Jesus Confronted Sin and Forgave

Jesus Confronted Sin and Forgave

Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone
John 8.7

There is a scene in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ which begins with a shot across a square looking at an angry mob advancing armed with stones. Then in the foreground a single sandaled foot stomps the dust, arresting the progress of the crowd. A finger writes in the dirt, and a trembling, bejeweled hand desperately reaches towards the foot of, well Gibson does not show us, but we know it is Jesus, and we know the hand belongs to the woman who had been caught in adultery, and the crowd armed with stones were the ones in John 8 who sought to test Jesus. (See John 8.1-11)

The mob had come, eager to confront and condemn the sin of the woman, and hoped that Jesus, who had begun to have an undeserved reputation as somehow being soft on sin and loose with the Law of Moses, would commit such a violation as to allow them to later accuse him. (8.6) the last thing they expected was for Jesus to confront sin, their sin. But that is what Jesus dared to do. At the same time the Lord also dared to forgive, not excuse, the sin of the woman. What did Jesus do? He dared to confront, and to forgive, sin. We don’t see much of that these days.

Rather than confront and forgive, we are more into “accuse and excuse.” There is no shortage of people, we might call them “Speck Inspectors” who are quick to accuse others of their sins, even the slightest ones. But such Inspectors typically overlook, want to avoid truly confronting the reality of sin’s pervasiveness, being particularly blind to the glaring reality of the beam they themselves bear. At the same time, it is fairly common practice for one who is caught in sin to seek to be excused, rather than to truly confess, repent, and be forgiven. And we have shown ourselves to be a readily excusing, if ultimately unforgiving, culture. It seems that most of us who profess to follow Jesus are quite unwilling to dare, as Jesus did, to confront the reality of sin’s pervasive presence in all our lives, starting with our own. The problem with excused sin is that it tends to hang around. Either the one excused persists in sin because it is fairly easy and cheap to make excuses and to be excused, or the one who excused the sin holds onto it so that they can always bring it up again against the excused.

But sin that has truly been confronted, and repented of and forgiven, well unlike excused sin which hangs around, stays in the record so to speak, truly forgiven sin is erased, gone, forgotten, expunged from the record. It takes daring to deal with sin so boldly, so completely, so finally. Before Jesus no one had ever dared to confront sin and forgive. Since the time of Christ, those who have dared have been far outstripped by those who are into accusing and excusing, rather than confronting and forgiving.

But you just cannot find any place in the Bible where God excused sin. Nor is there any biblical account of anyone who tried to make an excuse for their sin to God, or who sought to have their sin excused by God, ever succeeded. We do have many illustrations of sin confronted and forgiven.

Think of David being confronted by Nathan, and then confessing and repenting and being forgiven. (2Samuel 12) Think of Zacchaeus publicly confessing and repenting, and being forgiven on the spot by the Lord, who declared Zacchaeus a “son of Abraham” right then and there. (Luke 19) Think of the woman, pursued by those angry accusers ready to stone her to death. After Jesus had dared to confront them, the accusers vanished, , and Jesus himself refused to accuse and condemn, instead forgiving the woman, and charging her to leave her life of sin behind.

Accusing leads to condemnation, and at best, excusing. Daring to confront leads to repentance and forgiveness. That’s what Jesus did.

Jim
www.jimwilkenministries.org
Marion, NC
Psalm 37.4