Why Jesus Christ Died

Listen or read the following transcript from The Gospel Coalition as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of evangelism from Luke 22-23.

I have a daughter who is going to university in August. When she was a baby, she proved to be one of these verbal types who was interested in words very quickly. I can remember her when she was on the changing table, and I was changing her. She was not more than 1. She pointed, as she lay back, to the light in the center of the room and said “Dah!” I looked up and saw what she was pointing to, and I said, “Light.” She said, “Dah!”

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“Light.”

“Dah!”

“Light.”

“Dah!”

“Light.” And she said, “Lie. Lie. Lie. Dah!”

“Light.”

“Lie” That was night one. Night two, I’m doing my business. “Dah!”

“Light.”

“Lie.” Then she looks around the room. “Dah!”

“Doorknob.”

I mean, some kids start with “Mummy” and “Daddy.” This one starts with “light” and “doorknob.” She was verbal from the word go. We read to her incessantly, I’m afraid, and my wife (being English) was into nursery rhymes. One of the things we did was we had these four books of nursery rhymes with pictures on the left side and the rhyme on the right side. By the time she was 2, you could open up any one of those books and point to the picture, and she’d just recite the whole nursery rhyme.

One of those nursery rhymes was (well, it doesn’t quite rhyme, but you know what I mean), “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the battle was lost. For want of a battle, the war was lost. For want of a war, the kingdom was lost. And all for want of a horseshoe nail.” I don’t know what profound theological things we were trying to teach her by this, but I remember it perhaps even better than she does.

It is true that historical events are so intertwined and complex that causes and effects in such events are not always easy to sort out. Why didn’t the Axis powers win in World War II? Suppose the Americans had lost at Midway, which was a near-run thing. Suppose, in fact, the Japanese fleet had been spared. Would the Japanese have taken Australia, at least down to the Brisbane line? I don’t know. It was a near-run thing. Suppose the British had not cracked the Enigma code? The whole battle of the Atlantic would have looked very different too.

Suppose the Germans had planned a little better for the Russian winter and had actually taken Stalingrad and Moscow and closed down the Eastern Front? Suppose they had been less anti-Semitic and had retained more of their top scientists and had got the atom bomb first? It doesn’t take many what-ifs and we can imagine some very different outcomes. Suppose, suppose … In retrospect, of course, we give our reasons, but it is easy to see that even an array of truthful reasons is pretty complex on occasion.

Now Christians make a great deal of Jesus’ death, but why did he die? The reasons, just from the passage that was read ahead of us, are complex and intertwined, but it’s possible to make them so complex and intertwined that we don’t see what is really at the heart of the whole issue. I want to outline some of the complexities, but I want you to see, at the same time, there is something at the center that ties these very things together. So why, then, did Jesus die?

Now the Christian Bible is made up of two parts. The last third is the second part, and it covers the period from just before Jesus’ birth to about 100 years later. The first four sections of that part, which we call the New Testament, are mini-biographies, mini-booklets really, of Jesus’ life. We call them today by their authors’ names: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This is the third one, Luke.

For ease of reference, centuries after they were written, we broke up the text into short chapters and verses so we could all find out where we were at the same time and on the same page. These are chunks, then, from chapter 22 and 23, and we will follow those chunks in sequence. Why did Jesus die?

1. Jesus died because he was betrayed.

Luke 22:14–23. Now in verse 14, we’re told, “When the hour came …” That is, the hour for a special celebratory supper. It was connected with the so-called “Passover feast.” Jews looked back to a great feast that was bound up with their release from slavery in Egypt almost a millennium and a half earlier. Every year, Jews met together to celebrate this Passover meal.

So when the hour came for this meal, “Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table …” During formal meals in the first century, you didn’t sit at a table, you lay on a low mat and reached into center dishes, and the like. Jesus then says in verse 15, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” Already, that’s rather stunning.

Most people would have seen the political horizons darkening and not be too sure how this was coming out, but Jesus (for months and months and months) had been telling his disciples that he would go up to Jerusalem, suffer, and be crucified. Never does Jesus treat his impending sufferings on the cross as if they’re a sort of accident in history, if he were a puppet in a nasty political machine, or as if he were a martyr or a victim. He goes to the cross with his eyes wide open, as if he’s in charge of the whole show.

Yet, as we’ll see, he talks about betrayers. So he says, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” The reason is (in the larger context) because, on the one hand, he’s celebrating God’s release of his people from slavery in the Old Testament, and also, this is going to mark the beginning of a new celebration in which he releases slaves by his death. He hasn’t explained that yet; we’ll come to that in a moment. This is the beginning of a whole new era. He has looked forward to it, not to the suffering, but he has looked forward to this change.

“And I tell you, I will not eat with you again this Passover …” That is, he’s not going to be with them another year for another Passover celebration. “I won’t eat it with you again. I’m out of here until this Passover finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God.” That is, the ultimate release from slavery, the ultimate celebratory moment when God’s people meet in a consummated kingdom, a kingdom that is spectacularly glorious. But that’s not yet.

So he has them thinking about the future. He has them thinking about his sufferings. Then he takes the cup, we’re told in verse 17. “… he gave thanks and said, ‘Take this and divide it among you. For I tell you I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.’ ” Now we need to think a bit more about this notion of the kingdom of God. As Jesus teaches this notion of the kingdom of God, there are two dominant thrusts.

On the one hand, God is the King. He made us. He rules providentially. We owe him. The Bible views God’s sovereignty as so expansive, so comprehensive, that, in one sense, you can’t get outside it. The biblical writers know about the rain cycle, for example, the water cycle. In the book of Ecclesiastes, the writer speaks of water that falls from the heavens and rains down on the earth, little streamlets that go into rivers, rivers that go out to the sea, and the water of the sea going up into the clouds again.

They know about the water cycle. But on the whole, the biblical writers prefer to speak of God sending the rain, not because they don’t know about the water cycle but because they see God working in all kinds of comprehensive ways. Not a sparrow, Jesus teaches, falls to the ground apart from God’s sanction. There is a comprehensiveness to God’s sovereignty.

At the same time, it also speaks of God’s kingdom in another way, as something that is inbreaking, is beginning, and is starting. Here it has the notion, not of sort of comprehensive providence, or something like that, but of God breaking in to capture people, to begin a new community, and to get people to acknowledge his lordship, because by and large, the Bible pictures this world order as in rebellion against the kingship of God. But now the kingdom is breaking in, in such a way as to start something new.

This kingdom, we’re told, will grow and grow until the time when it is complete and perfect, when Jesus himself comes back, there is no more death or decay, and things will be put to right. That’s part of the framework of the whole Bible hope for the future. So Jesus is looking forward to the future in all of this, and he says, in effect, he is about to die. He’s not going to be eating the Passover with them, and he won’t drink any more wine with them until the kingdom of God dawns.

Then he takes bread. We’re told: “… he gave thanks and broke it, gave it to them, and he said, ‘This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you …’ ”

Now those of you who were brought up in a Christian church know that these words, found in similar lines in all of the Gospels, have instituted what we call today, “Holy Communion” or the “Lord’s Supper.” If you don’t go to a church, it might seem a bit strange, but it’s a rite that Christians go through from time to time, week to week, or month to month in which they take some bread and some wine, and they repeat Jesus’ words.

In one sense, it’s a shocking thing. Jesus is about to die for them, as we’ll see, and he has to institute a rite to get them to remember him. If someone died for you, in a swimming accident … tried to save you, pulled you out of the water into a boat, and somehow, in doing so, lost his own life … would you have to be reminded to remember him?

But here Jesus, about to go to his death, institutes a practice, a rite, amongst his people in this fledgling church. He says, “Whenever you take this bread and whenever you take this wine, do this in remembrance of me.” The disciples, at this point, don’t have a clue. They don’t know what they’re supposed to remember, even.

Then he comes to this strange passage: “But the hand of him who is going to betray me is with mine on the table.” That is, one of the 12 men with him around the table is about to betray him. “The Son of Man will go as it has been decreed …” The “Son of Man” was one of his favorite ways of referring to himself. “ ‘… but woe to that man who betrays him.’ They began to question among themselves which of them it might be who would do this.”

Here you have something of the complexity of the causes of Jesus’ death, don’t you? On the one hand, Jesus was betrayed. That’s what led him to the cross. On the other hand, it happened, we’re told, “as it has been decreed.” That is, Jesus sees that although there is a human agent, a betrayer, who sets him up, yet God is working on all of this too. This is not just an accident of history, the result of one man’s malice.

It’s worth stopping for a moment to think through why Jesus’ opponents, the political machine of the day, needed a betrayer. Why didn’t they just go and arrest Jesus? We don’t always remember how affected we are, this side of Gutenberg and the printing press, by pictures and television shows.

How do you know what John Howard looks like? Have you met him? Well, probably a few of you have, but most of you know what he looks like because you’ve seen his mug on the Sydney Morning Herald or you’ve seen him on television. That’s how you know what he looks like. Otherwise, you could go down the street and bump into him, and you’d never know who it was.

How did people know who Jesus was? Not many people had seen him. Stories about him were everywhere in the first century, but if there was a big crowd and somebody was standing at the back, they wouldn’t even have all that clear shot of who he was. No, to find out who Jesus was, point him out, make it clear who he was, and set up a time when there wasn’t going to be a riot, it took somebody on the inside. That’s what Judas Iscariot did. He took some money for it and handed Jesus over.

On one level, Jesus died because he was betrayed, yet even here, Jesus insists that God has a hand in it. This is betrayal that is somehow under God’s decree.

2. Jesus died because it was an evil hour.

Luke 22:47–53. We pick up again: “While he was still speaking a crowd came up …” Now they’re out in the garden of Gethsemane. The meal is over; they’re out in the garden, and he’s talking to his disciples. “… the man who was called Judas …” That is, Judas Iscariot, the betrayer. “… one of the Twelve, was leading them. He approached Jesus to kiss him, but Jesus asked him, ‘Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?’ ”

There is this confusion for a few lines. “Jesus’ followers saw what should happen, and they said, ‘Lord, should we strike with our swords?’ ” Is this the time to rebel; is this the time to start this political kingdom? Jesus stops it all. Then he says, down in verse 52, “Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come with swords and clubs?”

It’s as if he’s asking, “Is that what you think of me? Am I some sort of guerrilla warrior that’s causing trouble? Have I ever started a riot? Have I killed anyone? Why are you coming after me this way?” “Every day I was with you in the temple courts, and you did not lay a hand on me. But this is your hour: when darkness reigns.”

So the second reason, then, why Jesus goes to the cross, according to Jesus himself, is because it was an evil hour. Now I think we need to think about this a little more, because there is an awful lot in the Western world that doesn’t have a category for evil, or an evil hour. Evil is merely a social construct. Evil is what my particular society defines as evil; maybe some other society defines some other way of looking at things as evil. Evil is either genetically determined, or it’s socially defined, but there is no real evil. There is no objective evil.

But that is simply not the Bible’s view at all, and it may be worth thinking about this one before we press on a bit. I was telling some students earlier in the day that last November, I was giving some lectures in Poland. Usually when I go somewhere, I take the last plane in and the first plane out, simply because I want to get home to my family. But that day, the last of my lectures was down near KrakÛw, and so I told my family that if they didn’t mind too much, I was going to stay an extra day or two and go down to Auschwitz. So I did.

It’s not that I had never read about Auschwitz or that I had no idea what it was like; I had read a fair bit. I didn’t see anything there that I hadn’t read about, but there is something in the actual site that makes a terrible impact on you. You approach the main gates of Auschwitz I, and there is the ironmongery with the words, “Arbeit macht frei.” (All the irony bound up with that place: “Work sets you free.”)

You go inside and right away are the brick barracks. (It used to be a Polish officers’ barrack camp before it was taken over by the Nazis.) You can go to the one where the torture was done and the one where the processing was done. You can go to the little courtyard where tens of thousands of people were shot on various occasions.

You can go a little farther, and you can see the first of the ovens where people were burned. The bigger ovens in Auschwitz II, Birkenau, were all bombed out by the retreating Nazis in the face of the Red Army, but you can still see those ovens in Auschwitz I. You can walk through the gas chambers, where they could squeeze in about 2,100 people, drop in the Cyclon B pellets (a cyanide derivative), and kill 2,100 people in 20 minutes. You can still see the mounds of hair getting ready to be shipped to Germany to make fiber.

The more I have thought about Auschwitz, the more I am convinced that, sometimes, we have learned the wrong lesson from it. We have sometimes thought of it as if it was an aberration, but in one sense, it’s almost typical of this bloody century. Oh, in some ways it was an aberration. It was the most efficient death-dealing machine. They kept records. I know that.

But in this same century, we’ve lost 20 million Ukrainians to systematic, planned starvation, perhaps 50 million Chinese under Mao, a third of the population of Cambodia, endless numbers under various ethnic cleansings and genocide patterns in Africa, and on and on and on. This is the bloodiest of all centuries, and here we in the Western world come to the end of the century and we decide, in our wisdom, that is no such thing as evil.

I know a woman, about my own age, in Washington, DC. She was a postmodern woman. She was convinced that evil was merely socially defined. She was intelligent, alert, clever, and an editor for a major political weekly. She was involved in a Bible study with a friend of mine in DC called Mark Dever. She was trying to win him over to her opinion, and he was trying to win her over to what the Bible will say. It was a good, intellectual relationship.

Then she had to go off on assignment to Papua New Guinea. She landed at Port Moresby and was following whatever political things she was sent there to follow. Just before she left, she heard a story that shook her to her foundation. She heard a story of a priest who had been there for about 35 years. He had given his life to education. Just before he got on the plane to fly home (to retirement, in fact), he was arrested. It was discovered that, for 35 years, he had been sodomizing young boys in the schools. They had no idea how many, but at least hundreds.

As this woman began to think through all of the implications of this for their families, their families’ families, and the next generation … notions of trust and what kind of marriages they could build and all the rest … she was shocked, just horrified. She came home and talked it over with my friend in DC, and he said, “Claudia, was it wicked?”

She said, “Well, we all know that most child abusers were themselves abused. There are reasons for understanding these sorts of paths.” He said, “Claudia, the Bible itself insists that sin is often social. It runs to the third and fourth generation of those who hate God. We all acknowledge that sin is rarely isolated or narrowly individualistic. There are social implications. No one is disputing that. The question is … Was it evil? Was it wicked?”

The question so upset her that one night, unable to sleep, she woke up and began to say to herself, “This was wicked. This was evil.” Then it suddenly dawned on her: maybe she was wicked. And for the first time, she began to understand what the cross of Jesus was about. We’re coming to that.

You see, however, that Jesus does not look at this situation merely as the political machine. He does not say, “Well, you know, things sometimes happen like that. They fall out politically in some rather unpredictable ways.” No, the reason he went to the cross is because what was going on was just plain wicked. There were wicked men conspiring. It was a time of darkness, of horrible evil.

There is something obscene about a society and a culture that looks at evil and can’t see it. There is something horribly blind (whether at the corporate cultural level or at the individual level) that can look at that which is malicious or cruel or harsh, that is contemptuous or corrupt or arrogant, and can’t see it. Seven hundred years before Jesus, the prophet Isaiah talked about a culture like that. He said they put light for darkness and darkness for light. They put good for evil and evil for good. Jesus died because it was an evil time.

3. Jesus died because his disciples turned tail.

Luke 22:54–62. At this point, the other disciples had already fled. Jesus wouldn’t allow them to fight, so they flee. Now Peter, who is supposed to be their leader, one of their best, is so frightened of opinion, frightened of what could happen, that he denies that he even knows Jesus.

Peter follows at a distance. He’s in a courtyard, we’re told in verse 56, that a servant girl saw him seated there by the fire. (Like this whole thing is a bit exciting, you know, with a midnight trial and people running around in the courtyard.) She looks at him closely and says, “This man, he was with him!” He denied it. “Woman, I don’t know him,” he said. A little later, someone else saw him and said the same thing. “Man, I am not one of them!”

Then someone picks up on his accent. Some people like me don’t have any accent, but this man had an accent. He was from up north in Galilee. This was down south, where this was taking place, in Jerusalem. “He must be one of them. He’s a Galilean. He has the same accent as Jesus.” We all know the story. The cock crowed. The Lord turned and looked straight at Peter in the courtyard. “Then Peter remembered the word the Lord had spoken to him: ‘Before the rooster crows the day, you will disown me three times.’ And he went outside and wept bitterly.”

Do you know one of the intriguing things that the Bible says about the death of Jesus? It says that all his followers were either implicit in it, stupid in it, irresponsible in it, or disowned Jesus in it. These books were written by Jesus’ closest followers, and the followers don’t come out too well.

There is something to remember about that in the broader pattern of things. For Christians, if they understand anything about the Bible at all, they don’t present themselves to the broader world as if they’re a cut up on everybody else, as if other people didn’t understand Jesus, but these people do.

I don’t come to you today because, in principle, I’m a better person than other people so I will tell you how to be good. That’s not the way Christians can think. They know that the first disciples turned tail and fled, swore they didn’t know Jesus. No, Christians, we’ll see, are different because they are a forgiven people, not because they are an intrinsically better people.

Jesus own disciples didn’t stand up … Supposing they had gone out and tried to get a whole army of his followers (and there were lots of them in Jerusalem at this point) to sort of march and parade in front of the Antonia Palace? At this point, the leaders were so afraid of riots, they jolly well could have, “Go muscle!” They didn’t have the brains for that. They were too wimpish; they were scared witless. Jesus died because none of his followers knew what they were doing. You can also say that, too, but that’s merely typical.

4. Jesus died because he was perceived to be a political threat.

Luke 22:63–23:25. First, there was this terrible mockery, this beating, preparing him for crucifixion, and insulting him. Then at daybreak, there was this Jewish council which had the preliminary responsibility to make a decision before they gave it to Pilate, the Roman governor who could actually order execution by crucifixion.

“At daybreak the council of the elders of the people, both the chief priests and teachers of the law, met together, and Jesus was led before them. ‘If you are the Christ …’ ” That is, the Anointed One, the Promised King, the One who was to come that all of our old Scriptures tell us about. “If you are the Christ, tell us.”

Now part of the problem was that they expected a Christ that would be, first and foremost, political: one who would turf out the Romans, one who would set up the kingdom of David again, and one who would impose righteousness on the land. Yet at the same time, they saw that if somebody came along and started agitating like that, there was a terrible danger that the Roman powers would get suspicious of a new pretender to the throne and send in the troops. With all the might of Rome behind them, this little nation would get crushed.

“If you are the Christ, then, if you are the Promised Messiah, the King who has been promised, tell us.” Jesus sees his messiahship in slightly different terms. He insists (as we learn elsewhere in this book) that he really is the King. He really is the Messiah. He really does come from David’s line.

But he’s also one who’s not so much interested in establishing a merely terrestrial, political kingdom. He comes to build his kingdom that captures men and women, to transform them, to forgive them, to prepare them for heaven, and to teach them how to live here: a domain in which God is sovereign and recognized as King.

So he turns to them, and he says, “If I tell you, you will not believe me, and if I asked you, you would not answer. But I will tell you this, the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the Mighty God.” Exonerated. Vindicated. With all the authority of God. Well, that’s enough for them. As far as they’re concerned, he’s guilty of blasphemy. He’s guilty of offending them. They’re ready to write him off.

So they send him off to Pilate (chapter 23). They begin to accuse him. They have to cast it now in terms of the political categories that he understands. So they say, “Well, we found this man subverting our nation. He opposes payment of taxes to Caesar.” Well, that will get you into trouble. “He claims to be Christ the King.” So therefore Caesar’s authority is going to be questioned.

So the story plays out again, and then Pilate discovers that he’s from Galilee, so he sends him up the petty king up there, Herod, who happens to be in town. Herod, for his part (verse 8), is rather pleased to have a go with Jesus because he’s heard that Jesus has done miracles. For a long time, he’d wanted to see him.

So he plies him with questions, but Jesus just ignores him and refuses to answer. What’s going on in all this? The fact of the matter is the vast majority of people cannot hear moral and spiritual arguments or religious claims very well because, for them, everything becomes political so fast that the really important matters are drowned out in politics.

Did you notice in the Clinton mess, most of the Republicans went one way and most of the Democrats went the other way? Does this mean that one side, regardless of whether you think he should have been impeached, was very moral, and the other side was very immoral? Nope. It means it was politics for both sides. That’s what it means. They just couldn’t deal with the fundamental issues.

So if there’s a discussion, let’s say, on gambling in Australia, as John Howard tried to raise some issues last year. What’s going to happen? Are the merits of the case (what it costs the larger society and what it does to the poor) going to be weighed out very evenhandedly? Or will it immediately go to politics, whether we like it or not? The states get a lot of income from gambling. The issue becomes political. It’s hard to think of in any other terms.

So in one sense, Jesus was put to death in the first century because most of those in authority, Jews and Gentiles

my frame of reference that controls me. It’s a bit of a pain to think about these things. It might change my life; it might change my priorities, and I’m not sure I want that, quite frankly. Besides, what about all the Hindus? I don’t want to become like some Christians I know; some are kooks. I’d rather be PC.”

At the end of World War I, there was a poet by the name of Studdert-Kennedy. He wrote these lines:

When Jesus came to Golgotha, they hanged Him on a tree,

They drove great nails through hands and feet and made a Calvary;

They crowned Him with a crown of thorns; red were His wounds and deep,

For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap.

When Jesus came to Birmingham, they simply passed Him by.

They would not hurt a hair of Him, they only let Him die;

For men had grown more tender, and they would not give Him pain,

They only just passed down the street, and left Him in the rain.

I wonder how well he is treated in Sydney? Do people really take him on his own terms, or is he ignored and treated politically? Now we’re coming closer to the heart of the thing in the last two reasons why he comes to his death.

5. Jesus died because he came to forgive sins.

Luke 23:26–34a. By this time, all the political and legal proceedings are past. He has been beaten to a pulp. He has to carry the crossmember on his shoulder on the way out of town. He staggers outside the walls of the city, and he can’t make it. So they see Simon from Cyrene. The soldiers simply impress a passerby, who is on his way in from the country, and put the crossbar on him and made him carry it behind Jesus.

“A large number of people followed him, including women who mourned and wailed for him. Jesus turned and said to them, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children. For the time will come when you will say, “Blessed are the barren women, the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed!” ’ ”

He’s referring to the fact that judgment will fall on this whole city a mere four decades later, and the Romans would come in, in any case, and they would actually raze the city to the ground. “ ‘So don’t weep for me,’ he says, ‘weep for your own children.” “Then they will say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us!’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us!’ For if men do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?” An emblem, finally, of judgment to come.

There were others being crucified, too. Two criminals. In fact, they were guerrilla warriors that were against the regime. “Two other men, both criminals, were also led out with him to be executed. When they came to the place called the Skull, there they crucified him, along with the criminals (one was on his right, the other was on his left). Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.’ ”

It’s a stunning statement, but in some ways, not unique. Jesus said to his followers, in the so-called Sermon on the Mount, that we should love our enemies. Some Christians, when they have died under persecution, have used exactly these words. But at another level, there is something much deeper going on here in the text. This is extremely important. Let me approach this matter of forgiveness rather obliquely.

Not long ago, I read a book called Forgiveness. There were essays written in it from various perspectives, and one of the perspectives was that of a Jew who had survived the Holocaust. He raised the question, “Do I have the right to forgive the Nazi perpetrators?” His argument was, “No, I don’t, because their offense was not against me. I may have the right to forgive someone who does something against me, but I don’t have the right to forgive someone who does something against someone else.”

Say you’ve been raped. Do I have the right to go to your rapist and say, “I forgive you”? His argument was that it is simply obscene for someone to pretend to be able to forgive another for an offense against a third party. When I read those lines, I remembered a passage in the gospel of Luke. It occurs just a little earlier, in Luke 7:48. There was a woman, who happened to be a notorious sinner, and he says to her, “Your sins are forgiven,” and the sins weren’t against him. They weren’t against him.

Other guests on the occasion heard Jesus’ words, and they detected the problem immediately, and they protested, “Who is this who forgives sins?” Elsewhere, we have found them protesting, “It’s up to God to forgive sins; only he can forgive sins.” The reason for this sort of view, of course, is that, ultimately, sins are committed against God. That is to say, in God’s universe, everything that we do that’s wrong (even though it hurts other people in various ways) is, first and foremost, defiance of him. It’s an in-your-face act to him.

Thus, King David, living about a thousand years before Jesus. He was a great man in many ways, but at a horrible turn in his life, he seduced a beautiful woman next door by the name of Bathsheba. Then when it was discovered that she was pregnant by him (her husband being away at the front fighting in one of David’s wars), David arranged to have her husband Uriah brought back so they could sleep together and maybe the timing wouldn’t be too apparent.

But it doesn’t work out. So as a result, David arranges to have Uriah killed. Of course, that means getting one of his generals involved to set things up that way. When the whole story comes out, David is ashamed and so forth. Eventually, he writes a psalm to God. In it, he says, “Against you only, have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.”

At one level, of course, that’s rubbish. He hasn’t just sinned against God. He’s sinned against Bathsheba, sinned against Uriah, sinned against his general, sinned against the people, and betrayed the covenant that he made with God. He’s sinned in just about every conceivable arena and with all kinds of people. What does he mean by saying, “Against you only, have I sinned”? It wasn’t God that was bumped off; it was Uriah!

But from a Christian framework, from the framework of the Bible, what makes sin, ultimately, so heinous, so repulsive, and what gives it its odium is that it is, first and foremost, defiance of God. David knows full well that he’s hurt a lot of other people. In that sense, he’s sinned against them. He’s not denying that. He’s looking at the ugly heart of the matter, and the ugly heart of the matter is that he’s defied God. That is what has made the whole thing so evil. It wasn’t just a social mistake, a gaffe, a political blunder in which he was found out. He’s defied God.

In the Bible, evil is, first and foremost, doing what God forbids and failing to do what God commands. It is not living under his sovereignty and his providential rule, not delighting in his sheer godhood, not making him the center of everything, and not delighting in his honor, his glory, his presence, and his Word. No, we want to do things our way. Sometimes our way, then, ultimately issues in what we call the social pathologies. But in the first place, it’s not the social pathology that makes it evil. It’s first and foremost defiance of the living God.

So it’s God who forgives sins. Then Jesus comes along in his own ministry and, to a woman who is bound up with all kinds of things, he turns to her and says, “Your sins are forgiven.” The fact of the matter is that Jesus puts himself in the very place of God. Again and again and again, he applies passages that treat God, to himself. He claims to have the very authority of God.

He claims, in fact, that these sins really were against him: not in the physical arena, but they’re a defiance of him. He is the King. He is God manifest amongst us. So he does have the right to forgive sins. So now we come to this passage. He looks at all the evil around him, and he lifts his head heavenward and says, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Now note carefully what this must mean. It does not mean that the people who put him on the cross are innocent; that is, “Forgive them; clearly they’re innocent and don’t know what they’re doing.” Because if they’re really innocent, then they don’t need forgiveness. They still need forgiveness.

What he means by saying they don’t know what they’re doing is that they don’t know all that they’re doing. They know that they’re acting corruptly. They know that they’re sacrificing justice on the altar of expediency. They know that they’re politically corrupt. They don’t really know that Jesus is the Son of God, truly. They don’t see the full dimensions of their evil. But they still need forgiveness.

Then note, too, that Jesus’ prayer that they be forgiven is uttered in the context of his own death. Now we’re at the very heart of the matter, which will bring us to the last point in a moment. But before I come to it, let me just say this: Christians are forgiven people. What the gospel is about is God forgiving people.

The man who took me to Auschwitz was about my own age, maybe three or four years older. He’d been brought up in Poland in the postwar years. It is law in Poland that every Polish schoolchild has to be taken to Auschwitz at government expense; it must be done. So he had learned to hate the Nazis. He’d learned to hate with his whole heart. He had relatives that had been killed in the regime.

But at the age of 19, he became a Christian, and he knew the forgiveness of his own sins before God. When he was converted, he insisted, then, on being baptized in the Vistula River, which runs just outside the gates of Auschwitz. “There,” he said, “I buried my hatred.” Christians learn to forgive because they have been forgiven. That’s the truth. Now we come to the last point, and it is the most important.

6. Jesus died because, in fact, it was God’s plan.

Luke 23:44–46: “It was now about the sixth hour, and darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour, for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. At the end of it all, Jesus called out with a loud voice, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.’ When he had said this, he breathed his last.”

Now for us, a temple is a big church building. A few weeks ago, I was in Auckland, New Zealand, and I spoke in Temple Baptist Church. (No, that’s not quite right, it was Tabernacle Baptist Church, which is the older word for “temple” in the Old Testament.) Some people use “tabernacle” and “temple” as if it just means a church building.

But in the first century, that’s not the way a temple was viewed. The temple in Jerusalem was the place where God met with his people. It was constructed in a peculiar way. It was long, three times as long as it was wide and high, and priests were allowed to go in the first two-thirds of it. But then after two-thirds of it, there was a large curtain, and that left the last third of it, which was shaped like a perfect cube.

There was only one person who was allowed to go in there, and only once a year. That was the high priest. He had to bring the blood of a bull and the blood of a goat in there, just once a year, on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). He had to bring the blood in and splatter it on the top of a box. That was part of the whole Jewish heritage that came from the first two-thirds of the Bible, the Old Testament.

It was a way of signaling that both priests and people together could be accepted before this God after a whole year of various offense and failures and sins. They could be accepted before this God, right into his very presence, only if something or someone had died. They deserved to die, but God will take the blood of the bull and the goat instead. It was a way of indicating that sin brings death, that God demands that there be justice somehow.

On the day that Jesus died, at the hour that he died, the temple veil tore apart. Now for a devout Jew, that was shocking! You were guaranteed death if you went behind that curtain. You weren’t supposed to go there. Now the temple veil is torn apart. In the symbolism of the day, that was a way of saying that because of Jesus’ death, we have free access right into the very presence of God. That’s what it signaled.

People had a kind of formal access, because of the blood of the bulls and the goats, but in the Bible storyline, those things were just pictures that were looking forward to an ultimate sacrifice. What moral work is the blood of a sheep? Or a goat? It’s not as if the goat comes forward and says, “I’ll sacrifice my life for you.” It’s just an animal. It’s just a figure. It’s a way of pointing forward.

But eventually, there was One who came forward: the Lamb of God, provided by God in God’s own plan, who would bear, in his own body, our guilt. From the Bible’s point of view, God owes us justice. God owes us condemnation. But instead, what he gives us is his Son, to die on the cross and to take our sins in his own body on the cross. God doesn’t owe us that, but he gives us that.

In consequence, I don’t come to God (no Christian does) and say, “Well, God, I guess I can come into your presence anytime I like. I’m a pretty nice chap, probably as good as the next bloke in here. You’re sort of nice anyway, aren’t you?” It’s not the way it works in the Christian ordering of things. It’s not the way it is at all. Rather, God is holy, so terrifyingly and perfectly holy, that with all of my corruptions, my little deceits, my hidden sins, and so on, I can’t come before him.

Have you ever thought what it would be like never, ever, ever to have told a lie? Never, ever, ever to have cheated? Never, ever, ever to have nurtured bitterness? Never, ever, ever to have lusted? Never, ever, ever to have slammed the other person, just to make him or her squirm so that you could get ahead? And those are merely negative sides of things. Have you ever thought what it would be like to always, always, always to have loved God with heart and soul and mind and strength? To love your neighbor as yourself?

In the Christian ordering of things, that’s the way it ought to be. It’s just that we have become so used to our sin that we don’t even see it as sin anymore. We’re not ashamed of it. We’re not embarrassed by it. But the Bible says that God sees it, and he rightly condemns us and stands in judgment over and against us.

But instead of wiping us out, he gives us his Son so that we can come into his presence, not because we are so good, but because Jesus died. So when Christians approach God, they do not say, “Well, I’m here, and you owe me a hearing.” We say, “Accept me for Jesus’ sake.” Out of this comes the transformation of life and orientation and values that changes everything. That’s why Christians sing:

Astounding grace, that God the Son should choose

To leave his Father’s glory and refuse

To clutch his dignity, exploit his right

And make himself a no one in our sight.

The word made flesh, the Son of God a man;

The timeless one clothed in a mortal span

And born a baby in cattle shed:

Transcendent God, who suffered and bled.

Astounding grace, that Christ should suffer death

And know firsthand the grave’s cold, clammy breath,

That he, the Prince of life, creation’s Lord

Should take the curse which we could not afford.

He died our death; he buried all our sin.

He tore the veil; we boldly enter in.

He saw our bitter hates, our dreadful lust;

He bore our guilt and then declared us just.

Astounding grace that I who could not hear

God’s warning judgments now should come to fear

Impending death, the certainty of hell,

Yet find in Christ my fears completely quelled.

Once I was blind, in shoreless wastes I drowned;

But now I see: the lost sheep has been found.

My guilt’s forgiven, I gaze upon his face,

Exalting Christ and His astounding grace.

I don’t know you. I’m a stranger here; I don’t know you. I don’t know why you’ve come. Some of you, I imagine, God has been pursuing for some time. You know that Christ died for you, and you want to know that forgiveness. You want to come under his lordship. If that’s what you want with your whole heart, then in a moment, when I pray, I want you to pray in your own heart and mind with me. God sees the heart; he knows what you’re saying.

For some of you, this is so strange, the whole set of categories are a bit odd. What you need, first and foremost, is more information. You need to find out more about what the Bible really does say. You need to know more about Jesus. You need to know more about God. There are ways in which you can find out without undue embarrassment: courses and books that can be given to you. That’s open to you as well. But right now, those of you who really are ready to close with this Christ, to know his forgiveness, and to come under his lordship, will you pray with me?

Dear God, I know that I am not worthy to be accepted by you. I don’t deserve your gift of eternal life. I am guilty of rebelling against you and ignoring you. I need forgiveness. Thank you for sending your Son to die for me, that I may be forgiven. Thank you that he rose from the dead to give me new life. Please forgive me and change me, that I may live with Jesus as my ruler. Amen.