In Christ in His Sufferings, the first part of the Schilder Trilogy, Klass Schilder presents this antithesis as he compares Matthew 26:14-15 and Zechariah 11:12-13, the fulfillment of the prophecy regarding Christ’s being sold for thirty pieces of silver.
Self-Redemption:
- Man can save himself.
- Redemption is a limited thing.
- Man does God’s work.
Free Grace:
- Redemption is eternally beyond our own capacity. God must justify and sanctify us anew each day. We cannot live without the Shepherd of our soul one moment.
- Redemption transcends the possibility of compensation. We cannot by drawing on the resources of the whole world amass money enough to pay God. His gifts are inestimable worth. And the gift cannot be separated from the Giver, who is infinite.
- We can never put ourselves in God’s position. We want to remain the sheep of His care, following, believing, and listening to the Shepherd’s voice.
In light of Christ’s being sold for the price of a slave, Schilder comments:
The roof did not crash down upon these merchandisers. That it did not is not due to any “semen religionis” still hidden in some corner of the arid souls of these traitors to God, to prophecy, and to Christ. That is because of the will of God which selects these dark ways to the redemption of His people. God deliberately lets the thirty pieces of silver roll through the ages over the market place of the world. He does that in order that men may choose between free grace and self-redemption.
That choice is still the liveliest option of men. The conflict between those two contenders is uncompromising. The way of a legalistic, “good works” salvation leaves that of the preaching of free grace: the way of the Judaistic, pharisaic “earning” of salvation is incompatible with the New Testament Pauline Gospel of redemption by faith. On this question Rome and the Reformation part company too. For Catholicism, though but in part, would buy salvation, and, though not intentionally so, would by its system of absolution again put thirty pieces of silver upon the table. Luther and Calvin, in bidding farewell to the Roman Tetzel, must protest: by faith alone; by faith, not by works, lest any should glory.
Klass Schilder, Christ in His Sufferings, 78.
