EE:
By what authority did Jesus forgive sins?
DMP:
Ultimately it has to be God who forgives sins, because He is the one we sin against. So, when Jesus was dying on the cross, we hear him asking his Father to forgive the sins of the men who crucified him (Luke 23:34). He may already have forgiven them himself, but it needed God’s approval for the process to be complete. Ironically, his death on the cross was an essential link in the process of God’s forgiveness—he was the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29).
Having said that, there is an incident in the gospels where Jesus stands over a paralysed man and says “Your sins are forgiven you!” (Luke 5:20). This shocked the Pharisees, who said, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (v. 25). Jesus then proved he had the authority to forgive sins on behalf of God, by curing the man of his incurable disease. So God had delegated the power to forgive the sins of others to Jesus. Interestingly, Jesus, too, delegated the same power to his apostles (John 20:23). He gave them authority to forgive sins.
The answer to this conundrum is that in the Jewish idiom, what you do through your agent, you do yourself. This is an important principle. A good example can be seen in Exodus 23:20–22. Here God appointed an angel as His representative and authorised him to speak and act for God, including to rule and to judge. So when Moses went into the Tabernacle to speak with God, it was actually the angel of God that he spoke to, and from whom he received instructions. So, in the same way, Jesus had the delegated authority to forgive sins. He could even pass on that authority to a lower rank, the apostles. Yet the actual process of forgiveness still had to lie with God Himself. The Roman centurion in Luke 7:7–9 understood this relationship perfectly. He had authority from Caesar to order his servant to do something, and the servant had to obey. He could see that Jesus, in the same way, had been appointed by God to do His work on the earth, so if he gave the order, his servant would be healed.
In the book of Hebrews, and in Romans 8:34, Jesus is described as the mediator (or intercessor) for his disciples. Even today, in heaven, he speaks to God on their behalf, and pleads that God will forgive their sins, since he understands from his earthly experiences what it is like to be tempted, and can enter into our feelings. In a reversal of his earthly role, where he was God’s representative, he now acts as our representative before God.
