Gospel Foundations — the basics, said clearly
Nearly everything you believe a man has to do before God will receive him, this man could not do.
He could not be baptized. He could not join a church. He could not pay back a single person he had robbed, and he had robbed enough people to end up on a Roman cross. He could not clean up his language over time, or start tithing, or prove anything by a changed life, because he did not have a life left to change it in. He had a few hours and no hands free. Both of them were nailed down.
He went to paradise anyway, and he went that same afternoon. If you want the gospel stripped down to the frame, you will not find it in a systematic theology. You will find it six feet to the left of the cross of Christ.
Two Men, Same Distance, Different Eternity
Start with what is easy to miss. At the beginning, there was no good thief. Matthew says the thieves — plural — cast the same reproach at Him. Both of them mocked. Both of them joined the crowd. Whatever happened to the one happened late, and it happened while he was hanging there watching.
Then something turned. Luke records it.
But the other answering rebuked him, saying, Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss. And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise.
Luke 23:40–43 (KJV)
Read what that dying man actually got right. He feared God. He admitted his own guilt without a single qualifier — we indeed justly; we receive the due reward of our deeds. No blaming Rome, no hard childhood, no bad crowd. He confessed the innocence of Christ at the exact hour when the Sanhedrin, the soldiers, and the crowd were all agreed He was guilty. And then he asked a bleeding, suffocating, convicted man for a place in a kingdom.
Think about the size of that. Everyone else at Calvary looked at the cross and saw the end of the story. This man looked at a crown of thorns and called it a crown.
What He Brought With Him
Nothing. That is the point, and it is the whole point.
He brought no sacrament, no restitution, no record, no reformation, no vow, no fruit. He had one thing: he believed, out loud, in the Man dying beside him. And on that basis the Lord Jesus gave him a promise with a date on it.
Paul later put into doctrine what the thief received in person.
But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.
Romans 4:5 (KJV)
Notice who God justifies in that verse. Not the improving. Not the promising. The ungodly. God does not wait at the end of your rehabilitation to sign off on the finished product. He justifies men who are still, at the moment of justification, guilty — because the righteousness being counted to them is not theirs.
A Pardon Does Not Require Working Legs
When a governor signs a pardon, nothing in the document depends on the prisoner. He does not have to walk out of the cell on his own strength for the pardon to be valid. He does not have to earn the signature retroactively by good behavior on the outside. The pardon is an act performed entirely by someone with the authority to perform it, and the prisoner’s part is to receive it as true and walk through the door that has been opened for him.
A man on a cross has no working legs. That did not slow the pardon down by a minute.
“That Is Too Cheap”
This story offends people, and it has always offended people. A lifelong criminal gets the same paradise as a woman who served Christ for sixty years. Something in us wants an installment plan.
But look where you are standing when you call it cheap. You are standing between two crosses. The one on the right got in free. The one in the middle paid for it.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.
Isaiah 53:5 (KJV)
Grace is free to the man who receives it and it was never free to the Man who bought it. Those two facts are not in tension; they are the arrangement. Anyone who thinks salvation by faith alone makes sin a small thing has not looked honestly at what it cost to make the offer.
“Then I Can Wait”
That is the other conclusion men draw, and it is the more dangerous one, because it sounds shrewd. If a thief can be saved in his last hour, why not keep the years and settle the account at the end?
Because there was a second thief, and he had every advantage the first one had.
Same distance from Christ. Same view of His face. He heard the same prayer for the men driving the nails. He heard the same promise given to the man on the other side — he was close enough to hear every word of it — and he died lost, a few feet away, with the Savior of the world within arm’s reach. Proximity is not salvation. Information is not salvation. Being near the cross your whole life is not salvation.
And notice what nobody is promised: a clear-headed afternoon at the end. The thief did not plan that hour. He was handed it. Most men are not handed anything of the kind; they are handed a heart attack, or a windshield, or a diagnosis that arrives after they have stopped being able to think straight. Scripture does not say now is a convenient season. It says now is the day.
Today
Hold on to the one word in Jesus’ answer that the thief did not ask for. He asked to be remembered when — some future day, some coming kingdom, whenever that might be. He was content to be a footnote in something far off.
Christ answered, To day. Not after a waiting period. Not after a purging. Not after the kingdom finally comes. Today, with Me, in paradise. The Lord gave him more than he had the nerve to request, which is the most predictable thing about Him.
Then What Are the Works For?
Here is where honest men get confused, so let us be plain. The thief had no works because he had no time. You, reading this, probably have time. What is it for?
For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.
Ephesians 2:8–10 (KJV)
Not by good works. Unto good works. Works are never the engine; they are the evidence. They are what a saved man does with the years he was given, not the price he pays for the pardon he was handed. A believer with forty years left owes the Lord Jesus forty years of obedience — not to get in, but because he is in.
The thief is proof that works do not save. He is not permission to waste the ones you have.
Where That Leaves You
If you have been waiting until you are respectable enough to come, understand that you are waiting for a condition God never set. The first man into paradise under the new covenant was a convicted criminal who had been cursing the Savior an hour earlier. He did not clean himself up. He turned his head and spoke.
If you have been counting on a last-minute turn, understand that the man who tried that died six feet from Christ with nothing.
And if you have walked with the Lord for years and have quietly started believing your record is what holds you, read the account again slowly. You came in on exactly the terms the thief did. Nothing in your hands. Everything in His.
Lord, remember me. That is the whole prayer. It was enough on a Friday afternoon outside Jerusalem, and it is enough tonight.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist