First Rule Of Ransoming: Always Ransom The One Who Is Most Captive, Namely, The Captor

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Pastor Foley

Three Scriptures receive virtually no attention in the study of the Work of Mercy of ransoming the captive and yet are indispensable to it.

The first is 1 Timothy 1:12-16 (ESV), where Paul doxologizes:

12 I thank him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful, appointing me to his service, 13 though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, 14 and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. 15 The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. 16 But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life.

The second is Ephesians 6:12 (ESV), where Paul contends:

12 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

The third is Galatians 6:1 (ESV), where Paul exhorts:

Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted.

Put these all together and you get a fascinating–and fascinatingly neglected–3D Scriptural portrait of the Work of Mercy of ransoming the captive.

Rewind back to the first Scripture, 1 Timothy 1:12-16. Paul is referencing his Saul days, when he mercilessly persecuted the body of Christ. Did Jesus ransom the Christians who were captive to Saul? Yes. How?

By ransoming Saul himself.

Ephesians 6:12 explains why. It reminds us of an oft-forgotten or overlooked aspect of ransoming: The Work of ransoming goes deeper than the physical. Human beings don’t–can’t–control the power of sin and death, despite what we humans like to believe. Absent Christ’s intervention, sin and death control us. That is, the principalities and powers eat us for lunch.

The good news is that Christ’s death for sinners means full ransom for captives, not just the partial ransom of bodily freedom. As Jesus himself says (in Matthew 10:28), “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” 

When you put on these 3D glasses, captivity is fully unmasked: The captor, ultimately, is just another captive, despite what he wants to believe (and what he wants you to believe as he snarls at you menancingly, too). Saul, the captor of Christians, is revealed as Saul, the captive of sin. If Christ were to ransom the Christians but leave Saul captive, that would still be impressive. But as Paul points out in Romans 5:6-8 (ESV), Christ moves beyond impressive to downright divine:

6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— 8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Christ, in other words, regularly moves in a way contrary to human sight, understanding, and inclination, ransoming the one who is most captive, the captor himself. Reveal the captivity of the captor to the captor himself, set him free in Christ, and it is the captor himself who ministers to those whom he has been holding.

It’s a recurring theme in Scripture, like in the story of Paul and Silas and the Philippian jailer in Acts 16:25-34 (ESV):

25 About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them, 26 and suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken. And immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone’s bonds were unfastened. 27 When the jailer woke and saw that the prison doors were open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, supposing that the prisoners had escaped. 28 But Paul cried with a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.” 29 And the jailer called for lights and rushed in, and trembling with fear he fell down before Paul and Silas. 30 Then he brought them out and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” 31 And they said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” 32 And they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. 33 And he took them the same hour of the night and washed their wounds; and he was baptized at once, he and all his family. 34 Then he brought them up into his house and set food before them. And he rejoiced along with his entire household that he had believed in God.

And as we’ll see in our next post, it’s not a practice Christ discontinued once the Bible Days drew to a close.

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The Only Currency That’s Accepted Where Sin And Death Are Involved Is Divine Life

Posted on October 15, 2012 by Pastor Foley

Keep in mind as you read the sentence that follows that I get paid to travel around the world teaching Christian ministries how to raise money:

When it comes to ransoming the captive, money is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

A particular conceit among those of us in the top one percent of the world’s wealthiest people–by the way, that’s anyone making roughly US $38,500 or more a year–is that we are absolutely convinced that our wealth puts us in a particularly advantageous and responsible position to solve the world’s problems. “We have so much,” we sigh. “We really should do more to, you know, help those who don’t have anything.”

There’s certainly some truth to that, of course, but as Jesus points out to the rich young ruler, our usefulness to God typically comes after we divest ourselves of our wealth, not during the process of our divestment. “Sell all you have, give it to the poor, and then come and follow me,” he says, not “Come and follow me by selling all you have and giving it to the poor. You have so much, and I really need you to help those who, you know, my Father and I failed to provide for in the first place.”

I still recall when I started working with North Korean Christians. I asked them, “How can we pray for you?” And they said, “You pray for us? We pray for you!” “Why would you pray for me?” I asked, incredulously. I’m the rich and free guy here, I wanted to say. You’re the poor folks in bondage. And as if they read my mind, they replied, “Because you Americans and Koreans put so much faith in your wealth and freedom to solve problems. But until you have neither wealth nor freedom, you don’t know what it’s like to depend fully on God and to discover that he is able.”

Spiritual problems require spiritual wealth to effect a solution. Not just a spiritual solution but a whole life solution, for body, soul, and spirit. Because captivity is a whole life problem, not just a body issue.

Given that human beings are bereft of spiritual wealth, there is only one source for it–the very source that is typically dismissed as only an inspiration, an accountability factor, or a benevolent but distant being in the day-to-day grind of ransoming the captive.

Think about it: Given what we know about God, it would be peculiar indeed if he set up the world in such a way that it relied on the money of the rich to solve its problems. It would be peculiar indeed if he set up the world in such a way that rich people were somehow in a better or more important or more influential position to accomplish his purposes than poor people. Not quite what we, you know, see in the Scriptures.

And so as we consider the Work of Mercy of ransoming the captive, it’s important to remind ourselves that if ransoming the captive requires you to have a lot of money to do it right, then it is a Work that is restricted to the rich, and that would mean that this means of grace–this way of coming to know God more deeply and fully–is not available to the poor.

Since we know that can’t be the case, that’s our major clue that ransoming the captive can’t be about buying people out of prison or brothels. It must be about something else.

And indeed it is. As Scripture makes clear from end to end, the only currency that’s accepted where sin and death are involved is divine life. Captivity by definition involves sin and death. As such, divine life must be at the center of any serious effort to ransom the captive. The old saying “You can’t take it with you” has a corollary: You can’t buy people’s freedom with it either. As Moses’ life attests, when you take the work of ransoming captives into your own hands and out of God’s, people end up dead and you end up in the desert. Forty year sentence, baby.

So when we are seeking to effect the release of 13 year old Nan from the brothel, the length, breadth, and depth of the Work of Mercy of ransoming the captive must entail the application of divine life. It can’t be centered on the $80 ransom the pimp is requiring (and the nonprofit is asking you to contribute). It can’t even be about praying that God will move the heart of the pimp to accept our $80. The only force capable of setting captives free is the Cross of Christ.

How to apply that in the context of 13 year old Nan held captive in the brothel? Hang on for our next post.

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Here’s Why You Should Never Rescue People From Prison Or Brothels By Paying Off Their Captors

Posted on October 12, 2012 by Pastor Foley

These days, the most natural connotation of the phrase “ransoming the captive” involves well-meaning Christians raising money to pay off governments, gangs, pimps, and prison guards to release their unjustly-held victims, typically either sex-trafficked women or Christians imprisoned for their faith.

While seemingly quite compassionate, this is a bad, bad, very bad idea indeed. It takes a heartbreaking situation and pumps it up into a limitlessly profitable line of work for the most reprehensible people on the planet.

You will recall I serve as CEO of Seoul USA, and a primary field for our work is North Korea. That means that we deal daily with some of the most anguishing cases of sex-trafficking and Christian persecution on the planet.

A background note may be helpful: Women are sex-trafficked into China from North Korea by Korean-Chinese gangs as a result of China’s one-child policy, which as Nicholas Eberstadt notes has resulted in way too many Chinese men and way too few Chinese women, especially in the countryside:

China will face a growing number of young men who will never marry due to the country’s one-child policy, which has resulted in a reported birth ratio of almost 120 boys for every 100 girls…By 2030, projections suggest that more than 25% of Chinese men in their late 30s will never have married. The coming marriage squeeze will likely be even more acute in the Chinese countryside, since the poor, uneducated and rural population will be more likely to lose out in the competition for brides.

Enter North Korea, which is only too happy to make (a lot of) extra money by selling its young women.

There is, however, another source of equally lucrative income on which North Korea and the Korean-Chinese gangs also depend: Money from Christians seeking to buy the freedom of the women who are held captive.

After all, why use a 13 year old as a prostitute (or why execute an underground Christian) if instead you can make a lot more money through ransom? What business sense is there in going for the minor profit when there’s serious money to be made if you expand your criminal horizons? A pimp who kidnaps young girls from their homes is only too happy to diversify his profits. A young prostitute can make a few dollars a day for him, but Christians halfway around the world are happy to pay literally hundreds of times more. Do we think pimps and prison guards are unaware of this?

When we started in North Korea work ten years ago it was possible to bribe someone out of the worst North Korean prisons for less than a thousand dollars. Today, the going rate for ransoms is $15,000 to $20,000, or higher. What accounts for the price hike?

Christians driving up the market through this misunderstanding of ransoming the captives as a willingness to pay the ransom demanded by the captor.

The real tragedy is not the price inflation, however. It’s the staggering demand created in the market for more ransoms. (Heartbreakingly the same dynamic is at work in international adoptions, where some well-meaning but impatient Christians working through dodgy channels are driving an escalating market of baby kidnapping and wombs-for-hire because their desire to do good can be monetized by people desperate for any way to make a buck, sometimes just to stay alive. Don’t stop adopting but do read E.J. Graff’s The Lie We Love for a sobering reality check that will keep you out of the wrong channels and in the right ones.)

The math is irresistible to fiends: If one Christian in prison or one 13 year old girl in a brothel produces one ransom, then ten Christians or ten 13 year old girls produces ten ransoms. That’s mafia economics, and it works with Wall Street precision.

Sadly, some well-meaning nonprofits believe that looking at the big picture is the opposite of compassion. They say, “Yes, what you are saying may be true, but 13 year old Nan is in a brothel and we can rescue her for $80. How can we not act to set her free?”

But the true opposite of compassion…is compassion–the wrong kind of compassion, that is. Compassion that frees Nan but thus consigns 12 year old Ann, Tran, and Lan to the brothel with a buyback of $120 each.

As we talked about last post, theologically it is always bad practice to negotiate with the devil. It is of course the worst form of negotiating with terrorists: Even if it results in one person being freed from prison (and, by the way, that’s no foregone conclusion–nonprofits are suspiciously quiet about the number of these ransom deals that go bad), it only results in new prisons and brothels, more victims, and greater demands.

“So what are we to do?” sigh the well-meaning Christian nonprofit organizations in exasperation. “Ignore Nan? Turn a blind eye to our brothers and sisters in prison who are persecuted for their faith?”

Not at all. But as we’ll talk about in our next post, the cost will run us a lot higher than $80.

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