Chapter 29 — "Your Sins Are Forgiven": Jesus the Divine Savior
The Incarnate Christ and His Critics (Komoszewski & Bowman, 2024)
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There's a scene in the Gospels that cuts to the heart of who Jesus claimed to be. A paralyzed man is lowered through a roof by friends desperate for healing. He lands at the feet of Jesus. And Jesus looks at him and says: "Son, your sins are forgiven" (Mark 2:5).
The scribes and Pharisees in the room understand immediately what he's done, and they're furious. "Why does this man speak like that? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?" (Mark 2:7).
They're right about the theology, even if wrong about the application. In the Old Testament, forgiveness of sin belongs to God alone. It isn't something humans can grant on God's behalf, not even prophets or priests. The priests of Israel could offer sacrifices that atoned for sin, but only because God, through the sacrificial system, was the one doing the forgiving. No priest ever walked up to a sinner and said "I forgive you."
Jesus did.
The Logic of Blasphemy
Think about what Jesus' critics understood. They knew the Old Testament. They knew that when Nathan confronted David after his sin with Bathsheba, he said, "The LORD also has put away your sin" (2 Sam. 12:13). God forgives through his representative, but the agent of forgiveness is God. They knew that in Isaiah 43:25, God says, "I, I am he who blots out your transgressions." First person singular. God himself.
When Jesus said "your sins are forgiven," he wasn't claiming to be a priest interceding with God. He was claiming personal authority to forgive, to wipe the slate clean on his own say-so. The scribes grasped the implications: this is either God speaking, or a man making himself God. Either way, it demanded a response.
Jesus' response is remarkable. He doesn't walk the claim back. He doubles down instead. He heals the paralyzed man to prove it, specifically "so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins" (Mark 2:10). The miracle is proof of the claim. If I can heal him, you know I have the authority I said I have.
Why Only God Can Forgive Sin
The logic here runs deeper than it looks. Why is forgiving sin uniquely God's prerogative?
Sin, underneath everything, is an offense against God. When David confesses to God in Psalm 51:4, "Against you, you only, have I sinned," he isn't ignoring Bathsheba and Uriah. He's recognizing that all sin is, in the end, rebellion against the moral order God established, a violation of the relationship with the Creator. So forgiveness is the prerogative of the one sinned against.
When someone wrongs you, you're the only one who can forgive them. No third party can forgive on your behalf. And since all sin is against God, only God can forgive it.
Jesus' claim to forgive sins is not a pastoral nicety or a spiritual counseling technique. It's a claim to stand in the place of God, the one sinned against, and personally release the offender from their debt.
The Cross and the Logic of Forgiveness
What makes the incarnation indispensable here is this: the one who forgives sins on earth is also the one who bears their weight on the cross.
Jesus didn't forgive sin casually or cheaply. He forgave it by absorbing it. "He made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor. 5:21). "He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree" (1 Pet. 2:24). "He was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities" (Isa. 53:5).
The forgiveness Jesus declared to the paralyzed man, and declares to every sinner who comes to him, wasn't free. It cost him everything. God didn't simply wave away the debt of sin. He paid it. In the flesh. On a cross.
That's why the incarnation matters so desperately for the question of forgiveness. Only God can forgive sin. Only a human being can die. Jesus, being both, is the one person in the universe who could forgive and atone at once, who could say "your sins are forgiven" and then go to the cross to make it true.
For Those Who Carry Guilt
There's something I want to say beyond the argument.
If you carry guilt, real guilt, the kind that doesn't go away with time or therapy, the scene with the paralyzed man is for you. Jesus didn't ask for a theological summary before he forgave. He didn't demand a lengthy penance. He looked at the man and said: your sins are forgiven.
That's the authority Jesus exercises over your life too. Not because your sins don't matter, but because he paid for them in the place where it mattered most. The God who has the right to condemn is the same one who chose to redeem.
"Your sins are forgiven." Hear it. Believe it. It's the word of the one who has the authority to say it.
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