presence of God on our behalf as our great High Priest, once for all.

That’s what the curtain being torn down in verse 38 tells us. The ransom has been paid and now, wonder of wonders, we - the enemies of God - have access to God without his judgment. Better than that! With his favour!

All the foreboding darkness of judgment has been lifted from over our heads forever because it hung over Jesus’ head until his final breath.

In that moment he made us righteous, and holy, and pleasing to an outraged, and slighted, and maligned God.

And it wasn’t Jesus persuading a reluctant or begrudging Father either. This was the plan of both the Father and the Son from eternity past—to rescue a people for God’s own possession through the ransom price of Jesus’ perfect life.

What a plan of love set this whole work in motion. What a plan of love executed it in every last and perfect detail!

So, these are the four signs that Mark gives us that testify to the unique ransom work of Jesus on the cross.

The Scottish Theologian John Murray - one of the most eminent Reformed theologians of the 20th century - says this about Jesus’ ransom in his book ‘Redemption: accomplished and applied’: ‘There are two aspects of sin which come into distinct prominence as those upon which the redemptive accomplishment of Christ bears. They are the guilt and the power of sin.

And the two effects issuing from this redemptive accomplishment are respectively: (1) justification and forgiveness of sin and (2) deliverance from the enslaving defilement and power of sin’.

I quote Murray because, thanks to Mark’s account of the various people who saw what happened that day and their responses to it, we can see the ‘effects’, as Murray calls them, of the redemption - or ransom - of Jesus on these two aspects of sin - the guilt of sin and the power of sin.

There are four people, or groups of people, that Mark singles out in his account. He has the by-standers of verses 35-36; and he has the Centurion posted at the cross in verse 39, who then comes into the picture again in verse 44.

And then he also has the women watching from a distance; specifically, the two Mary’s - Magdalene and the mother of James and Joseph in verses 40-41. They also reappear at the tomb of Jesus in verse 47 where Mark says they ‘saw where Jesus was laid’.

And finally, there is this character named Joseph of Arimathea who deals with Jesus’ body in verses 42 to 46.

Jesus’ ransom dealt with the guilt owing to sin and that refers to a legal transaction. Jesus ransomed our life from the consequences of sin and thereby justified us before God. He made us upright in God’s holy estimation.

The transaction happened on the cross when Jesus hung there and died. But there’s a moment in the life of every person who gets saved when that ransom-reality is applied to their lives. And that moment of application is at the moment of faith.

Jesus said, ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life’.

They won’t perish because when Jesus hung on the cross, he was ransoming his own life for them. The moment of receiving is the moment of faith in Jesus - ‘whoever believes in him’. Whoever believes Jesus ransomed his life for them.

So, faith is essential - without faith it is impossible to please God. And what we see in Mark’s account are two contrasting types of people - those who believe and those who don’t. In verses 35 & 36 we see those who are skeptical about Jesus as he hangs on the cross.

The dreadful darkness had been over the land for the last three hours and Jesus cried out in Aramaic, ‘Eloi Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ And the bystanders thought that he was calling out to Elijah to come and rescue him from the cross.

Maybe they misheard or maybe they didn’t understand. Maybe ‘Eloi’ sounded like ‘Elijah’ to them.

Whatever the reason, they thought Jesus was calling for Elijah to rescue him. But none of that matters anyway because, they experienced the miraculous darkness, yet they were not expecting anything spectacular from Jesus.

Their cynical mocking tone in verse 36 says everything about their hearts. They did not believe in Jesus; rather they saw him as an object of reviling: ‘now leave him alone. Let’s see if Elijah comes to take him down’. And what we are reminded is that the cross of Jesus is an offence to a lot of people.

To some, the cross of Christ is the aroma of death. They are like Pharaoh of old - in spite of all the beauties of Jesus, they have hardened their hearts towards him.

That doesn’t have to be the response though. And there may be some here right now who have not yet put their faith in Jesus.

Today can be the day that Jesus’ ransom is applied to your life - as seems to have been the case with this Centurion in verse 39.

He must have been a hard man. He would have been brought up with all the Roman false gods and he would have been hardened in the Roman legions.

He was probably well acquainted with death, and he might have even been involved in the mocking and flogging of Jesus that went before the crucifixion. We don’t know.

What we do know is that he saw the same darkness cover the land, and the way that Jesus was on the cross. And he concluded the opposite of what the bystanders concluded - he saw wonder!

There is no reason for a Gentile soldier to talk in these terms: ‘surely this man was the Son of God’ unless he was convinced of the fact in his own heart.

He saw what Jesus did on the cross; he saw what accompanied his death on the cross; he saw the way he died, and he believed that Jesus was no ordinary man but that he was the Son of the living God. That is remarkable!

Faith is the only fitting response to Jesus. Every other response is a response of rejection, and of self -reliance; and ultimately a response that leads to death.

There is no ransom from sin for anyone who will not believe on the Lord Jesus. But for the one who does believe, there is instant and comprehensive rescue and deliverance from sin.

In these competing responses to Jesus, we are encountering how faith in Jesus results in forgiveness from sin and justification before God. It is an event in time - a moment of heartfelt faith in the Son of God.

But then there is the second effect of the redemptive cross work of Jesus that Murray rightly highlights - namely deliverance from the enslaving power and defilement of sin.

The apostle Peter in his first letter urges his readers as obedient children not to conform to the evil desires they had before they were saved.

Rather, he implores them to be holy, ‘just as he who called you is holy’. And then he wants to justify why he is calling them to this radical way of life - here’s how he does it: ‘For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver and gold that you were redeemed [that is ransomed] from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect’.

So, Peter links the ongoing Christian life - which he calls obedience; and non-confomity to evil desires; and being holy - he connects these things with the cost of the ransom Jesus paid for our lives.

We weren’t redeemed with cheap things like silver and gold! We were redeemed with the infinitely precious blood of Jesus! The message is: don’t cheapen that ransom by returning to evil ways.

Paul says the same kind of thing to Titus. He talks about the grace of God which has appeared - namely Jesus.

He says that the ‘grace of God teaches us to say “no” to ungodliness and worldly passions and live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the appearing of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good’.

So again, Murray (by the way, these were two of the texts Murray cited in support of his assertion) Murray got it right when he said that the ransom of Jesus has this second effect which is that it frees us from enslavement to the power of sin.

That means that by Jesus’ ransom we are freed to turn our backs on sin and to pursue holiness; and as Paul says in Titus, to be ‘eager to do what is good’.

Ephesians 2:10 says it very simply, ‘we are God’s handiwork, created inChrist Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do’.

Ok, so we see, I hope, that the redemption Jesus worked on the cross for us has not one, but two major ‘effects’ as Murray calls it. The first is the forgiveness of sins, the second is freedom from the dominion of sin. There is power in the cross for both these effects.

The ransom of Jesus is precious and costly and effective enough to create both of these things in all God’s chosen people - who by faith are saved by Jesus, and who by faith are living for Jesus.

Let’s see that this is the case here in Mark 15. First there are these wonderful and courageous women who have followed Jesus all the way around Galilee caring for his needs. And then have followed Jesus all the way from Galilee to the foot of the cross. They are eager to do good to Jesus and for Jesus, because they love Jesus.

They are not compelled by duty; they are compelled by love. That’s the power of the cross at work in them.

The very power Jesus is purchasing for them as they watch him hang on the cross is the power that moved them to do everything they did for Jesus.

And then there’s Joseph of Aramithea. Mark says he was a prominent member of the Council - that is of the Jewish Sanhedrin.

But he’s not like the other members, ‘Joseph was waiting for the kingdom of God’, Mark says.

And he says he went ‘boldly’ to Pilate to ask for Jesus body.

There are at least two reasons why this was a risky move on Joseph’s part.

The first is that the Jews handed Jesus over to Pilate to crucify Jesus, and now here is a Jew going cap in hand to the Roman ruler for his body. That might not go down well with Pilate and the Romans.

The second is that Jesus is the very one Joseph’s council rejected and handed over to the Romans. To go and ask for his body - not secretly but boldly - opened him up to accusations of ‘Jesus allegiance’ amongst the Jews - something that could clearly have been very costly for him.

That was one kind of cost he risked, but there’s another kind in verse 46 where he takes Jesus’ body and places it in a tomb cut out of the rock. The NIV study bible comments that this was likely a family tomb owned by Joseph and very expensive because it was hewn out of rock.

So, Joseph doesn’t count the cost to his reputation and the potential consequences of that; nor does he count the cost to his wallet as he readily provides a tomb for Jesus which was reserved for him and his family.

Like Peter pointed out in his letter, Joseph wasn’t bought at the price of silver and gold but with the precious blood of Jesus and that seems to move Joseph to these bold demonstrations of his love for Jesus.

So right there at the cross, Mark shows us the powerful and eternally significant effects of Jesus’ cross work.

His ransom is not symbolic—it is effective. It achieves real forgiveness of sins. It secures true reconciliation with God.

And it brings liberation from the grip of sin, setting us free to ‘pursue righteousness’ (1 Timothy 6:11).

So that we can say with joy this morning: ‘This the power of the cross; Christ became sin for us!’