Mark 2:7 “Who but God can forgive sins.”
Acts 10:43 “…Everyone who believes in him will have their sins forgiven through his name.”
John 1:29 “Look! There is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”
John 20:23 “If you forgive anyone’s sins, they are forgiven. If you refuse to forgive them, they are unforgiven.”
(The Disciples did not have the power to forgive sins, only God can forgive sins, but Jesus gave them the privilege of telling new believers that their sins have been forgiven because they have accepted Jesus’ message. All believers have this same privilege. W can announce forgiveness of sins with certainty whe we ourselves have found repentance and faith.)
Hi, Kevin. (Nice name, by the way.
)
Context in reading Scripture is extremely important here. Just as you cannot determine my intent if I were only to say one sentence in a post, neither should we take verses from Scripture out of their complete meaning to the story which surrounds them.
Mark 2:7: Here, Christ encounters a paralytic that was brought to him. When Christ tells the man that his sins are forgiven, it is* the crowd surrounding Christ*, not Christ Himself, who is questioning
Christ’s authority to forgive sins. In short, they were calling Christ a blasphemer.
This verse does not invalidate Christ’s ordination of the Apostles to forgive sins. Let’s look at the next verse you noted.
Acts 10:43: Peter is summoned by the centurion Cornelius (himself directed by the Holy Spirit). Realizing that the Spirit guided him to help people he may not otherwise meet, Peter tells the group that Christ shows no partiality. He makes one very important statement that you did not add, so I will show a fuller portion with emphasis added
(. . .)This man God raised (on) the third day and granted that he be visible,
not to all the people, but to us, the witnesses chosen by God in advance, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.*** He commissioned us** to preach to the people and testify that he is the one appointed by God as judge of the living and the dead*. To him all the prophets bear witness, that everyone who believes in him will receive forgiveness of sins through his name."
Scripture shows most emphatically here that Peter, the leader of the Twelve, knows his place and that of his fellow Apostles as the start of Christ’s continuing ministry. They aren’t merely men who followed Christ around. As Peter’s testimony shows, he states that Christ
specifically picked these men and only these men as the leaders, the first bishops. These series of verses, including the one you noted, **reinforces **Apostolic authority to forgive sins, not diminishes it.
John 1:29: Here, it is John the Baptist that points out Christ as He comes to John to receive baptism to start a pattern that we follow today to follow in Christ’s lead.
Baptism remits all sin, mortal, original or venial. You *can * and *do *sin again after baptism, leaving you in a state that is unacceptable to God. You can also confess your sins directly to God, but Christian tradition long before the Protestant Reformation preferred you to confession with a priest, clergy ordained by a bishop, who received their authorities throughout the ages from the Apostles. Again, you’re reinforcing apostolic authority here.
John 20:23: Ten of the Apostles hide away, but the resurrected Christ finds them anyway. His words here have to be fully completed for your partial verse to make sense, so I reproduce them here, again with important points emphasized:
On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.”
When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.
(Jesus) said to them again, “Peace be with you.
As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “
Receive the holy Spirit.
Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”
Christ does not come to the masses of lesser disciples to give them or anyone else authority to remit sins after His ascension. Christ comes to see **only **His chosen, the remaining of the Twelve who will be now the Twelve Apostles. The verse you gave, Acts 10:43, further reinforces what Christ did, as Peter tells the people he was speaking to *emphatically *that *Christ came to he and his fellow Apostles and **only *
these men.
To support this further,
Acts 1:20 shows Peter and the Apostles doing something that is also supported from older scripture. They appoint a new Apostle, a replacement for Judas. If Christ did not given them leadership or authority as the central bishops of his new church, why would we see this in Scripture?
Freudian slip, Flatty?
