The payment for sin is death. But God gives us the free gift of life forever in Christ Jesus our Lord. [Romans 6:23 (NCV)]

Blessed are they whose sins are forgiven, whose wrongs are pardoned. [Romans 4:7 (NCV)]

To impress their students with the importance of commas, English teachers often tell an unsubstantiated story about Maria Fyodorovna, the wife of Tsar Alexander III of Russia. Alexander, a harsh and repressive ruler, had exiled a suspected anarchist to imprisonment and death by writing these words on his warrant: “Pardon impossible, to be sent to Siberia.” Coming across the document, the Tsarina seized the opportunity to save the life of an unknown prisoner and quickly scratched out the comma. She re-inserted it so that the warrant read: “Pardon, impossible to send to Siberia.” With the comma’s transposition, the prisoner’s death warrant became his pardon.

The story gives us no reason to think the prisoner was innocent; rather than saving an innocent man, the Tsarina merely chose to act mercifully toward a guilty one. Unlike the Russian prisoner, we’re probably not anarchists or thieves but every one of us is a sinner and we all fall short of God’s standard of perfect righteousness. Whether it’s lying, envy, immorality, greed, pride, self-centeredness, anger, rebellion against God or our indifference to Him, like the Tsar’s prisoner, we are condemned because of our guilt. Because the wages of sin are death, we deserve death as much as that man probably deserved being sent to the unrelenting misery of Siberia.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, described his four years of exile in Siberia as being in a “house of the living dead,” a place of “inexpressible, unending suffering.” Rather than serve our sentence in the brutal conditions of a Russian slave labor camp, Jesus served our sentence on Calvary. By dying on the cross, He took the punishment we all deserve. With His one act, He moved the comma on our death warrants and paid the penalty for the entire world for all time. Like the Russian prisoner, we haven’t earned mercy or forgiveness and we certainly don’t deserve a pardon. Nevertheless, rather than a comma written in ink, our pardon was written in the blood of Jesus when He sacrificed Himself on the cross.

Thank you, Jesus!

It is not good for us to trust in our merits, in our virtues or our righteousness; but only in God’s free pardon, as given us through faith in Jesus Christ. [John Wycliffe]

Everyone has sinned and fallen short of God’s glorious standard, and all need to be made right with God by his grace, which is a free gift. They need to be made free from sin through Jesus Christ. God sent him to die in our place to take away our sins. We receive forgiveness through faith in the blood of Jesus’ death. [Romans 3:23-25a (NCV)]

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