THE SIN that was committed on Golgotha against the Christ of God, is not merely a sin, but the sin; sin in all the fulness of consummation and absoluteness.
Further than this, sin could not and can not go. Deeper it can not penetrate. More wickedly it can not oppose the living God. More boldly, more recklessly, in a sense more devilishly, it can neither outrage God’s majesty nor wound God’s love.
Many cruelties have been perpetrated in the earth, which have borne a more gruesome character; in which the ingenuity of human cruelty has exhibited itself more strongly; in which simultaneously all sorts of sins of voluptuousness, selfishness, revengefulness, murderousness, and what not have broken out; atrocities at which still altogether worse than on Golgotha human blood has flowed, and the cries of human death-horrors have been heard, but this more terrible character only belongs to all such dreadful acts when you count with the standard of the feeling.
But when you take your standard spiritually; when you understand David’s confessson: “Against Thee, yea, against Thee only have I sinned”; and consequently you confess, that a sin is more shameful, more cruel and more terrible, in the measure in which it more directly opposes the living God, then all those other bloody atrocities recede altogether into the background; and there simply has not been committed one sin on the earth, nor ever can be perpetrated by man, which is comparable even from a distance, with the sin, that has been sinned against Jesus on Golgotha; the fall in Paradise excepted.
The superficial man does not understand this.
When Adam eats of the forbidden tree, and Cain murders his brother Abel, the unspiritually-minded man thinks, that the murder of Abel was a far more dreadful sin, than the eating of the forbidden tree.
But he who has lent a listening ear to the Word of God, knows better.
For Cain’s crime is truly dreadful, and Abel’s blood keeps calling unto God; but yet, not by the murder of Abel, but by the eating of the forbidden fruit, a whole world is sunken away in guilt and condemnation before God.
And so also it is here.
The judicial murder by Herod of John Baptist, and that bleeding head of the man of God carried on a silver salver into Herod’s banqueting hall, makes a more repulsive impression than the cross of Golgotha.
And yet, of the murder of John, God’s Word scarcely takes further notice, while on Golgotha’s account presently Israel is cast away by God, city and temple destroyed, and at last Rome’s emperorship, that in Pilate stood accessory, is overrun by Barbarians and brought to nought.
The balance with which the world, and the balance with which God the Lord weighs sin, is altogether different.
The question is, whether, as you put sin into one scale, you put into the other the honor of men or the name of your God.
Hence it can not be otherwise than that judgment on sin and sin must altogether diverge.
Also on Golgotha.
Jesus knew that the sin that was committed on Him was the most grievous, the most heinous, the most damnable sin.
They on the other hand who committed it, or who witnessed it, could scarcely imagine, that there was sin in it.
The spiritually blinded did not know, they did not understand, nor did they realize, what they did, when they put the Mediator between God and man to the cross.
Therefore they could not themselves pray that God might forgive them.
And because they could not do this for themselves, Jesus prayed this for them:
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!”
HAVE you made this also a matter of thought?
Has your soul, in its love for your Savior, entered into what this had to be to Him? Himself alone to understand the outrage committed upon Him, and to be obliged to shut up the knowledge of this all else surpassing sin in His own troubled mind?
Through all the centuries, from Paradise, sin had been bent upon, had lusted, once to make a show of its entire godlessness, its grossest unholiness, its most perfect, devilish nature.
And the world was full of cruelty and horror.
One misdeed overtook the other to surpass it and to place it in the shade.
And yet, however inhuman, beastly and devilishly sin had broken out and broken through among the peoples and the nations, it had never been able to offer a sample of its absolute godlessness.
Ever yet the fever of the passion of sin had burned on.
Ever yet did it plan upon more; took higher aim; was intent upon still unholier revelation of its demoniac nature.
And now, at last, it will come to its most awful utterance, to that deed of naked, clear, radical and direct enmity against God and against His Anointed. Further it can not go.
Here, upon Golgotha it stretches itself out in the fulness of its evil power; appears in its gigantic wickedness and meanness.
It does what it had never done: in Jesus it assaults God Himself.
It comes out in a dreadfulness, which imparts a meaning to the history of the whole world; which brings doom to Israel and Jerusalem; and to all those who join themselves to it, lets eternal damnation become irrevocable.
And … . of all this no one observes anything. The Sanhedrin has not the faintest glimpse of this. Of this Pilate has no distant thought. This does not enter the heart of the multitudes. Not even a Peter or a John understand a half of this.
Jesus alone knows and feels this. He upon Whom the sorrow comes, and against Whom sin commits itself in its finished completeness.
Yea, so forcibly does this awful knowledge press upon Him alone, that disclosure of His heart even to the best of His disciples is unthinkable.
They are dull-brained as a dove. They hear His words, but do not understand Him.
And so to all the dreadfulness of His suffering, this awfulness was added also, that no one saw the horror, save He. And He alone saw it to the full.
And it is this anguish of soul that went forth, when in prayer to His God He exclaimed: “Father, they know not what they do.”
DOES Jesus’ prayer in behalf of these madmen at His cross mean, that their ignorance excused them, and that on this ground Jesus prayed, that their sin might not be laid up against them?
Let not he who might think this forget, that here we stand on Golgotha; that this is holy ground; and that it is not expedient for him to tread this holy ground, so long as he has not loosed the latchet of his spiritless superficiality.
For how?
It should be no sin, because it was done in ignorance? Wherefore then, if it were no sin, this prayer for forgivenness?
Have you forgotten what the Psalmist sang: “Lord, cleanse thou me from secret faulths” (19:12)? Forgotten what Jesus said, that he that knew not the will of his Lord, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes (Luke 12:48)? Forgotten also what the apostle says: “If our heart condemn us not, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things” (1 Jo. 3:20)?
Hide yourself in the tent of the world with so nonsensical an idea, as though sin done in ignorance were no sin, but do not enter with this into the tent of the Lord. With so sinful a judgment of sin stay away at least from the one and only Golgotha.
No, whether anything is sin, does not depend upon your knowledge, but solely on this: whether it opposes God; and although ill will and consciousness aggravate the guilt, yet the first, the predominant, the all judgment-explaining standard is and always will be, the degree of godlessness with which your word or your deed opposes the Holy God.
Jesus’ prayer: Father, forgive them, a prayer, which even as every prayer of Jesus, has very surely been heard, can have no other sense, and no other meaning, than that to that Caiaphas, to that Herod, to that Pilate, to those soldiers, to those priests, to the persons in that wild mob about His cross, there might not be imputed personally that most awful of guilts, implied in the murder of the Anointed of God.
That it was these persons who did it, was purely incidental.
Had you been high priest in Caiaphas’ place, had I sat in Pilate’s judgment seat, had our third man been tetrarch of Galilee, had our children and servants stood about the cross, we all together would have done wholly the same what now these unfortunates did.
It was sin, which we all have cherished, that used these persons merely as its instruments.
And therefore these instruments are of secondary count. That they lived just then. Occupied those posts of honor just then. Lived in Jerusalem just then. And from curiosity ran out to Golgotha. All this was incidental.
That which on Golgotha exhibited its unholy sense, and committed the atrocity, was the sin of mankind.
And therefore Jesus prays for them, that this incident might not aggravate their judgment forever.
Even as it will eternally shadow our judgment, unless we convert ourselves, so shall it also shadow their judgment.
Nothing less, but also nothing more, for that more, Jesus has prayed away for them.
“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
And then there still are children of God, who count with their conscious sins alone, and who, because of the dullness of their heart have no percepton of any other sins, are scarcely aware of the need of prayer for forgiveness of guilt.
As though what Jesus then prayed, should not have included us.
Sins which we know and have confessed, but also, and much more yet, mountains of sins, that stand to our account, and of which we have no faint perception.
And therefore it is so blessedly comforting, that there is One Who liveth to pray also for us.
To pray also for us, that calm prayer of Golgotha: Father, forgive my redeemed ones, for they know not what they do!