21 “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” 22 And when He had said this, He breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”
Although the 4 Gospels record relatively few details of the 40 days between Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, this period is an important part of Jesus’ ministry to His disciples, as He now began preparing the men who would serve as His apostles in the early days of the Christian church.
The 3 verses we’re looking at this morning are what some commentators have called John’s version of the Great Commission, and it begins with Jesus’ statement in verse 21. “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” In 2 Corinthians 5:20, the apostle Paul writes, “We are ambassadors for Christ, God making His appeal through us.” That word “ambassador” is an important Biblical principle in the Reformed church.
Jesus says in John 20:23, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.” This has been a divisive verse for a very long time. The way this verse is interpreted and understood explains much about the vast differences between Protestant Christians and Roman Catholics, so we need to spend some time digging into what this verse really means. Remember that we not only need to know what we believe, but why we believe it.
The Christian Standard Bible, in its study notes on John 3:16-18 says, “God, out of love, gave His one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will have eternal life. John’s favourite designation for Jesus is the Son sent by the Father, imagery taken from the Jewish concept of the shaliach, according to which the sent one is like the sender himself and faithfully pursues the sender’s interests. Jesus is that ‘sent one’ par excellence, and He in turn sends His disciples. Being sent implies that the commission, charge, and message are issued by the sender rather than originating with the ones sent. The messengers’ role is to fulfill their commission according to their sender’s will.”
Behind the New Testament office of apostle is the ancient Jewish office of shaliach. A shaliach was an agent who carried out the legal, financial, or personal affairs of his master, something similar to the modern principle of power-of-attorney, where someone is given the power and authority to act on behalf of someone else.
In Jewish culture, to deal with a man’s shaliach was the same as dealing with the man himself, and to fulfill this role, the shaliach needed two things: power and authority. He needed to have both the power to make decisions and transactions, and he also needed the authority to do so.
As Jesus appeared to His disciples on the evening of His resurrection, He granted both of these to them: power through the Holy Spirit and authority to proclaim the forgiveness of sins.
When Jesus taught Nicodemus about the new birth, He said in John 3:7-8, “Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
The Greek word for spirit is the same as the word for breath, so the implication is that we are born again by receiving the holy breath of God. Genesis 2:7 comes to mind. “The Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”
And now, as Jesus meets His disciples, He breathes His life into His believers so that they would be born again to a new and living relationship with God. From this point on, it is in the church that God’s grace and love would be manifested, and through the church that God’s work will continue in the world.
In His Farewell Discourse from midway through John 13 to the end of chapter 16, Jesus told His disciples that He would send the Holy Spirit. “These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, He will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” (John 14:25-26) And in John 16:13-15, “When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth, for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak, and He will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for He will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that He will take what is mine and declare it to you.”
Jesus tells His disciples that not only will He send the Spirit, but He also tells them what the Spirit will do in and through them.
The work of the Holy Spirit is not to give us an emotional and spiritual buzz, but to guide us into a knowledge of the truth and to equip us for Christian ministry, all for the purpose of bringing glory to Christ.
John deliberately connects the giving of the Spirit to Jesus’ Great Commission to His church. Verses 21 and 22. “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when He had said this, He breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
The Holy Spirit has been given to the church to empower the church in the ministry to which it is called in the world, and at the very heart of the ministry of the church is the proclamation of the Gospel.
Pentecost, the day that the church did receive the Spirit, happened 10 days after Jesus’ ascension. This was still some 50 days in the future, so is there some kind of conflict here? No. Most commentators agree that Jesus’ statement in verse 22 was an anticipation of what was to come at Pentecost.
John MacArthur explains what Jesus meant by writing, “Since the disciples did not actually receive the Holy Spirit until the day of Pentecost, this statement must be understood as a pledge on Christ’s part that the Holy Spirit would be coming.”
Without the power of the Holy Spirit equipping the church, we would be completely ineffective in carrying out the task we have been given. The Spirit’s power is absolutely essential to the work of the church, for the simple reason that sin is such a powerful force in the world. Its grip on the human heart is so strong that no one can turn in faith to Christ without the supernatural intervention of the Holy Spirit.
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 2:14, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.”
He expands on this truth in Ephesians 2:1-5 when he writes, “You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience - among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ - by grace you have been saved.”
The church, like many noteworthy non-Christian charity organisations can and does do some marvellous work in reaching out to the marginalised and underprivileged. We are called to do these things, but our principle task - proclaiming the Gospel and bringing sinners to repentance and saving faith in Christ, only happens when the Spirit is at work in the hearts of the lost, and in the hearts of those who faithfully proclaim the Gospel.
So, as His representatives, His ambassadors on earth, Jesus has given His church the power needed to turn repentant sinners to Him, but we also need His authority, just as the ancient Jewish shaliach needed the authority of his master, and so in verse 23, Jesus gave His authority to the church. “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”
This is the verse which has caused much debate down the years, so the question is, exactly what authority is being given by Jesus, and to whom is it given?
The opposing interpretations of this verse give us one of the distinct and fundamental divisions between Protestant and Roman Catholic doctrines, and the differences are not secondary, but fundamental to what we believe and teach.
We’re not talking here about whether we should use wine or grape juice for Communion, or whether we should be baptising infants as well as adult believers. Those are non-salvific issues.
The way the Protestant Reformed church and Roman Catholics understand John 20:23 reveals a deep disagreement about the Bible’s teaching on salvation.
In fact, the differences between the two in understanding how sinners are saved, are so far removed from each other, that Reformed Christianity and Roman Catholicism are really two different religions.
Jesus told those there that evening, “If you forgive the sins of anyone, they are forgiven them.” Roman Catholicism uses its interpretation of Jesus’ words here to justify the practice of the priesthood pronouncing absolution of sins, which stands directly opposed to the Bible’s teaching that it is God alone who has the authority to forgive sins. He has not given this authority to the church.
So what did Jesus mean by saying, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them?” He is giving His disciples, and the church the authority to proclaim the forgiveness of sins through faith in Jesus Christ and His Gospel.
The Bible teaches that it is only God who can forgive sins. In Mark 2 we find the account of 4 men lowering their paralysed friend through the roof of a house in Capernaum where Jesus was teaching. The first thing Jesus says in verse 5 is, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” The scribes and teachers of the law said, “He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Jesus didn’t challenge them, but instead He proved His deity, and His right to forgive, by telling the paralysed man, “Rise, pick up your bed, and go home.” His response would make no sense if it were not true that only God has the authority to forgive.
Another point to note is that Jesus’ statement to His followers in John 20:23 was to a mixed group of believers, including the women who had seen Him earlier that day. He did not say it exclusively to the remaining 11 disciples. Thomas wasn’t even there, so Jesus could not have been granting authority to forgive sins to just the clergy, as Roman Catholicism teaches.
Instead, He was talking to believers in general and the church as a whole. This means the authority given by Jesus in verse 23 is given to every believer and to the whole church. To model the church based on the Old Testament priesthood as Catholicism does is wrong, because Jesus, through His sacrificial and atoning death for sin has fulfilled the Old Testament office of the priesthood.
In its place now is the Reformation doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Now the whole church ministers to each other and those outside the church. We minister to each other in corporate worship, and as we encourage and remind one another of the truth that our sins are forgiven through faith in Christ, and we minister to those outside the church by proclaiming the Gospel and the hope of forgiveness of sins through faith in Christ.
At the beginning of his letters to the seven churches in the opening chapters of Revelation, John begins with a doxology of praise by writing, “To Him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by His blood and made us a kingdom, priests to His God and Father, to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.” (Revelation 1:5-6)
When we read through the New Testament, from the book of Acts and the pastoral letters and epistles, there is no mention of any of the apostles granting the forgiveness of sins, because they had no such authority.
What they were given was the authority to proclaim forgiveness in Jesus’ name. In Acts 16 the Philippian jailer asked Paul and Silas, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” Paul and Silas answered in verse 31, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.”
In chapter 10 we find the story of Cornelius the Roman centurion, who believed in God. Cornelius was given a vision of an angel by God who told Cornelius to send for the apostle Peter. Peter, while all this was going on, was also given a vision by God of animals, both ceremonially clean and unclean, being lowered on a sheet. The lesson Peter needed to learn was that salvation through faith in Jesus was available to both Jew and Gentile.
We pick up the narrative in Acts 10 from verse 33, where Cornelius says to Peter, “So I sent for you at once, and you have been kind enough to come. Now therefore we are all here in the presence of God to hear all that you have been commanded by the Lord.’ So Peter opened his mouth and said: ‘Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears Him and does what is right is acceptable to Him. As for the word that He sent to Israel, preaching good news of peace through Jesus Christ (He is Lord of all), you yourselves know what happened throughout all Judea, beginning from Galilee after the baptism that John proclaimed: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him. And we are witnesses of all that He did both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They put Him to death by hanging Him on a tree, but God raised Him on the third day and made Him to appear, not to all the people but to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with Him after He rose from the dead. And He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that He is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead. To Him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in Him receives forgiveness of sins through His name.” (Acts 10:33-43)
“He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that He is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead. To Him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in Him receives forgiveness of sins through His name.”
This is not the priestly absolution of sins but the apostolic preaching of the Gospel of forgiveness through faith in Jesus, and now, 2000 years later, we preach the same message with the same authority Peter had, and with the same power of the Holy Spirit which Peter had.
“If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”
In the original Greek text, the verbs forgiven and withheld are in the perfect tense. The NASB gives a more accurate translation of this verse: “If you forgive the sins of any, their sins have been forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they have been retained.”
The perfect tense describes a present state based on a past action. This means Jesus was not giving the authority to forgive sins. Instead, He was authorising His disciples and the church to tell sinners the terms on which they can know that their sins have been forgiven or withheld, depending on whether they believe in Him or not. He was pointing them to the cross.
So basically, as the church, we don’t tell people, “Your sins are forgiven,” but rather, “Your sins have been forgiven.” There’s a small, but important difference. Their sins are forgiven not because we say so, but because God says so, and He says so through the death and resurrection of His Son.
William Barclay wrote of Jesus’ words in John 20:23, “One thing is quite certain - no man can forgive any other man’s sins. But another thing is equally certain - it is the great privilege of the church to convey the message and the announcement and the fact of God’s forgiveness to men.”
Just as the apostles did in the early years of the Christian church, we are to preach forgiveness through faith in the blood of Jesus Christ, and as we do, we are given the authority to declare forgiveness through faith in Him, and we can be assured that those sins truly are forgiven.
This is the same kind of authority Jesus was referring to in Matthew 16. Peter had just made his great confession of faith in verse 16. “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus replies, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Matthew 16:17-19)
This is one of the most badly mangled and misinterpreted passages in the whole Bible. This has nothing to do with Peter being appointed as the first pope, and it also has nothing to do with Christians going around boldly binding and loosing things in the spiritual realm.
How many times have you heard someone praying, “Satan, we bind you in the name of Jesus?” Firstly, praying to Satan is not only unbiblical, but extremely dangerous, and secondly, if all these people are going around binding Satan, should we not be asking a rather obvious question: Who keeps letting him out again?
If a prayer for the binding of Satan was Biblical, it would only ever had to have been prayed once, but we hear it all the time, and the reason we hear it all the time is because it is a meaningless, empty prayer, with no power or authority whatsoever.
So the next time you’re in a church or prayer meeting and someone boldly and foolishly claims to be able to bind the devil, head for the door as fast as you can.
The binding and loosing which Jesus talks about in Matthew 16 is about sin within the church and church discipline. John MacArthur writes, “Here Christ gives Peter (and by extension all other believers) authority to declare what was bound or loosed in heaven. This echoed the promise of John 20:23, where Christ gave the disciples authority to forgive or retain the sins of people. All this must be understood in the context of 18:15–17, where Christ laid out specific instructions for dealing with sin in the church. The sum of it all means that any duly constituted body of believers, acting in accord with God’s Word, has the authority to declare if someone is forgiven or unforgiven. The church’s authority is not to determine these things, but to declare the judgment of heaven based on the principles of the Word. When they make such judgments on the basis of God’s Word, they can be sure heaven is in accord. In other words, whatever they “bind” or “loose” on earth is already “bound” or “loosed” in heaven. When the church says the unrepentant person is bound in sin, the church is saying what God says about that person. When the church acknowledges that a repentant person has been loosed from that sin, God agrees.”
Jesus has promised to send the Holy Spirit, who, among other tasks, convicts us of our sin, leads us into the truth, and empowers the church to faithfully proclaim the saving power of the Gospel of Christ. He has given us not only the power, but also the authority to preach the Bible’s teaching on forgiveness and salvation, as though it was Jesus Himself speaking. The Puritan Thomas Watson wrote, “Know that in every sermon preached, God calls to you; and to refuse the message we bring, is to refuse God Himself.”
This is what it means to be faithful ambassadors of Jesus Christ. He has not only called us to this task, but he has given us His power and authority to do so.
Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:17-20, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to Himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making His appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”
As ambassadors for Christ, we don’t provide forgiveness, but we do proclaim it. So when someone says, “I don’t feel forgiven,” it is our responsibility to say, “According to the Word of God, if you open your heart to Jesus Christ and believe in His work on the cross, your sin is forgiven.”
Likewise, to those who say, “I don’t need Jesus Christ to be forgiven,” our response should be, “Your sin remains because only the blood of Jesus can wash it away.”
Our message to the world, commissioned by Jesus Christ Himself is, “We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”
Homegroup Study Notes
Read John 20:21-23
See also Matthew 28:18-20, Mark 16:15-18 and Luke 24:46-49.
Discuss the similarities and differences between these different accounts of The Great Commission.
Although the Holy Spirit only came upon the church in power at Pentecost (some 50 days later), Jesus still promised His disciples the power of the Spirit, just as He had done during His farewell discourse in John 13-16.
What authority did Jesus grant, and to whom was it given?
How do you understand the term “priesthood of all believers?
How does the church today operate under the power and authority of Jesus?
The New American Standard Bible translates verse 23 as, “If you forgive the sins of any, their sins have been forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they have been retained.”
What did Jesus really mean in verse 23, and how does the NASB version help us to better understand this verse?