The First Time Jesus Spoke from the Cross

When they came to the place that is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And they cast lots to divide his garments.Luke 23:33-34The soldiers took hammers and metal spikes, and they nailed the Son of God to a beam of wood. They lifted Him up on a pole and dropped it into a hole in the ground. Then Jesus spoke for the first time from the cross: “They know not what they do.”The men who nailed Jesus to the cross didn’t think they were doing anything wrong. They didn’t have a bad conscience; they didn’t feel they needed to ask God for forgiveness. These men were right in the middle of committing the most terrible sin in the history of the human race, and Jesus said that they did not know what they were doing. How is that even possible?This tells us something very important—we cannot know what sin is simply from our own feelings about what is right and what is wrong. If you trust your own heart, your own intuition about right and wrong, you will sin and go on sinning, without even knowing it.We need God to tell us what sin is, and the good news is that He does this through His law. That is why we need God’s Word. Even the apostle Paul had to admit: “I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet’” (Rom. 7:7).Do you see how it would be possible for you to sin against God without even knowing it?