Isaiah 53. Isaiah 53. If any of you would like a Bible, please hold up your hands and the ushers will see that you get one. Isaiah 53. Subject is what's generally referred to as the thief on the cross. The criminal who repented is what I've titled it today. But I'd like you to think through the 53rd chapter of Isaiah as he saw it. He probably would have known that chapter, probably would have memorized it. Isaiah 53, as seen through the eyes of the thief on the cross. But he was pierced for our transgressions, beginning in verse five. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was upon him. and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray. Each one of us has turned to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shears is silent, so he did not open his mouth. And then verse nine, he was assigned a grave with the wicked, but with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer. And though the Lord makes his life a guilt offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand. After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light of life and be satisfied. Therefore, I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. Now turn with me for a moment to Galatians 2. Again, thinking of them through the eyes of that thief. Galatians 2, verse 20. have been crucified with Christ. And I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. And now turn back, please, for the reading from the Gospels, Luke 23. Luke chapter 23, beginning in verse 32. Luke 23, beginning in verse 32. Two other men, both criminals, were 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 on his right, the other on his left. Jesus said, Father, forgive them. For they do not know what they are doing. And they divided up his clothes by casting lots. The people stood watching, and the rulers even sneered at him. They said, he saved others. Let him save himself, if he is the Christ of God, the chosen one. The soldiers also came up and mocked him. They offered him wine, vinegar, and said, if you are the king of the Jews, save yourself. There was a written notice above him which read, this is the king of the Jews. One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him. Aren't you the Christ? Save yourself and us. But the other criminal rebuked him. Don't you fear God? He said. Since you are under the same sentence, we are punished justly. We're getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong. Then he said, Jesus, Remember me when you come into your kingdom. And Jesus answered him, I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise. Now those are the words that I wanted us to focus on for just a few minutes. The one criminal said to the other criminal, don't you fear God? We're punished justly. We're getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing. Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom. Jesus' response was just like that. I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise. What an amazing eternal difference a day can make. 45-50 words! But these 45-50 words right here spell out the difference between heaven and hell for eternity. And in that conversation, we see one of the clearest examples of a genuine confession and instant forgiveness and the very character of God and the quality of his love and his forgiveness and his acceptance. And children, the outline this morning is going to be very, very simple. First, the thief, the criminal, the malefactor. Isaiah says he was wicked, a very strong word in Hebrew. And Luke says he was a criminal. King James says malefactor. Mark calls him a robber. We're going to talk about that thief for just a little bit. And then we're going to talk about his genuine confession and what caused it. Two things that caused him to repent and confess his sins. And third, we're going to talk about Christ's response and his forgiveness. What a difference that made. Now first, the criminal. We don't even know his name. He's just like any other person who's been in trouble with the law. Barabbas himself would have been there with them on that cross that day if it had not been for the fact that Pilate, early that morning, had released Barabbas. I believe that these two men were also part of Barabbas' band. They were all in prison at the same time. They were recognized as being political prisoners for the same kind of crime. And they'd started out in the same way that every political prisoner starts out in reacting to those hated Romans or to something in government and politics. They started out reacting that way, rebelling against the government. We make a distinction yet today between common criminals and political criminals. The common criminals will steal and swindle and beat and kill. But the political criminals are those who are reacting to the civil government. the way that every good Jew was reacting to the Romans and their hated control of the Jewish nation. So if we give Barabbas and his men the benefit of the doubt, they started out rebelling against the unjust authority. It was the powers that be in civil government, but it was the wrong response to those powers that be. It was unjust. It was unjust. They had lots of reason to react to the God-given, God-allowed authority. But instead of responding to that in the right way, in such a way as to see God bring out the change that God wanted to bring, they decided to take matters into their own hands and overthrow that unjust government. It was causing them to crawl and grovel. But then, as so often happens when men respond in the wrong way to injustice, they were outlawed. They were hunted. They were exasperated. They were hungry. They became desperate and they began to riot and to get revenge in Los Angeles or in Chicago or anywhere else. They robbed and they killed. David probably had that same kind of man with him in the prison in the cave down there in Abdullam. David probably had 400 of the same kind of men who had come to Barabbas. These other men came to David. You remember, over and over again, David had the opportunity just to cut Saul's head off, period. And they said, do it. He said, I can't do it. That's not the way to respond to unjust authority. And David taught those men to become mighty men of valor. What a contrast now with what Barabbas did. He walks off scot-free and they get caught and crucified. Big difference between the way in which we respond to authority. What a difference it makes. These two men are now going to the cross along with Jesus. But I'm sure that both the men who died on the cross that day knew about Jesus Christ. They'd had some contact with him before that day. Everyone in Israel would have heard about Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth. Luke doesn't go into the details of how they knew about it because Luke's purpose at this point in the gospel is to focus attention on the crucifixion. He wants us to be thinking about the crucifixion. So he doesn't go into a long detailed description. of how these people knew about Jesus before. But the fact is, the whole nation knew about Jesus we're talking about. Synagogues were talking about him. Who is he? Is he just a prophet? Or could he be the Messiah? The merchants were talking about him. He affected their business. The tax collectors certainly were talking about him. There have been a lot of them that said, we really do believe that this man is the Messiah. The tax collectors. The carpenters would have admired him. The women respected him. The zealots and the rebels like Barabbas and these two criminals were especially interested in him. If he's the Messiah, he's the one then who's going to relieve the whole nation and release them from this galling yoke of Roman bondage. And they would want to throw in their lot with him early so they'd have a chief place after he came into his kingdom. So I think these two men had disguised themselves very often in the last three years and had gone down to listen in and to watch to see what Jesus had been doing. I think they'd been watching and listening from the very beginning. They may have been there with John the baptizer at the Jordan River. The day that John said, now there, is the sacrifice of God who is actually going to take away the sins of the world. Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. I think they would have been cheering when he began condemning Herod and all those other hypocrites from Jerusalem. I think they would have said, this sounds like the kind of a leader. They may even have been baptized by him, by John. They may have gone to hear the Sermon on the Mount. They've been intensely interested, probably up to that point where he said, but if someone strikes you on the one cheek, you turn to him the other one. That can't be the way to overcome these Romans. And finally, they had been among those who broke off relationships with him and walked no more with him. And there were many of those, you remember, who did that. They preferred to rebel. They wanted to do it their way with a revolution. Instead of waiting around for him to make some more bread and fish, they'd go take their own and do it their way. They had hoped that he would have been the one who would have delivered the nation, but now they've given up on that. They never were able, though, to forget the teachings of that man and the things that he had done. They thought about that and thought about it a lot, and they even talked about it. If only he would become the leader and do things the right way, it wouldn't take him very long to really release this galling bondage of Roman domination. You know, thousands of people have that same experience today. They've heard a lot about Jesus Christ from a mother or a father or an old teacher or a neighbor or even a TV program. But they're too busy with their own life. They've turned to their own life. And that means then that they have to turn away from Jesus. They don't consciously turn away from him, but it just means I know how it has to be done, and if I have to do it this way, then I just have to turn away from his way. I remember my own life. I'd heard a lot about Jesus Christ. But then, when the war broke out and I got into the Navy, I was just like that man. I was too busy with doing things my own way. But now comes the great change. Somehow they'd all been caught, Barabbas and these others. They'd been captured, they'd been jailed, they'd been sentenced for one reason or another, they'd been found guilty. And God had timed it all so that just as he was finished with the work of his son on earth, and he was going to the cross, so these men had been captured and they were also going to the cross. to their death. And now they're on their last march out of Jerusalem. And this is the last time they'd ever see these streets on the way to Golgotha, the place of execution. You ever think about the time when you see your home last? You know you're not going to return to that, or your own room, or something else like that? It's the last movement now of the right arm because the soldiers have clamped that thing, and they're nailing it. And there's still one arm left. And I think that those men were probably still throwing one last punch. But two soldiers would handle that arm and nail it. And still the feet were there, and they could kick. And the one foot was still good for one more kick. And the soldiers knew it was coming, and they tried to hold off. But then when all four were nailed down, the only thing they could do was curse and spit. And I'm sure they were cursing and they were spitting. And at first, maybe both of them were raving. One of them certainly was. They were mocking the one in the middle. You claim to be God? God's supposed to be able to save. Why don't you do something about this situation? But then suddenly one of the two noticed something different about the man in the middle. He's not raving, and he's not fighting, and he's not cursing. And suddenly something triggers, and he remembers that old chapter out of Isaiah 53. He was taken as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before his shearers, he's dumb. A man who is despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And one of the two criminals began to reason, remember these things, that he'd done wrong to other people. But somehow now he sees them in terms of their being not only against the people that he'd beaten and killed and robbed and hurt, but these things as being against God. that they're even more serious in terms of what they meant to God than they were in terms of what they meant to these other people. And then suddenly he hears the words that broke his heart. Father, forgive them. They just don't know what they're doing. And I think in one blind instant the truth became clear that only God could say something like that. I'm impressed with the way that's put together in the scriptures there in verse 32. Two other men, criminals, were led out, crucified, with the one on his right hand, the other on his left, and Jesus said, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. I'd always thought that it was the soldiers Jesus was talking about. They're nailing his hands down, and so he's saying, Father, forgive them. They just don't know what they're doing. And I'm sure he was speaking about the soldiers. But now, thinking out of the standpoint of that cross and taking those same words, it comes right in the context there of the scriptures. Look at it sometime. Father, forgive them. And the thief, the one thief, took that very, very personally. It was right after that that he spoke to the other thief and rebuked him. Don't you know that this is God? And then he confessed his own sin publicly and separately. We're getting just what we deserve. But this man has done nothing, absolutely nothing wrong. Two things broke that hard old heart of that criminal that day. One was the desperateness of his own circumstance. He was the end of life. He knew he wouldn't live to see another day. And the other was the word of God. the word that revealed the character of God. He is God. And He knows me and everything there is to know about me. And yet He can forgive me. He wants to forgive me. Father, forgive them. They just don't know. There's a blinding revelation, not only of the fact that He's God, but of what God is like. He's a God who knows and he loves that much in that way. And with all that, he will forgive. And he saw that in one blinding instant. And now the thief turns to profess his faith in Jesus. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is God. Jesus, he says, remember me when you come into your kingdom. That was his genuine confession of sin. We deserve what we get. His genuine confession of faith. You are the king of the kingdom. And furthermore, I trust you with my life after I die. And Jesus responds instantly like that. Verily I say unto you, today shalt thou be with me in paradise. Not, why did you wait so long? Not, why did you do all that stuff? Not, why didn't you do it my way? Jesus doesn't do that. I say, question, do you? How instantly can you forgive a person? What's your response when someone asks you to forgive them for something? Well, why did you do that? Well, why didn't you do that my way or God's way? He doesn't do that. He does not do that instantly. Today shalt thou be with me in paradise." No suspicion, no doubting. It's just there. I like the word that Augustine left on the walls of his room. Augustine had this up there on the walls of his room. Augustine, if you want to call him that. There is life in a look at the crucified one. And now in the last place here, look for a moment at the results, the faith in that criminal. In a very real sense, I don't know that we have any example of a greater faith than the faith in that criminal. I don't know that anyone ever believed more completely and totally than that criminal did. Abraham? Well, Abraham had a lot of faith. He went out not knowing whether he went. But there were so many years to discover and to prove that Abraham lived, David and Isaiah the same way, all that time that he had to test and prove and know. And as for Peter and James and John and their three years of experiences with Jesus, they had just denied him. The closer he got to that gruesome bloody scene there on the cross, they forsook him and fled. The more shame he showed, the less they proved that they were able to trust him. I mean the shame of the humility of his arrest and trial and then his crucifixion. They forsook him and fled. The closer the thief got to it, and there wasn't anybody closer, the more he believed. And as for Thomas, Eight days later Jesus rebuked him and in effect he could have said this in just those words, you know Thomas, blessed is this criminal who's up here in heaven with me today who saw nothing but my shame and my death and yet he trusted in me without sticking his finger into the hole in my side or the holes in my hands. And the criminal I sometimes find, and probably should more often, that there's nothing I can do when I'm studying except sit and cry for a little bit. What a blessing it would have been to Jesus. Do you begin to realize how lonely He would have been on that cross? As he looked out across there, there was nothing but dead fear and hope that's gone in the eyes of Mary, in the eyes of any of the other disciples who were there. It was hope that was gone. There was no hope. And then to top all that off, he was forsaken by the Father. No one has ever known more loneliness than what Jesus knew there on that cross. Do you realize how close to that very instant that thief said, well, I trust in you. Just remember me when you come into your kingdom. There wasn't encouragement in anyone else's face. but there would have been encouragement for Jesus in those words of the thief at that point. Some people think that the Apostle Paul would be sitting at the right hand of Jesus in heaven. I think that Paul will want to give his seat, if that's the case, to this man. I think that he will want to say about this criminal, you know, he really understands what I was writing about when I said, Paul speaking, I am crucified with Christ. But it all hinges right back to what Jesus said there as he was there. There just isn't any statement in scripture that more perfectly reveals the character of God, our God, than what Jesus said there when he said, Father, forgive them. They don't know what their sins, what their treatment of other people mean. They just can't conceive, they can't possibly know what that means to you. Father, forgive them. Father in heaven, We thank you for allowing us to look so deeply into the loneliness of your only begotten son there on that cross. Thank you for showing us how it is that you so order the lives of people. At the very time that you had completed the life of your son and the arrangements for his life on earth. You are also completing the arrangements for the life of this criminal. Thank you for showing us another indication of what you are, of what kind of God you are, a God of that kind of love. Father, just forgive them. For they can't know what they've done has meant to you. Father, forgive them. And thank you for showing us, too, then what the love of that thief must have meant to you there on that cross that day. And for the instant promise that as those who have trusted in you die, they're not going to lie in the grave for a long time without anything happening, in a tomb, in a casket, in a hole in the ground, But today, instantly, we'll be with you in paradise. Thank you, God, for teaching us that. We pray your blessing now as we look at the criminals in the world around us, as we see those who have lost hope, and those who don't know you and what they're doing and what that means to you. God bless us as we would communicate that same kind of love, that the loveworth you've loved us, we would be able to love them also. Would you please use us to do that? And now, Father, hear the prayer of any man or woman, boy or girl here this morning who's praying in that way. Father, I hear you saying it. forgive her, forgive him. I just don't know what their sins have meant to you. I hear that. I do not know that I have ever trusted in you to make things right between myself and yourself. But I want to know that. Would you forgive me for what I have done against you? would you forgive my sins? I hereby trust in what you were doing on that cross to make everything right between yourself and myself. Instead of trusting in what I can do for you, doing things my own way, I just hereby trust in what you've already done for me. Now, come into my life and just do with me whatever you want from here on. I thank you for hearing this prayer. Lord Jesus, hear that prayer for any person who's praying that today. Thank you for having heard it already. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Let's turn together to Psalm 22i. Psalm 22i. And we'll sing stanzas 12, 13, and 14. Psalm 22i. Let's rise to sing. All ends of earth remembering him shall turn and spout unto the Lord. The kindred of the nations there To Him their homage shall accord, Because the Lord, the King of hosts, And rules above all earthly throngs. The rich and mighty of the earth shall weep and moan before him then, and in his presence all shall bow. ♪ Who help us to the dusty span ♪ ♪ The wretched who, although they strive ♪ ♪ Yet cannot keep their souls away ♪ ♪ Shall rise to swerve his will ♪ ♪ And to the ancients shall be told ♪ ♪ About our Lord and they shall come ♪ ♪ And trial His righteousness unfold ♪ ♪ Unto a people yet unknown that this was done by Him alone ♪ The grace of God, the love of Jesus Christ, the communion and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be and abide with every one of you now and forevermore. Amen. And blessed be his glorious name, long as the ages shall endure, for all the earth extend his fame. Amen, amen, forevermore. Amen, amen, forevermore.