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Seventh of a series of sermons on "The Prayers
of Jesus as Recorded in the Gospels. ”
Luke 23:34, “Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them,
for they know not w! ~t they do.”
N the course of our series of the prayers
of .Jesus we have come to the cross. This
is, of course, the climax of our Lord’s
history on earth. Our last view of Je
sus was in the Garden of Gethsemane
where, prostrate on the ground, beneath
the olive trees, with His heart bursting
with sorrow, He prayed that memorable
prayer and wound up with that trium-
I
phant experience, “Nevertheless, not my will but
thine be* done.” Since that time and the time of the
cross Jesus has passed through some very tragic ex
periences. The first of these was his betrayal by
Judas Iscariot, one of His disciples. The second was
the denial of Peter, another one of His disciples, the
one who had most loudly declared that he would nev
er forsake Him. Another of these experiences was
that sham trial through which He passed; the next
is His experience on the cross. And it is with refer
ence to this experience that we come now to speak.
In the company that stood around the cross
were some of His disciples, and the faithful women
who had never turned their backs upon Him through
all the various experiences of His life. These wo
men had ever stood faithful and firm, and they are
there now; they stayed by Him until the end. In
that company of women there is one that stands out
conspicuous in the midst of all of them, a loving and
lovable character, His own mother, there to witness
the awful agony of her Son, upon the cross. And
there is a man in that crowd who was pressed into
service and made to carry up the slopes of Calvary
His cross; and there are the Roman soldiers and the
men and women of the streets who have by reason
of the sensation come together around the cross to
see the Son of God die. As they stand there about
this cross Jesus beholds the multitude and utters
these significant and deeply pathetic words that we
have for our text.. “Father, forgive them, for they
know not what they do.” All these prayers of Jesus
have proven to be of great spiritual significance, and
to disclose the purpose of our Master and the depth
of His passion there is no prayer that He ever ut
tered that has half the interest to us that this prayer
has.
THE LAST PRAYER.
Let us remember the first place that this prayer
was made in the moment of His death. Death-bed
sayings are always of great interest to any of us, es
pecially to those who are in any way connected with
the dying one. How often have I seen the family
gathered about the bedside, when the death angel
flutters through the door of the house, to catch the last
word, the testimony or expression that the one dying
might be able to give. I have just come from a home
where one of our deacons died and the first thing
that they told me was the last word that he spoke.
And certainly the last word that he ever spoke to
me I very well remember. It was a word concern
ing a resolution which he had formed to give largely
of this year’s income to the foreign mission cause,
and a statement to me that he had just mailed his
first installment of this amount to the treasurer of
our mission fund. This last testimony, given just a
few hours before he passed away, was the first
thought that came to me when I heard of his unex
pected death.
But it is after all the last prayer that is the win
dow through which the eyes of the world can inspect
the soul of the one who prays. A man in prayer
speaks to God exactly what is pressing heaviest upon
his heart. If a man prays most for himself, you may
know that self is most conspicuous in that man’s
make-up. If a man in his prayer prays most for oth
ers you may know that the deep thought of his life
Is not so much his welfare as the welfare of his fel
lows.
THE PR A YER ON THE CROSS
Tabernacle Sermon by Reb. Len G Broughton, D. D.
Stenographlcally reported for The Golden Age.—Copyright applied for.
I remember a very interesting death-bed scene
through which I passed a number of years ago. It
was the death of a woman who was deaf and dumb;
but a lovelier Christian character never graced the
face of this earth. She was converted when a child
eleven years of age and lived as faithful and consist
ent a Christian life as I ever knew and lived it un
der very difficult circumstances. Her father was not
a Christian; none of her brothers were Christians;
only her mother and herself in that home held up the
standard of the Lord. She asked me as her physi
c’an, it was in the day when I was giving myself to
the practice of medicine, to stay by her side and sup
port her elbow while she prayed, and at first I could
not understand why she wanted me to support her
elbow while she prayed, but I understood a little la
ter, for she was intending to express the prayers of
her heart by her fingers, and as I held her elbow she
prayed for those who stood around about her bed,
and the prayer was taken down by her brother and
preserved in the family; just five minutes after she
closed with the amen her spirit slipped into the pres
ence of God. Oh, the depths of soul agony through
which she passed as she prayed for the salvation of
her father, and the salvation of her brothers!
Brethren and friends, this prayer of Jesus that we
are studying was a prayer made in the very instant
of death. At the time when Jesus spoke these words
He was suspended between earth and heaven, not
only upon the cross but in spirit; He had begun the
ascent to His Father. You will observe that in this
dying prayer, this prayer uttered while undergoing
the most excruciating agony, Jesus prays for His en
emies. One would naturally, according to the ways
of the world, expect that under such circumstanes
He would have prayed for those immediately con
nected with Him. We would naturally have expected
Jesus to have prayed first for His mother; she was
heart-broken, she did not understand it; she could
not understand why that one the like of her Son, so
pure and spotless as He, should be crucified like this;
it seems that Jesus would have first prayed for His
mother, for her comfort, her sustenance, her support;
and then we would have expected Him to have pray
ed for His disciples and especially for those weaker
ones of His disciples, those whose temperaments and
dispositions Jesus so thoroughly understood. There
upon the cross with drooping head and with strain
ing eyes surveying that mob, He passes over His
mother and the other women and His disciples and
friends and took in that great angry mob, and prays
for them, and this prayer for His enemies is the
prayer that He makes while in the act of dying;
these enemies have hounded him to His death; they
have crucified Him; they have Him now nailed to
the cross, and they are the one’s whom His prayer
is for, which reveals to us that the supreme mission
of Jesus was the mission of the world’s forgiveness.
“FATHER, FORGIVE THEM.”
But who are these enemies gathered about Jesus?
They are the scholars of that day; they are the gen
tlemen of the day; they are the priests and the scribes
and the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the magistrates
of law; they are also the thieves and the thugs; that
mob was made up of all kinds, classes and conditions.
There are out there in that mob men whose eyes are
red with the fire of hell, scoffing and laughing and
sneering at every gasping breath that He draws,
saying all sorts of hard and cruel things about Him,
and it is for them that He prays. There is a picture
in one of the art galleries of Europe which I have
looked upon for hours; it is to me one of the most
interesting of all the great paintings that I have ever
seen. It is a picture that is intended to set forth
the character of the crowd that crucified Jesus, and
in that crowd is one figure that strikes me with
more force than all the rest. He is a slave; with a
low, degraded animal-like face and he is in the atti
tude of spitting on Him; a poor, miserable slave is
spitting at the Son of God. All of this is included in
the crowd that He prays for. Oh, my brethren, when
I think of the depths of the forgiveness that Jesus
•Himself felt for these people, and then when I think
The Golden Age for March 31,1910.
of how hard it is for us even to live peacefully with
our fiiends, it makes me blush with shame.
This word “forgive” which He uses, is a word we
need to study. There are two Greek words from
which we get our word forgive. The first one points
to the condonation of the sin and the other to
the dismissal of the sin. There is a vast difference
between the forgivenss and condonation and the
forgiveness of dismissal. We see God’s for
giveness in that Old Testament figure of the
day of atonement. On that day they brought
in two goats; one was taken and slain as a
sacrifice for sin; and the other the priest put his
hands upon and confessed the sins of the people and
these sins were laid upon the goat, then by the hand
of a “fit man” the goat was led off into the wilder
ness and lost. There is a picture which represents
this goat after he has been led into the wilderness,
famishing for food and dying. But no man ever
saw that goat die in the wilderness. No man ever
saw that goat again; he was entirely out of sight
and lost; lost forever, never to be found. That is
the type, the figure of what our Lord is praying for
here with reference to His enemies; that their sins
may be forgiven, that they may be as completely
lost as the goat in the wilderness; that they may be
dismissed, not condoned, the word used here is the
word which has reference to the dismissal of sin, not
the condonation of it. The first word is the word
that we use in expressing our forgiveness one for an
other. The other is the divine word; it is expressive
of the act and the attitude of God when He says, “I
forgive,” He does not mean condone; He means dis
miss; send off as far as the East is from the West.
Lost are your sins in the wilderness if God has for
given. Our Anglo-Saxon word properly studied, it
self carries out this idea. The word forgive prop
erly interpreted is “forth give,” or to “give forth”
and it is the same word used in connection with Laz
arus and his resurrection, when Jesus said to his
friends standing around after the resurrection, “loose
him”; “take off his grave clothes and let him go”;
He used the same word that He is using here in this
prayer; it is the word to forgive; it is the word to let
go; it is the word “forth give—give forth”; “Take
away his grave clothes; let him go; let him be freed
of the things that bind him.” The same word is used
in connection with the boat when the boat was let go
from its anchorage to the bank; it was “forth-given”;
it was given forth; it was loosed from its moorings.
I remember standing, when a boy, and looking upon
the first balloon ascension that I ever saw. There
was the balloon, a great ponderous thing, full of gas,
throbbing, it seemed to me, with anxiety to ascend,
but it could not go; and in my enthusiasm I walked
around it and burned with anxiety to loose it, to give
it its liberty, to see it fly. After awhile the man in
charge came and began cutting the ropes that held
it fast, one after another; she danced to and fro as
the ropes were cut and after awhile the main center
rope was cut and up she shot like a bird. That bal
loon was “forth-given.” She was given forth to the
air above. Jesus in His prayer uses this word for
His enemies, “Father, forgive them”; let them be
loosed, be freed from the sins that bind them.
“THEY KNOW NOT”
Then you will please observe that the plea in this
prayer of Jesus was based upon their ignorance.
“Father, forgive them, for they know not .what they
do.” Ignorance in no sense puts God under obliga
tion to us, but ignorance does put God in the atti
tude of mercy to us. Ignorance brings us within the
pale of His great and wide mercy. Jesus here in this
prayer was praying that they might come within the
pale of divine mercy and be forgiven. He kiiew their
ignorance; they did not know that He was the Mes
siah, the Son of God; that He was to ascend from
that place to be the Advocate of the world. They did
not know that. Jesus knew that and this great ig
norance appealed to the mercy of Jesus and He used
it in His prayer to His father. If today every man
out of Christ knew just what Jesus is and what He
wants to do, there would not be a man here that
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