The Bible only records a small part of the thief’s story in Luke’s Gospel. So how could an entire book be written on the thief, including the crucifixion of Jesus from the thief’s perspective?

Pastor Colin discusses the ‘aha’ moment he experienced while reading Luke 23 and how it influenced the writing of Heaven, How I Got Here: 

The ‘aha’ moment came for me when I saw that Jesus died before the thief. We know this because John tells us that when the soldiers came to break the legs of the victims, Jesus was already dead. That means that the thief heard all the words spoken by Jesus from the cross.

After putting his trust in Jesus, the thief heard the Savior cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It isn’t hard to imagine how much that would have tested the thief’s new found faith. But then he witnessed the death of Jesus: his shout of triumph, “It is finished” and his self-giving into the hands of his Father.

The real story here is the story of the sufferings and death of Jesus, and I have tried to tell it through the eyes and experience of the person who had the closest view of these events, and whose life was the first to be transformed by them.