Abundant Joy

“For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, a testimony at the proper time.”

As we continue with Paul’s instructions to Timothy on prayer, I want to include this one. “Listen, Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5). This is the Shema, a prayer still recited by Jews today. In Hebrew, Shema translates to “hear,” “listen,” or “pay attention” and proclaims the oneness of God. Paul starts this verse in Timothy with “For there is one God…”  John Barry writes in The Faithlife Study Bible, “Paul draws on this prayer to highlight God’s universal reign; because there is only one God, he is the God of all people (1 Tim. 2:3-4).”

Paul continues, “For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus…” We will stop here first and focus on the word mediator. What is a mediator? It is a person who negotiates reconciliation between two parties in conflict. In this case, the parties are mankind and God. Job states it perfectly in the Old Testament. He has lost everything. He longs to plead his case in front of God. This is what he says. “For he is not a man like me, that I can answer him, that we can take each other to court. There is no mediator between us, to lay his hand on both of us. Let him take his rod away from me so his terror will no longer frighten me. Then I would speak and not fear him. But that is not the case; I am on my own.” Job desires someone to go between him and God.

In the Old Testament, the priests were the mediators between God and the Israelites. They made sacrifices on behalf of the people. And only the high priest could enter the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement to make atonement for their sins. But now, Paul is saying that Jesus is that mediator. When Jesus was crucified, the curtain that divided the Holy of Holies from the rest of the sanctuary was ripped from top to bottom (Matthew 27:51; Mark 15:38; Luke 23:45). This symbolized that Jesus’s sacrifice, the shedding of His blood on the cross, paid the price for our sins. We all can have access to God. The writer of Hebrews says, “But Jesus has now obtained a superior ministry, and to that degree he is the mediator of a better covenant, which has been established on better promises” (8:6).

There are some branches of Christianity today, mostly among the more progressive streams, who feel that the idea of penal substitutionary atonement is wrong. That this would be God punishing an innocent person, His Son Jesus, for other people’s crimes, and it is wrong to punish an innocent person. Some have gone as far as to call it “child abuse.” But to deny penal substitutionary atonement is to deny God’s overarching redemptive plan for humanity- one that He has set up from the beginning of time. There are four parts to the story of the Bible: creation, the fall, redemption, and restoration. Those who deny this forget that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are one. They are working together for our redemption and restoration.

The next part of the verse gives us a clue to this. “…who gave himself as a ransom for all, a testimony at the proper time.” Notice this phrase. “Who gave himself…” In Matthew, Jesus says this. “…just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (20:28). He gave up His life of his own accord. We see this word “ransom” and might be tempted to think of it in our own contemporary terms. But in Jesus’s day, a ransom was a price paid to free a slave. Jesus paid the price to free us from our sins. “He gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to cleanse for himself a people for his own possession, eager to do good works” (Titus 2:14).

Paul finishes with the phrase “…a testimony at the proper time.” God is sovereign. Paul uses phrases like this in several of his letters to express God’s sovereignty in human history. In Ephesians 1:4, Paul writes that God chose us before the foundation of the world. In Titus, he writes that God made promises to the elect before time began. And he uses a similar phrase in Galatians to the one in Timothy. “When the time came to completion, God sent his Son…” (4:4a). God had the exact time and place chosen before time began. He knew before He created us that we would sin. Yet He created us anyway. He created us with free will because only with free will could we freely choose to love Him.

There is one last thing I want to address before I close. As I looked at this verse, I was curious about the role of the Catholic priest in confession. Is he considered a mediator between God and man? I wanted to get my answers from a Catholic source so I went to a website that says it’s the “largest database of answers about the practices and beliefs of the Catholic faith” (Catholic Faith, Beliefs, & Prayers | Catholic Answers). According to answers I found on this site, the Catholic church teaches that priests are mediators between God and man. They do not believe that there is a conflict with the verse we are looking at today because “The ministry of the ordained priest is not in conflict or competition with the sole mediatorship of Christ, because the priest does not claim anything of his own apart from Christ.” From what I can tell, they are saying it is not a problem, because the priest is working with Christ, not on their own behalf. But this does not solve the problem for me. The Catholic church teaches that one must go to confession (it is one of the sacraments of church) and then do penance for one’s sins. There are two types of sins: venial and mortal. Venial sins are less serious offenses against God’s law. Mortal sins are grave offenses against God, done with full knowledge of how wrong they are. If a mortal sin is not repented of, it can lead to eternal damnation. Again, I was curious as to how these are repented of. What would happen if you did not make it to confession after you had committed a mortal sin? I checked the website again and was directed to the Baltimore Catechism. “Q.766- When will perfect contrition obtain pardon for mortal sin without the sacrament of penance? A. Perfect contrition will obtain pardon for mortal sin without the sacrament of penance when we cannot go to confession, but with perfect contrition we must have the intention of going to confession as soon as possible, if we again have the opportunity.”

There are a couple of things I want to say here. Nowhere in the Bible does it tell us that we must confess our sins to someone and then receive penance. There is no mention of “perfect contrition” which will obtain pardon for mortal sin. In fact, there is no mention of mortal versus venial sins at all. All sin is punishable by death, and Jesus paid the price, the ransom, so that we might live. Peter writes, “For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring you to God” (1 Peter 3:18a). That brings up my last point. Christ suffered once for all… He already paid the price! There is nothing we can do to earn it. Once we accept Christ as our Savior, our sins are forgiven! That does not mean that we shouldn’t ask for forgiveness when we do sin, (and we will!), but the Bible tells us that when we ask for forgiveness, He is faithful to forgive us (1 John 1:9). But we do not have to get absolution from anyone. Our mediator is Jesus!

Many of the traditions in the Catholic church are just that- tradition. They may go back many years, but if they are not grounded in the Word of God, then we are adding an unnecessary burden. I am so thankful that because Jesus paid the price, He paid my ransom. I don’t have to call out like Job, “There is no mediator between us!” Instead, like Paul, I can cry out, “Abba, Father!” because I am a child of God and have God’s Spirit in me (Galatians 4).

Grace be with you!