What about the thief on the cross?
Question 07057
There is perhaps no account in the Gospels that more plainly displays the grace of God in salvation than the exchange between Jesus and one of the criminals crucified alongside Him. It has been used in Christian preaching and pastoral care for two thousand years, and rightly so, because what takes place in those brief verses contains more about the nature of salvation than many a lengthy theological argument manages to establish.
The Encounter
Luke 23:39-43 presents the scene with characteristic economy. Two criminals are crucified with Jesus, one on either side. One joins the mocking crowd, hurling abuse at Jesus and demanding a rescue that serves only his own skin. The other rebukes him, acknowledges the justice of their own punishment, affirms the innocence of Jesus, and makes what is, given the circumstances, a remarkable request: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Luke 23:42).
The request is striking in its clarity. This man, dying in agony, addresses Jesus by name. He is not asking for an immediate rescue from the cross. He does not ask to be taken down, to be spared the next few hours, or to be given a more comfortable death. He asks to be remembered in Jesus’ kingdom. He believes, on whatever basis he had formed his understanding, that Jesus is a King, that Jesus has a kingdom, and that acknowledging himself to Jesus is the way to be included in it.
The Response
Jesus’ answer goes further than the man asked: “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). He does not say “I hope you will be there” or “provided you continue in this faith.” He says “you will be with me,” and He says it will happen that very day. The word paradeisos (paradise) was the word used in the Septuagint for the Garden of Eden and came to be associated with the dwelling place of the righteous dead in the presence of God. Jesus is assuring this man of immediate, personal, ongoing presence with Him following death.
No conditions are attached. No further requirements are given. There is no instruction to be baptised, no probationary period, no demands for restitution or public confession beyond what has just occurred. The man asked to be remembered, and Jesus said you will be with me. The exchange is complete.
What This Man’s Faith Involved
It is worth pausing to observe what this man’s faith did and did not include. He had no Christian baptism. He had no participation in the Lord’s Supper. He had no opportunity to produce works of repentance in the sense of changing his behaviour over time. He died within hours of this exchange. He had whatever knowledge of Jesus he had gathered through public report and the events immediately before him.
What he did have was genuine recognition of his own guilt (“we are receiving the due reward of our deeds,” v.41), genuine recognition of Jesus’ innocence and worth (“this man has done nothing wrong,” v.41), and genuine personal appeal to Jesus as the One who could include him in what lay ahead. He trusted himself to Jesus in the only way open to him, with nothing to offer and no prospects beyond the appeal itself.
This is saving faith in its most elemental form. It carries both dimensions of the turning described elsewhere in the New Testament: an honest acknowledgement of one’s own guilt before God, and a personal entrusting of oneself to Jesus. The repentance is there, not in any elaborate emotional performance, but in the honest facing of his own guilt. The faith is there, not as intellectual agreement with theological propositions, but as personal trust directed at a specific Person.
What This Account Does Not Teach
The account has sometimes been used to argue that baptism is unnecessary for salvation, and on that specific point it does provide evidence, though it is not the only or even the strongest evidence. What must be said carefully is that this exchange occurred before the death, resurrection, and Pentecost that established the ordinances of the church. The thief was not living under the New Covenant arrangements by which the church is now governed, and the impossibility of his baptism under those circumstances means this is not the right passage to use as the general pattern for the relation between baptism and salvation, even if it does confirm that the Spirit is not bound to any outward form.
Equally, the account cannot be used to normalise the deliberate deferral of obedience to Christ in the hope of a late-life conversion. This man did not choose his situation; he was dying. His circumstances made every act of discipleship impossible except the one he managed. To take comfort from his story as licence for deliberate delay is to misread the narrative entirely.
So, now what?
What the thief on the cross shows, unmistakably, is that the grace of God in salvation is not dependent on what a person can bring to God, how long they have believed, or what they have been able to do in response. It is dependent on what God does in response to genuine faith in Jesus. The man had nothing and received everything, because what Jesus receives is not the person’s record but the person themselves.
“And he said to him, ‘Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.'” Luke 23:43
