Purchased by Your Blood

In heaven a question had been asked: who is worthy to open the scroll? The elder answered that the lion of the tribe of Judah had overcome. John looked and saw a Lamb standing as though slaughtered, and the Lamb came and took the scroll. Now the living creatures and the elders sing, and their song gives the reason the Lamb is worthy.

Revelation 5:9-10 And they sing a new song, saying, "Worthy are You to take the biblion βιβλίον bib-lee'-on(scroll) and to open its seals, because You were slaughtered and purchased us for God by Your blood from every tribe and tongue and people and ethnos ἔθνος eth'-nos(nation, Gentile-people), and You have made them kings and priests to our God, and they will reign on the earth."

Worthy, Because

The song begins where the angel’s question began: “Worthy are You to take the biblion(scroll) and to open its seals.” Then comes the word “because,” and after it the reason in three parts: “You were slaughtered,” “and purchased us for God,” “by Your blood.” Each of those phrases rests on one Greek word, and each word carries something that an English reader might pass over.

“You Were Slaughtered”

The first verb is esphages, from sphazo, “to slay, to slaughter.” It is the same root as the word John used a few verses earlier when he saw the Lamb “as though slaughtered.” There it was a perfect participle, describing a state that remains. Here it is an aorist, the Greek form that looks at an event as a single, completed point. The slaughter happened once.

It is also passive and second person singular. The Lamb did not slaughter Himself; the slaughter was done to Him. And the song does not speak about Him in the third person. It speaks to Him: “You were slaughtered.” The elders and the living creatures address the Lamb directly, as they fall before Him.

“And Purchased Us for God”

The second verb carries the weight of the song. It is egorasas, from agorazo. The word comes from agora, the marketplace, the open square of a town where goods were bought and sold. Agorazo means to buy, to acquire by paying a price. It is the ordinary word for a purchase.

It is not a word of rule, like the scepter of Genesis 49:10, or a word of conquest, like the lion who has overcome; it is a word of trade. Someone paid, and something changed hands. That is exactly the work that the Hebrew verb gaal גָּאַל gaw-al' does in the Old Testament. When Leviticus 25 says that the near kinsman “shall redeem the sale of his brother,” it means that he pays the price and the thing sold comes back. When Revelation 5:9 says that the Lamb “purchased us for God,” it uses the Greek word for the same kind of act. Agorazo is gaal carried out in Greek.

This verb, too, is aorist, active and second person singular. It was done at one point, it was done by Him, and the song again says it to His face: You purchased.

So the elder had announced the lion, a figure from the line of rule. But when the song tells what the Lamb actually did, it uses the language of the goel. The price was not paid by a scepter. It was paid by the Lamb.

“By Your Blood”

The third phrase names the price. “By Your blood” is, in Greek, en to haimati sou: the preposition en with the noun haimati in the dative case. The dative marks the means by which something is done, and in a sentence about buying, the means is the price. The Lamb purchased with His blood.

Peter wrote that believers were redeemed “not with perishable things such as silver or gold,” but with the precious blood of Messiah, “like that of a lamb without blemish or spot” (1 Peter 1:18-19). Peter names the price from the side of those who were bought. Revelation names it from the side of heaven, in the song sung to the Lamb Himself. The two agree: the price was blood, and it was His.

From this one verse a plain truth follows. Redemption is not a declaration. Nothing in this song says that the Lamb announced that a people would be His, or that He simply decided it. It says that He paid. Redemption, as Scripture writes it here, is a payment.

How Far the Purchase Reaches

The song then says whom the Lamb purchased: people “from every tribe and tongue and people and ethnos(nation, Gentile-people).”

In Leviticus 25 redemption reached the lost inheritance of a single kinsman: a field that one poor man had sold, or one man who had sold himself. The near kinsman bought back what one brother had lost. Revelation 5:9 uses the same kind of verb, and it gives the purchase a reach that Leviticus 25 never gave it: every tribe, every tongue, every people, every nation.

Here the two lines meet. A goel must be flesh of the same flesh, and the One who redeems took part in flesh and blood so that He might stand as a near kinsman. Where there was no kinsman able to redeem, He entered the family. This verse shows Him, in that standing, paying the price, and paying it for people from every nation under heaven.

The Song Goes On

The song does not stop at the purchase. It says what those who were bought have been made: “You have made them kings and priests to our God, and they will reign on the earth” (Revelation 5:10). A few verses later the whole company of heaven takes up the same theme with a great voice: “Worthy is the Lamb who was slaughtered” (Revelation 5:12). The worthiness of the Lamb and His slaughter are named in one breath.

John heard of a lion and saw a Lamb, slaughtered and standing, and the song says that the Lamb paid a price, in His own blood, to buy a people for God.

The song also joins two offices that Scripture tied to separate tribes: kings and priests. The scepter was promised to Judah, and the priesthood was given to Levi. The letter to the Hebrews faces that very question about the One who redeems. He came from Judah, the tribe of the scepter. How, then, can He be a priest? The answer Hebrews gives separates the tribe He came through from the qualification He brought.