The Sin Debt
November 3, 2025
Matthew 27:27-31, ” Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the common hall, and gathered unto him the whole band of soldiers. And they stripped him, and put on him a scarlet robe. And when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand: and they bowed the knee before him, and mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews! And they spit upon him, and took the reed, and smote him on the head. And after that they had mocked him, they took the robe off from him, and put his own raiment on him, and led him away to crucify him.
Before Salvation, every single one of us had a sin debt. We were all born with sin attached to our lives, and that sin kept us from communing with our God. We lost the ability to walk with God because of our sin. We know that God cannot look upon sin, and before salvation, that was everything we were.
First off, I know I’m saved. I know that Christ redeemed me. I am not my own, I belong to Christ However, in spite of what Christ did for me, years ago, I walked away from God. I rejoined the world and even though my sins just slid off my soul like water off a duck’s back, it still hurt my walk with God. Things that I would never have done as a saved person before I slid back into the world, stain my spirit even now. I have had to fight to regain the joy of my salvation many times because of my sin.
I went into rock and roll, I drank, I swore, I watched things on television that I shouldn’t have. And just because I came back to God doesn’t mean that the influences that I allowed myself to endure hasn’t hurt my testimony or my walk with God.
Things are never the same when you walk away as they were when you were walking right.
It is safe to say that our Christian life isn’t what it should be in light of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. This is a reminder for all of us of the sin debt that we once had and just what he went through to pay for it.
There was a Change at Salvation
The Bible tells us that we are changed!
II Corinthians 5:17 says ” Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”
That means that Our attitudes, our desires, our wants,
these have all been turned from the world and to Christ. The Holy Spirit convicted us of the need to repent and turn to God and as a result, we became new creatures. We don’t want the same things as a lost man wants; we don’t dothe same things that the lost man does. We may have liberty in Christ, but not to continue in sin.
News Flash – And I know this may come as a shock to some, but I am not the most pleasant person to deal with sometimes.
I have a tendency to get mad at people on the road, I get impatient with people for not seeing things the way I see them. I get prideful when I do something that I think is worthy of praise and don’t get it.
But so do you.
None of us has attained. I may not be as bad as you, and you may not be as bad as me, but we are all guilty of sin even after our sin was paid for.
We each had a sin debt. God couldn’t look upon our sin. God wouldn’t listen to our prayers, God wouldn’t commune with us, and God wouldn’t allow us to understand the Bible, being of a natural mind. (1 Corinthians 2:14 “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”)
When we are saved, and we willfully sin, and don’t kid yourself, all sin is willful, when we sin, that sin debt that we had prior to salvation has already been erased. It isn’t there anymore. So, that means that our current sin, even though we may be chastened by God for committing it, just slides off of us. God doesn’t hold that sin against us because that sin debt has already been paid for.
Matthew 27 talks about how Jesus was treated at calvary, so I’m going to give us all a reminder.
The Bible says that they plaited a crown of thorns and put it on his head. When we think of thorns, we think of what? Roses? Pucker brush? These thorns were Judean thorns. We don’t know exactly which type they were, but most likely it was Paliurus spina-Christi or Jerusalem Thorns. These were somewhere between 1 and 2 inches long and they didn’t bend. They were extremely ridged. These type of thorns would have gone through leather sandals when stepped on.
The plant itself was flexible enough to be braided into a mock crown and placed on Jesus’ head, but they didn’t just place it there did they? They drove it there.
Matthew 27:29-30 says “and when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand: and they bowed the knee before him, and mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews! And they spit upon him, and took the reed, and smote him on the head.“. (emphasis added)
Mark 15:19 says ” And they smote him on the head with a reed, and did spit upon him, and bowing their knees worshipped him.” (emphasis added)
Just to be clear, to smite means “To strike; to throw, drive or force against, as the fist or hand, a stone or a weapon;
They beat that crown onto his head, and those 2-inch spikes, they thrust their way into his skull with a brutality we can’t hardly imagine today. We can however imagine the amount of blood that ran down his face and all down the front of his body.
I fell in my entryway in the middle of the night awhile back and landed on my head. In the matter of about 20 seconds that it took for my wife to get the light on to see if I was all right, I was covered in blood. It was on the floor, on my head, on my hands. A head wound, no matter how small, will bleed profusely.
Jesus was covered in his own blood.
The Roman soldiers took him and scourged him with what was called a flagrum. A flagrum was a torture device that had a short handle and several leather cords and each one of these cords had lead balls at the ends to give them weight. Each one of the cords would have most likely had shards of bone, or pieces of broken pottery glued to them so that when they struck flesh and then yanked the whip away, it would have ripped his body and caused him to bleed more.
It wasn’t for discipline; it was for destruction.
Isaiah 52:14 says ” As many were astonied at thee; his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men:”
When they put the robe on him, the blood would have seeped into the fabric and congealed there just enough so that when they tore it back off his body, it started bleeding all over again, just like a cheap band aid on a bad cut except this was from head to foot.
They laid him on the ground to nail him to the cross. Some criminals would have been tied to the cross, but the Romans reserved their special punishment for those they considered the worst of the worst. Jesus was nailed with iron spikes through his hands and through his feet and then lifted up and dropped into the hole that would hold the cross upright in place.
When he was hanging there between heaven and earth, it was almost impossible to breathe and in order to catch his breath, he would have had to put his weight on the nails in his feet to try to push himself up so that he could gasp and get some air.
We read in the bible of the brutality that he endured, but it is extremely important that we understand that all of this wasn’t what caused the most pain for Christ.
The Bible says that he took upon himself the sin of the world. He became sin for us. A man that knew no sin, BECAME sin.
II Corinthians 5:21 ” For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”
Isaiah 53:6 ” All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.“
I Peter 2:24 ” Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.”
The pain that Jesus bore on the cross wasn’t the physical agony he was made to endure. It wasn’t the crown of thorns. It wasn’t the gasping for breath. It wasn’t the cuts and contusions over his entire body. It wasn’t the betrayal of the disciples who deserted him at the end.
It was the sin.
Mathew 27:46 “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
That was the pain. Not the physical pain, but the sin.
God can’t look upon sin and when Christ said that he was forsaken, that was because God turned his back because Christ became our sin.
Jesus bore the sin of the roughly 200 – 300 million people who were on the earth at that time.
He bore the sin of the roughly 50 to 100 Billion people who lived prior to his birth.
He bore the sin of the roughly 40 to 80 Billion people who have lived and died up until this moment and beyond.
He knew each and every sin we would ever commit.
And yet we continue, as saved people, to commit these sins and in essence attempt to add to the sin debt that he already paid for!!
Shame on us. Shame on me.
When Christ died on the cross, he looked down through time and looked right into my eyes and said “I do this for you”
When Christ died on the cross, he looked down through time and looked right into your eyes and said, “I do this for you”.
He already paid for every sin we would ever commit. His agony, his despair, his pain was bearing that sin.
He knew every sin we would ever sin for all time.
God is outside of time. His meaning of time isn’t our understanding of time. Every sin we commit has added to the sin debt that he died for already.
And He felt the pain of each sin.
Think about this. If he died for all our sin, his pain was caused by our sins even now. Every sin we commit now, today, was added to his pain at that moment!
Sin will always be a problem for the child of God because we have the same flesh as we’ve had since birth. I realize that I sometimes take advantage of the grace of God by not striving hard enough to be the servant he deserves. I pray that this would prove to be a help to someone else. We no longer have a sin debt; we shouldn’t still act the same as when we did.