“For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit:” 1 Peter 3:18

Everybody is interested, I suppose, in having their sin forgiven, so, how is sin forgiven?

Well, I should say the people who believe in sin are interested. For many who don’t believe in a concept of God, there is no such thing as Sin or Evil.

A major misunderstanding today is from a lot of pop psychology, it says, “Well forgive yourself.” People just need to forgive themselves. Well, that’s ridiculous. You can’t forgive yourself. Suppose that Dallas were to come up here and punch me in the nose. And, then after he punches me in the nose he says, “Now, Pastor, don’t worry about it. I have forgiven me.” No, my dear friend, only I can forgive Dallas, he can’t forgive himself and think that it makes it ok with me. And for people to say, Oh, just forgive yourself. You see, sin is against God. Now suppose somebody else comes around and says, well, neither one of you need to worry about it. I forgive both of you. Well what has he got to do with it? We have a lot of people going around saying, “I’m okay and you’re okay; you affirm me, and I affirm you.”

What we need to understand is that sin is an affront to a holy God. Only God can forgive sin and only God can forgive sin according to certain of His own principles.

One reason Jesus died on the cross is because of Sin.

There is an awful lot in the Western world that doesn’t have a category for evil, that comes from sinners. For many, evil is merely a social construct. Evil is what a 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. As a whole the world sees no objective evil that is caused by Sin.

But that is simply not the Bible’s view at all.

Remember Auschwitz, how may Jews died in that horrible spot of time?

What has mankind learned from that atrocity? Maybe we have learned the wrong lesson from it. We have sometimes thought of it as, that is not the norm of how mankind is. Really, just look at the last century which a bloody century.

In the same century of the Holocaust, 20 million Ukrainians eradicated 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, as a result of mankind being a sinner, and his nature is to do just as bad as we can imagine.

Jesus does not look at this situation and what the leaders were doing to him 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.

People do wicked things because they are sinners, in opposition of God.

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

Isaiah 5:20 Woe to them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

The bible discloses some intriguing things about the death of Jesus. It says that all his followers were either
implicit in it, stupid in it, irresponsible in it, or just simply disowned Jesus in it. Remember, the books about
Him were written by Jesus’ closest followers, and the followers don’t come out too well.
Christians understand what Sin is and that we are sinners, in need of a Holy God to forgive us, we understand
the need of the Cross.

Jesus died because he came to forgive sins.

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. 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!” Luke 23:26–34

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.

Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.’ Luke 23:34

One of the most moving books that came out of the Holocaust, was written by Simon Wiesenthal.
Wiesenthal’s entire family was wiped out in the Holocaust. He’s the only one who survived. He was at
Auschwitz. He wrote a little book called The Sunflower. It is only wrote 85 pages.

He describes how, in the closing weeks of the war he was pulled out of a work detail and shoved into a room
where there was a young dying German soldier with wounds so bad that clearly he wasn’t going to live very
long. Apparently, this young Nazi soldier had asked to speak to a Jew, and the guards happen to pull
Wiesenthal out of the line and shoved him in this room.

Gasping for life, this young Nazi soldier begged Wiesenthal for forgiveness, not only for what the Nazis as a
whole had done but for some things that he himself had participated in. He asked Wiesenthal for forgiveness.
Wiesenthal, in his book The Sunflower, goes through what is rushing through his mind. He’s thinking, “Only
the offended parties can forgive, but most of the Nazis’ most offended parties are dead. No one
else has the right to pronounce forgiveness. Therefore, there is no forgiveness for the Nazis.”

He listened to this young Nazi soldier crying for forgiveness. He said not a word, and he turned and walked out of the room. After the war was over, he wrote up the account, called The Sunflower. He did not offer forgiveness.

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.

Look what we have in Luke 7:48. There was a woman, who happened to be a notorious sinner, and Jesus says to her, “Your sins are forgiven,” and the sins weren’t against him.

Other people present heard what Jesus said and they protested, “Who is this who forgives sins?” “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. In God’s universe, everything that we do that’s wrong (even though it hurts other people in various ways) is, first and foremost, against Him.

King David, living about a thousand years before Jesus understood this. . He was a great man in many ways, but at a horrible turn in his life, he committed several horrible sins with lasting results. When the whole story comes out, David is ashamed and so forth. Eventually, he writes a psalm to God.

Psalms 51:4 Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest.

At one level, of course, that’s not true, he hasn’t just sinned against 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 killed.

As Christians we must understand this, from the framework of the Bible, what makes sin, ultimately, so heinous, so repulsive, is that it is, first and foremost, it is against God. David knows full well that he’s hurt a lot of other people. He’s looking at the ugly heart of the matter, and he sees at the heart of is, that it is first against God. That is what has made the whole thing so evil. It wasn’t just a social mistake, or, a political blunder, it was against God.

So it’s God who forgives sins.

As we noted earlier in Luke 7:48 where Jesus told the sinful woman that she was forgiven, He claims, in fact, that these sins really were against him: not in the physical arena, but they’re a defiance of him. Because he is the King, God manifest amongst us, 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.”

Luke 23:34 Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots.

Be careful here, 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, sacrificing justice on the altar of expediency, and politically corrupt. They don’t really know that Jesus is the Son of God, and they don’t see the full dimensions of their evil. But they still need forgiveness.

Jesus’ prayer that they be forgiven is uttered in the context of his own death. Christians are forgiven people. What the Cross is about is God forgiving people.

Jesus died because, 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.”

Today, for most of us, a temple is a big church building. 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. In the fifteen foot cube and the end was the place where God could be met.

There was only one person who was allowed to go in there, and only once a year, and it 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.

Until Jesus death on the Cross, 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 a symbol, 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, and 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.

It is the Cross, and Jesus death that opens the way that we can have personal access to God.

Too often, 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.

We must constantly remind ourselves, that we are not worthy to be accepted by God. We must remember to thank Him for sending His Son to die for us, that we may be forgiven. Thank Him that he rose from the dead to give us new life, and ask for forgiveness, and please change us, that we will live with Jesus as our ruler.