What about the thief on the cross?

Question 07057

The dying thief is the single clearest illustration in Scripture that salvation is by grace through faith and nothing else. He had no time to be baptised, no opportunity to join a church, no chance to make restitution to anyone he had robbed, and no prospect of a single good work. He had a few hours, a cross of his own, and a Saviour beside him.

People raise his case for all sorts of reasons, some of them good and some of them convenient, so it is worth walking through what Luke actually records, what the man believed, and what his salvation does and does not establish for the rest of us.

What actually happened to the dying thief

Luke 23:39-43 gives us the account. Both criminals initially joined in the mockery, as Matthew 27:44 confirms. Then something changed in one of them. He rebuked his companion, admitted his own guilt in plain terms, declared the innocence of Jesus, and asked to be remembered when Jesus came into His kingdom.

The answer came immediately: “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” No probation, no conditions, no delay. The dying thief received an absolute assurance from the lips of Jesus while both of them were still hanging there.

What makes this so striking is the timing. Jesus had not yet died, risen or ascended. The man was saved on the strength of a work that was still in progress a few feet away from him, which tells you something about how God reckons the value of the cross across time.

Notice as well that the request itself was modest. He did not ask for a throne or a guarantee. He asked to be remembered. Jesus gave him vastly more than he requested, which is a pattern worth noticing wherever it appears in the Gospels.

Luke uses the word kakourgos of the two men, which means an evildoer or criminal rather than a petty pilferer. Matthew and Mark use a stronger term again, one often applied to insurrectionists and brigands. This was not a shoplifter. Rome did not crucify shoplifters.

What the dying thief actually believed

It is easy to assume he believed almost nothing, but read his words carefully and the content is remarkable. He believed in his own guilt: “we are receiving the due reward of our deeds.” He believed in the innocence of Jesus: “this man has done nothing wrong.” He believed in life beyond death, in a coming kingdom, and in the authority of Jesus over that kingdom.

That is a substantial confession from a man in agony who had, so far as we know, only the events of that morning to go on. He grasped what the religious leaders standing below him could not, which is one of the quiet ironies of the whole scene.

It also tells us something about the content of saving faith. The dying thief did not have a doctrine of the atonement. He had a person, and he trusted Him. Trust in the right Person with limited information saves; sophisticated information without trust does not.

And he confessed it publicly. In the worst possible circumstances, in front of a hostile crowd, he sided with Jesus out loud. There was nothing to be gained by it socially and he did it anyway.

The word he used for the coming reign of Jesus is worth pausing over too. He speaks of Jesus coming into His kingdom, which is future and royal language. Dying beside a man the world had written off, he addressed Him as a King with a kingdom still ahead of Him. That is faith seeing what the eye could not.

He was never baptised

This is the point at which the case usually gets raised, and rightly so. If baptism were necessary for salvation, the dying thief would be the great exception, and Scripture does not present him as an exception. Jesus states his destination as settled.

I take baptism seriously as the commanded and expected obedience of every believer, and I would urge it on anyone who has trusted Jesus. But the dying thief demonstrates that it is the sign rather than the substance. I have worked through the passages in the article on whether baptism is necessary for salvation.

The same applies to church membership, communion, giving and service. All of them are right and good for the believer who has opportunity. None of them is the ground of acceptance, and the man beside Jesus had access to precisely none of them.

Nor did he have the indwelling Spirit in the way believers do after Pentecost, which is a reminder that God has always saved people by grace through faith while the arrangements of each era have differed.

Was he saved under the old covenant?

Some argue that the dying thief belongs to the old covenant era and therefore proves nothing about salvation in this age. There is a grain of truth in the observation, since the church had not yet begun and Pentecost was still weeks away.

But the argument proves too much if it is pressed. The basis of his salvation is the same basis as ours: the death of Jesus, received by faith. What differs across the eras is the amount of revelation available and the arrangements God has put in place, not the ground on which sinners are accepted.

Old Testament believers were saved by faith too, looking forward with far less information than we have. Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness, and Paul uses that fact in Romans 4 as the pattern for Christian justification rather than as a contrast with it.

So the dying thief is not an anomaly. He is a particularly vivid instance of what has always been true.

It is also worth noting how quickly the promise came. There was no interval in which Jesus assessed the sincerity of the request. The response of heaven to a sinner turning is always immediate, and John 6:37 says the same thing in general terms: whoever comes will never be cast out.

What the objectors say

One objection is that this account encourages presumption. If a man can be saved in his final hour, why not carry on as you please and settle up at the end? That is a serious pastoral concern and I will come to it, though notice it is an argument about consequences rather than an argument about the text.

Another objection is that the promise of paradise “today” is really a matter of punctuation, and that Jesus said “truly I say to you today” rather than promising paradise that day. The Greek word order allows it grammatically, but nothing else in Luke supports it and the reading exists to serve a doctrine of soul sleep rather than arising from the passage. The NET Bible notes on Luke 23 set out the case fairly.

A third objection is that this was a unique privilege because Jesus was physically present. I see no support for that either. The dying thief was saved on the same terms as anyone in Romans 10:13, which promises that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

What his case does and does not prove

It proves that salvation is by grace through faith apart from works of any kind. It proves that assurance can be given immediately and absolutely. It proves that no life is too far gone, since this man was under a Roman death sentence for good reason.

It does not prove that obedience is optional for those who have time to obey. The dying thief did everything a man in his position could do: he confessed his sin, defended Jesus publicly and asked for mercy. Nobody could accuse him of holding anything back.

Nor does it prove that a person can plan on a late repentance. He was not banking on it; he was surprised by grace at the end of a wasted life. Those are entirely different postures, and I have taken up the pastoral question in the article on deathbed conversions.

Hope and presumption

The old comment on this passage is that one thief was saved so that nobody may despair, and only one so that nobody may presume. It has been repeated for centuries because it is right on both counts.

The despair side matters most in my experience. I have sat with people who believed themselves beyond mercy because of what they had done. The dying thief is the answer to that, and I have used the passage at more bedsides than any other.

The presumption side matters too. Nobody knows they will have a lucid final hour. Most deaths do not offer one. Treating the mercy shown to this man as a strategy is a gamble no sane person would make with anything else they valued.

So, now what?

If you think you have gone too far, you have not. The dying thief had nothing to bring, no time to improve and no reputation left, and Jesus welcomed him without hesitation. There is no queue and no qualifying period.

If you have been assuming there is time, notice that this man did not choose his moment. It arrived. What are you waiting to become before you come to Jesus?

And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

Luke 23:43, ESV

The last word belongs to Jesus rather than to the criminal. What we remember about the dying thief is not the quality of his faith but the readiness of the Saviour beside him, who had every reason to be occupied with His own agony and attended to one more sinner anyway.