Presence: You Can’t Be A Ransom If You Don’t Show Up In The Form Of The Captive

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Pastor Foley

Building on our preceding post we’re now laying out a four step Scriptural process for ransoming the captive. And there’s no way around it: Being a ransom–rather than paying a ransom–means showing up in person to our captive captors. (Remember, we’re ransoming the one who is most captive, namely, the captor himself.)

This is of course after the manner of Christ, who, as the Apostle Paul explains, appeared in person in “the fullness of time”:

4 But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.

We’ll have more to say about the fullness of time in the next post, but this remarkable passage from Galatians conveys another, equally amazing, truth:

Christ does not just show up as ransom. He actually shows up in the form, condition, limitations, and restrictions of those whom he is ransoming.

This is a little examined aspect of Hebrews 13:3, which says:

3 Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body.

This means something more than just standing at the window wringing your hands waiting for their release. Just as Christ did, it means being found in their likeness. So not only are you showing up, but you are showing up as them, with them, like them. That was a defining characteristic of early church ransoming: Whenever a Christian was held captive, people didn’t show up to protest outside the prison, and, even more fascinatingly, they didn’t show up to bribe the prisoner’s way out.

They showed up to bribe their way in—to be present with the captive:

When the imposter Peregrinus Proteus is imprisoned because of his Christian leadership activities, every effort is made by his community to get him out of prison… When this proves impossible they descend upon the prison in droves, bribe the guards in order to spend the night with him, bring food and raise money; others come from other cities as far away as Asia, sent at common expense…to help, defend, and strengthen him. For, adds Lucian… “They show incredible speed whenever such public action is taken; for in no time they lavish their all.”

Talk about making an impact on one’s captors!

Think about it like this:

If Christ had descended, heavens parting, in the form of God, alighting on the temple mount, he would not have had much difficulty getting people to pay him heed. Likewise, with Christians imprisoned for their faith, with young girls held in brothels, when we show up in the form of rich Westerners, we’ll have no shortage of people we can ransom with our big fat wallets.

But the problem is, as Christ knew, overwhelming one’s captors (or buying them out) can’t end the cycle of captivity. It only perpetuates it. Worse, it accelerates it. Because captors’ hearts don’t soften in the presence of ransom payments and shows of force. They harden.

If, however, you show up in the actual form and likeness of those you are ransoming (and this doesn’t mean wearing a disguise–Philippians 2 doesn’t say Jesus was God wearing a human costume; it says he became man), then captors see two things:

  1. God in Christ mirrored through you;
  2. Them–the captors–mirrored through you, too.

This enables you to cry out with the most powerful cry of missionary identity, “We too are only men, human like you.” And it allows you to appeal to captors as their fellow, not their ticket to an early retirement.

Meditate on that thought and you’ll quickly see the futility of Westerners jumping on airplanes and catching flights to the nearest North Korean concentration camp: We can try our hardest, but we still won’t look like North Korean prison camp wardens. It will never be very convincing for us to say, “We are just like you.”

So put away your wallet, because money can’t end captivity. And put away your plane ticket, because you’re going to have a hard time incarnating yourself convincingly in the form of a Thai peasant outside a brothel. Instead, turn to the next post, where we learn that it takes more than presence to effect a ransom.

It also takes a plan.

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There Are Countless Captivities But Always The Same Ransom

Posted on October 22, 2012 by Pastor Foley

By placing the Work of Mercy of ransoming the captive within the fullness of the Scriptural context we’ve come to see in our posts this month how:

  • ransoming the captive is actually a ministry of ransoming the captor (who is revealed as most captive of all), and how
  • ransom is not paid to captors but rather embodied by us, as we who have been set free in Christ lay down our lives for captors in a re-presentation of the sacrifice of Christ, and how
  • all ransoming is a Work “outside the frame”–that is, rather than negotiating with terrorists and pimps and prison guards and hostile political forces according to the rules of their game, ransoming is an invitation and an invocation to God himself to manifest according to his rules and his power, and how
  • his power is most fully manifest on earth in his love of his enemies and his transformation of their hearts.

In short, as Jay E. Adams puts it, ransoming the captive is always a story of how an enemy of God “disowns the devil, denounces his cause, and deserts his army.”

Now on this firm foundation we get to ask: what does that look like in real life? Remember, Nan is still in the brothel, and whatever strategy we set needs to be applicable to that context.

But the great insight of the Scripture is that God doesn’t have multiple strategies for ransoming captives that vary according to severity of captivity, wealth of ransom-givers, or politics of parties involved. He has just one strategy, and it is equally and simultaneously applicable to the smallest captivities and to the largest, because all ransoming Work is always a re-presentation of the one and only ransom for sin, the Lord Jesus. Or as the Ransom himself puts it:

if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.

So we’ll lay out the practical implications of that in the next four posts. To telegraph our punch, we’ll break out the Work of Mercy of ransoming the captive into four practical steps:

  1. Presence
  2. Planning
  3. Partnership
  4. Petitioning to God and Proclaiming to Captors.

Whether it’s Nan in the brothel, Mr. Bae’s parents in the concentration camp, or a custody battle in which one parent refuses to let the other see and spend time with a child, the pattern of the remedy is, amazingly, always fundamentally the same.

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Why Neither Nonviolence Nor Violence Are Ever The Right Strategies: The Great Insight That All Great Men Of History Can Only Ever Get From Jesus

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Pastor Foley

You might be surprised to see a piece on nonviolence materialize smack in the center of a month of posts on ransoming the captive, but this is actually right where it belongs.

Or, more accurately, doesn’t belong. Because on the basis of the posts we’ve laid out so far, we now have a sufficiently panoramic theological view to see why neither nonviolence nor violence are ever the right strategies for Christians when it comes to ransoming captives, and why Jesus truly is the only way to understand their strategic insufficiency.

As we talked about in the last post, the first rule of ransoming is to ransom the captor. It’s the revolutionary insight that evades videogamers and videogame creators everywhere: Mario should not seek to rescue Peach but should instead endeavor to set Donkey Kong free. Set Donkey Kong free and the endless levels of increasingly complex game play come, amazingly, to an end, no longer necessary.

Fanciful idealism? Hardly. It’s the great insight that’s woven into the very fabric of the universe–the only solution to ransoming the captives that does more than to displace, postpone, or exacerbate the otherwise intractable problem of captivity.

It is what Gandhi saw in Jesus that transformed his struggle against the British…into his struggle with the British for Indians and Brits to be set free, together.

It is what Martin Luther King saw in Jesus that transformed the American Civil Rights struggle as well. Once you see–really see–the captivity of those whom you were absolutely positive were your sworn enemies, nothing about the struggle can ever be the same again.

The insight, notably, has always come historically from people beholding Jesus and the way Jesus beheld his enemies–as captives even as they thought he himself was their captive–crying out to his father for them, not him, to be set free:

39 And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads 40 and saying, “You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” 41 So also the chief priests, with the scribes and elders, mocked him, saying, 42 “He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. 43 He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him. For he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’” (Matthew 27:39-43, ESV)

4 And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34, ESV)

Regrettably, though great men apprehend much in beholding Jesus, there is one area where they still miss the essential Jesus (and thus, likely, his divinity). Our battle is not against flesh and blood: Correct. But this does not mean there is not a battle, and thus it does not mean that nonviolence is either the answer or even a viable strategy. There is a battle, of such magnitude and incomprehensible dimensions that it simply makes the fighting and nonfighting of humans silly and irrelevant.

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. (Ephesians 6:12, NIV)

The Scripture does not say we do not battle. To the contrary, it says that the battle is on–against the powers of this dark world and the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

And, incredulously, it says that we are the ones who battle against such forces. And this is why neither nonviolence nor violence are ever the right strategies, and why nonviolence is never advocated by Jesus or his immediate successors as the strategy; namely, earthly violence is simply on a different plane as heavenly powers or spiritual forces.

Mario can’t, in the terms of our diminutive example, set Donkey Kong free either through nonviolence or violence. They’re irrelevant–attempting either is a strategic category error. For  Donkey Kong to be set free, the software itself has to be rewritten–an intervention that is only possible from outside the frame of the game.

Nonviolence and violence describe the relationship between the avowed combatants in the contest. The recognition that combatants are actually co-captives is a epoch-shaking insight, to be sure. But by itself the insight remains pitifully insufficient to set captives free. It is why civil rights movements lead to advances but never quite to transformations.

No, nothing happens unless a force is definitively and permanently engaged from outside the frame. And the foundational testimony of the Christian faith is that there is but one such force: God himself.

And that is why Jesus acts neither nonviolently nor violently toward his captors as he hangs on the Cross. Instead, he acts toward the only force he ever acts in his life–the only force with which we ourselves should ever act in matters of ransoming the captive, or with regard to any matters at all:

44 It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, 45 while the sun’s light failed. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. 46 Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” And having said this he breathed his last. (Luke 23:44-46, ESV)

It is only when we are finally disabused of our faith in both violence and nonviolence that we can definitively engage the battle and unleash the one and only power so disruptive that prisons can contain neither captives nor the praise of those who, set free, sing the song of triumph of our God.

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