THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK: The debt paid at New Orleans

He stands in a long line of Presidents who trace their family back to the Emerald Isle. Bill Clinton was another, and Ronald Reagan paid homage to his ancestors from Ballyporeen in Tipperary. In the early decades of the United States, many American Chief Executives boasted Scots-Irish ancestors.

Among them was the 11th President, James Polk, who had family connections with Coleraine. The ancestral home of the 21st President, Chester Alan Arthur is near Cullybackey. The forefathers of Ulysses S. Grant - the 18th President “unconditional surrender” Grant of the Civil War - were from Dungannon, while Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President, who took America into World War One, had ancestors from Strabane.

An instructive story is told of Andrew Jackson, the 7th President, whose parents - Andrew and Elizabeth - left Boneybefore, Carrickfergus in 1765 with their two sons, en route to America and the Carolinas. Elizabeth became pregnant with a third child, but before the child was born her husband died in a farming accident. When the child was born he was given the name of his father, Andrew.

He was a skinny boy, with a feisty temper, and little aptitude for study. He inherited several hundred pounds from his Jackson grandfather in Scotland, but frittered it away within weeks, gambling on cards and horses. He had a boisterous lifestyle, often doing a runner from various establishments, leaving his bills unpaid.

He took to soldiering, and gained a reputation for toughness. Someone compared him to the branch of a hickory tree; thin, but impossible to break. He was known thereafter as ‘Old Hickory’. In 1815 a British force threatened the city of New Orleans, and a raw American force under Jackson won a stunning victory over the battle-hardened Redcoats.

It is recorded that an inn-owner, John Lister, retrieved old unpaid bills from his files, found the one relating to Andrew Jackson, and wrote over it; ‘Paid at the Battle of New Orleans’.

That’s the image the New Testament uses about the meaning of Calvary. Just as shopkeepers would press a bill which had been paid over an upturned nail, so the apostle Paul imagined a page with the list of our sins and failures nailed above Christ’s cross. He told his Colossian readers, ‘He forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the Cross’(Colossians 2; 13,14).

The current ‘cost of living crisis’ may well plunge households into debt. But here is one debt that has been paid for us. Christ has borne the penalty of our sins. ‘He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree’(1 Peter 2;24). The debt has been paid at Calvary.